Like many video games lately, the Lifeless Area (opens in new tab) remake has a New Recreation+ mode that turns into out there after the sport is completed for the primary time. It allows gamers to start out a brand new recreation loaded up with all of the weapons, fits, and upgrades they’ve already earned, ostensibly making for a better expertise, and it additionally provides quite a few new textual content logs that present extra narrative background to life aboard USG Ishimura.
A kind of NG+ logs is a supposedly “indecipherable” scrawl of marker symbols—mainly a Lifeless Area hieroglyphic. However it’s really very translatable: It is a straight character-for-character trade that was decoded (opens in new tab) not lengthy after the unique Lifeless Area was launched.
(Here is a GameFAQs (opens in new tab) thread from 2011, if in case you have doubts.)
Happily for these of you who, like me, are curious however not particularly inclined to go to the difficulty of decrypting the message your self, redditor GingyYouTube (opens in new tab) has already achieved the job. There are a pair errors within the translation, however corrections are famous within the feedback beneath.
That is what the message appears to be like like within the recreation:
And that is what it interprets to:
They stroll in white
Untouched by crimson
They order the dwelling
They shepherd the lifeless
A finger’s contact—
We’re frozen nonetheless
They’re the reply
They’re the need
Past the celebs
The brethren wait
Oracles, ship us
From humanity’s destiny
Whereas the content material of the message is straightforward to determine, what it really means is a special matter. A number of individuals within the thread imagine the opening traces are a reference to Oracles (opens in new tab), a mysterious group of high-ranking cultists seen within the Lifeless Area 2: Severed DLC whose origins and motives are unknown. “Order the dwelling [and] shepherd the lifeless” is taken to imply creating necromorphs and bringing them to convergence (opens in new tab), whereas the second stanza is believed to be a reference to Tau Volantis (opens in new tab), a planet in Lifeless Area 3 that was was a frozen wasteland eons in the past in an try to halt a convergence occasion.
It is all very deep-lore stuff, however the normal consensus is that the references to occasions that occurred in later Lifeless Area video games means EA is planning to remake these video games, too—or is at the least open to the thought. That idea is bolstered by the sooner discovery of one other NG+ textual content log (opens in new tab) referring to the Sprawl, an area station on Titan that served because the setting for Lifeless Area 2.
The success of the Lifeless Area remake (opens in new tab) presumably makes related updates of Lifeless Area 2 and three, and perhaps much more sequels past that, more likely to occur. Even so, it is cool to know (or at the least fairly theorize) that EA was excited about it lengthy earlier than this remake noticed the sunshine of day.