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I just finished the game a few days ago, and have been pondering over the lore ever since. Sooo yeah this is essentially an analysis of that from what I can see.
The Ancients
The ending location is the only place that we see the ancients - according to the wiki, they appear "vaguely humanoid". People have said that they look modified with implants, but I would think that if that were the case, why wouldn't they look more like the guardians? to me they look much more organic and crustacean-esque, and appear to have an exoskeleton as such, which would of course be expected for an undersea creature. As for their origin, others have speculated at them coming from outside of europa, but I feel it is fairly obvious that they (or at least their primordial descendants) formed on-planet as hinted by the dialogue of certain decrypted runes that say quote "LIFE FORMS UNDER ICE - CONSCIOUSNESS FORMS - KNOWLEDGE COMPOUNDS - CIVILIZATION DEVELOPS - INSULATED FROM DANGER". But what danger? Radiation? Another alien race? Humans?
YOH-WEH
The being known as YOH-WEH, or jove...you know, that guy. that guy. From what we can tell by another piece of ruin writing, quote "A singer is born; an audience gathers", YOW-WEH was created by the ancients, where they became somehow enslaved or entranced by it's "song". When an ancient approaches in the final ending level, upon being asked about YOH-WEH, it says "It that sings. Out of their desire was it born, out of their folly did it grow". I would make a comparison to AI, because of course I would, but then again that's probably not best considering such a *literally* alien concept as is what the ancient tries to explain. And YOH-WEH is different to the guardians...it is biological, organic, at least to some degree. And it seems to have some ability to manipulate spacetime, as seen with the warping effect and shifting of walls when fighting, as well as launch whatever those projectiles are.
The End, and the Portal
After the crew defeats YOH-WEH, the 'singing' is stopped. But what does this mean? The ancient says "Our song has been sung, but the number of verses in yours we do not know" - does this mean the end of the ancients? "The bridge is collapsing, but you can still make it back across" so the portal that brought the crew to the center of jupiter has been re-opened...maybe it was held closed by YOH-WEH? to prevent them from returning to Europa? and when he was defeated, it was allowed to open again?
"For us there are no stars, only home, but for you the skies are open." A reference to their roots on Europa? or maybe they DID come from another planet after all...say they formed somewhere similar to Europa, they would want to inhabit another planet with similar environment, right? Are they going back through the portal...the bridge, as well? back to their home, now that they have been freed?
Maybe, at some point in their civilization, they worked out how to create wormholes. Previously, they could have been unable to penetrate the thick, ice crust of Europa and/or their homeplanet, but portals enabled them to travel elsewhere...but why does the ending take place in Jupiter? a high energy content at the core, or something? and why is there water? no pressure, either...this could mean a contained environment constructed by the ancients (not enough water above to generate pressure), and judging by the walls, it certainly looks like that could be the case.
But what about the gravitational anomaly on Europa? Well, guess what, Wormholes allow gravity to pass through. My theory is that the anomaly would be caused by the gravity of Jupiter passing through, causing the observed gravitational difference. This probably happened when contact was lost with Earth - and was this when the ancients went into jupiter? where they there already? what changed to cause the anomaly and the jovian radiation? was it the "change in tone" the ancient mentioned?
After the defeat, the area around seems to collapse. In the ending scene, with an observatory communicating to some outpost, 'Gravitational collapse' is noted. this could mean a variety of things. A) A gravitational collapse is usually referred to as the process of a large object collapsing in on itself from it's own gravity, where it cannot supply enough outwards force to counteract it. In the case of stars, this usually occurs at the end of their life, resulting in the formation of a neutron star or, if large enough, a black hole. B) The gravitational anomaly ceases as the portal collapses, and Europa returns to it's normal gravity. I think this one is more likely, as the observatory would probably take some note of Jupiter seemingly disappearing. Still, then ending area seems to collapse.
The crew is then reset to the first outpost on the map. Looking along...the eye of europa is still there. It's as if nothing happened. But the ship is still the same...the walls are still scorched, the hulls cracked, the ammo used...that wasn't all a dream. So what happened? In the ending sequence, Dr. af Grann is mentioned to talk about the crew being unlikely to be heard of from this side of the "Timelike Hypersurface". Now this may seem like just a bit of word salad, but it actually has meaning. In general relativity, time and space are thought of as one part of the same thing, with time being just another dimension - meaning that the universe could be thought of as just a 4-dimensional object existing without time (time being an illusion), with objects in the 3D space being plotted along the time dimension according to the laws of physics. A timelike hypersurface, correct me if I am wrong from what I have looked up about it (I'm not much of a physics person per se), is like a 3D snapshot in that 4 dimensional space. Like a snippet of time. So...saying "from this side of the timelike hypersurface" essentially means that the crew travelled in time with reference to Dr. Grann and the 'solved' timeline...backwards, to the beginning. And ignoring all the quirks of time travel, this kind of even checks out considering wormholes are a part of, one again, a 4 dimensional space INCLUDING time.
So yeah that's my take lol
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