Things begin innocently enough in Warframe.

A voice calls to you, naming you part of the Tenno. Tenno, with their warframes - think of it like a robot suit - were a warrior caste who long ago battled against foes across the cosmos. That voice, belonging to someone named The Lotus, wakes you up from a stasis to once again fight the good fight.

Unfortunately, the first big bad guy of the game puts basically a mind-control ankle monitor on you. Your first task is to remove that and you accomplish that by playing the game - shooting everything on screen and looting all the materials thatdrop so you can make bigger and better weapons and warframes.

And once you kill your probation officer, that’s pretty much it for storyline. The game offers zero additional lore on your way through the solar system. You begin on Earth, make your way to Venus and then to Mars and across more and more planets, shooting dudes and gathering literally tens of thousands of materials. At that point, you’re just playing the game, no real story to speak of.

But as you progress, there are a few quests here and there. Go help a faction, here’s some basic storytelling about how they split from one of the enemy groups. Go there, help a colony survive so there’s some basic background about this new thing that’s about to get introduced.

It’s a lot of grinding, but it’s a fun grind. It’s a fun game. And grinding doesn’t feel like grinding when it’s so dang enjoyable to run around, level up your equipment, increase your ranking and grab resources to build new things and level those up. Especially since that’s the main gameplay loop of Warframe. As a result, that’s all new players really expect the game to be from that point on.

But as you progress along the star chart, as it’s called, and reach Neptune somewhere between 50 and 100 hours, spread across multiple days since there are some time gates too, things take a turn. On the previous planet, Uranus, you did a new quest that featured some new information about The Lotus, who refers to herself as the “mother of all Tenno,” met some new enemies and learned who one of the major antagonists of the game is.

SPOILER WARNING: I was legitimately blown away at what comes next. It is one of the finest moments in video games I have ever experienced. If you have even the slightest notion of playing Warframe, I implore you to stop reading this until you have completed a quest known as The Second Dream. There’s a reason why talking about this quest is considered taboo in the game’s community.

You continue on your critical path to Uranus and begin a quest called The Second Dream, the first “cinematic” quest the game ever introduced. And it’s in this quest that the online looter shooter game made by Digital Extremes suddenly, from out of nowhere, becomes a heavily story-driven experience that is well-written, well-presented and fascinating.

Upon beginning the quest, a cutscene plays, something you’ve likely not seen in Warframe before. It introduces your main villain you’ll be fighting against, The Stalker, and gives us more back story about the main antagonist, Hunhow, introduced just one quest ago.

Hunhow is searching for something called the reservoir, described by The Lotus as the “weak point of all Tenno.”

Let’s back up for a second. Before this, it’s kind of implied to the player that Tenno and warframes are essentially the same thing and are completely interchangeable terms. Grineer and Corpus are factions within the game’s universe, so Tenno are too, right? You’ve got the idea that warframes are basically robots that banded together and chose that name to unite under.

But that veil slowly gets lifted during the course of The Second Dream, which is framed initially as an ancient evil that had been awoken which is “bent on Tenno Destruction.” And while replaying the quest shows that there’s an awful lot of foreshadowing, a first-timer running through it will get confused or miss it outright because you’ve still got a ton of things to shoot while characters are talking to you.

While on the quest, you work with another villain, who isn’t quite as villainous as Hunhow, who says that an ancient evil bent on destruction is bad for him too. Thus, he’ll “scratch your metal back” and you’ll scratch his. Later on, he doesn’t tell you where a certain item is, but says that you’ll have to look for it. You do have eyes, don’t you, he asks. Or maybe you just smell it?

Hmm. That’s kind of weird. There’s a sudden emphasis on what you are and how you function. That’s never really cropped up before in the game.

Then it goes even deeper, and this villain you’re working with is more villainous than maybe you realized because he says:

-I’ve seen inside a Tenno and what I saw didn’t make sense.

OK, now wait a second.

You’re just a robot, right? That’s all you’ve been playing as the entire game. Since you started Warframe, you’ve just been a robot that can somehow change which warframe you can use and, as the player, accepted that as just being a video game. But there’s more to it than that it turns out.

He asks if the reservoir is where The Lotus hides her “great deception” and revels that we “don’t know the truth either” and are instead just being fed “lies from their omnipotent mother.”

If the player is able to understand what’s going on while blasting their way through the mission they’re on, they might pause for a moment. Wait, The Lotus has been deceiving me? Has this game suddenly started telling a story?

It has, actually. The Lotus admits that she is, in fact, deceiving you, and that it is because The Stalker was driven to madness upon learning the truth of the Tenno.

-Forgive my deception. I was only trying to save you from the same fate.

She calls the reservoir the “heart” of the Tenno. And that its location has been hidden for your safety.

The villain you’re working with just loves that.

-You must be asking yourself, where is this heart if not in my chest?

Even earlier, as the quest began in the initial cutscene, Hunhow demands The Stalker to find the Tenno heart and “cleave it beating from its nest.”

There’s a lot going on in this exchange between The Lotus and that villain. And if you happen to think back to the start, it’s beginning to get a little weird. The word “nest” was almost certainly used intentionally, right? This seems really well crafted for it to just be coincidence. And then all the other things that are just starting to crop up more often, like questioning what a warframe really is.

But onward and upward. As it turns out, the reservoir is hidden in the moon. Which apparently exists, much to the surprise of the bad guy you’re working with, who thought it was destroyed, and instead is terrified at the power The Lotus wields, since she was able to just outright hide it.

Starting up the game, beginning on Earth, traveling to the moon wasn’t an option 100 hours ago. Didn’t even show up on the map. Hm, must be optional content or something else. Probably didn’t pay it any mind. And now that you’re this deep into the video game, the moon, Lua, as it’s called, is a new endgame destination suddenly revealed that you’re going to go to.

Running around on the moon in gilded halls that once was home to an ancient civilization in an attempt to beat The Stalker to the reservoir, you start hearing voices. It’s not really clear who can hear these in the lore of the game or if this is for the player’s benefit, but one, a man’s voice, speaks of death and destruction. And the other, a woman’s whose sounds very familiar, speaks of mercy.

-These aren’t soldiers, but golems possessed by devil minds.

-You will have to dream, my angel.

Things are starting to piece together. A little bit at least. Kind of? You continue your journey to the reservoir until you reach the final area – a large, true to its name, reservoir. And from the water a tomb-like structure blossoms upward, and a smaller tomb-like structure floats toward your warframe.

The music is slow. It sounds imposing. Important, but gentle. There’s harmony to it. And as a vocal chorus begins to chant, well, it’s hard to see but is that a body?

Is there a body lying on that tomb thing?

The structure reaches the floor and the body falls to the ground in a heap. And as it does, your screen glitches and flickers. And your warframe drops to its knees.

And the screen turns black.

After a brief moment, the game resumes. But the camera isn’t directed behind your warframe as it has been your entire journey so far. It’s positioned behind the body, which as it turns out, is a living person. At least, it’s shaped like one. It’s humanoid if nothing else, but this black bodysuit its wearing blocks any and all details.

But if you push forward, like literally press the key that moves you in the game, the body drags itself towards the warframe. The slow, somber melody that played as the tomb opened begins again. That chorus resumes harmonizing as the person draws closer and closer to the warframe. And finally, the person places a hand on the warframe’s shoulder, causing it to glow blue, come back to life and pick the person up, carrying it like a child in its arms, like on a rescue.

You make you escape playing as the warframe. You move as you normally do, but your button that usually fires your gun now fires some sort of beam attack from the person’s hands.

As this is happening, The Lotus says:

-You need to focus your mind to unleash your true power.

Those are directed at you. You need to focus your mind to unleash your true power.  

Wait. Wait just a second. Are you that person? Are you not really a robot?

What’s going on?! It’s been 100 hours in this game and now this is happening?

Upon escaping, you’re back on your ship and are told by The Lotus to deliver this person to an area on your ship that you’ve not been able to access for what you thought were video game reasons. You need to place this person into something called a somatic link.

The Stalker had found you at the reservoir, but chose, for some reason, to not attack you. You’ve fought him through the mission sporadically, but there wasn’t final fight against him. That might have felt weird if you got to think about it, if there weren’t ton of things going on narratively out of nowhere, plus all the guys to keep shooting.

But back on the ship, he attacks you. And as you fight and attempt to reach the somatic link, with The Lotus really, really emphasizing and panicking that you need to get past him, you are overpowered and The Stalker drives his enormous evil sword straight into the chest of your warframe.

The person, you, I guess, are now separated and recoiling in fear from the scene playing out. The person is grabbed by the throat and lifted up before The Stalker. But, somehow, your warframe is able to rip the sword from its chest, which stuns the stalker and Hunhow, who has been speaking through that weapon this whole time.

Everything shines white and the danger is averted. However, now this person is being carried by someone else. The same harmonic melody plays and whoever is carrying this person is wearing something that looks purply and gray.

It’s The Lotus. It’s the first time you’ve met her in person after this long 100-hour journey. And she places you into the somatic link and says:

-Now we fight on two fronts, my child. The war without…

The screen turns a bright white again.

-…And the war within.

The screen comes back into focus and does the absolute unthinkable:

It gives you a character creator.

Now wait, hold on just a second. You’ve been playing this game for enough hours to have full on beaten at least three other games and now Warframe is giving you a character creator at 100 hours into the game?

That’s amazing!

As it turns out, you are that person who was in that tomb-like structure buried beneath the water on the moon that was hidden away. You are customizing the character you’ll be playing as from now on. Though you will still use warframes, you are this character. You aren’t a robot at all. You are a human, a special kind of human changed by a power called the void. Because of that, you are powerful and can perform something called transference, allowing you to remotely control a warframe with your mind.

You’re young though. Maybe a teenager. And you were conscripted to fight as a mindless killing machine through a kind of brainwashing. Not only that, your character is voiced! And you are given dialogue options to choose from when The Lotus asks you questions about what you remember. Those lead into a new form of grind to further enhance your character.

Even your new human character, called the operator, is shocked by this revelation, going so far as to say “Lotus, I thought I was…”

The sheer ridiculousness of all of this is mind blowing. My jaw was on the floor for the entire duration that I was creating my character. I’d never seen anything like that before. This game that had no story that I’d been happily playing suddenly had a major story that apparently has some really cool, existential plotlines that had been dangled in front of me without me even realizing until looking more into it after the fact.

That’s not the end though. It’s the beginning. That’s the best part! There’s a handful more cinematic quests that go even deeper into the ideas first presented in The Second Dream in a story that is still being told, with the next installment due Christmas this year.

While those other quests are really, really good too, they aren’t as game changing, literally, as The Second Dream. That’s when things get bonkers in Warframe.  And when things get incredible.