The game is set thousands of years in the future, where humanity has colonized other planets to the point that they've created entirely new cultures. One of these, the Letarri, have set out to colonize a new planet after escaping from the dictatorial Rynans. The Colony Ship Laeril was one of the escaping ships designed to create this new colony, New Letarr, but something had gone wrong in the process.
Prominence contains examples of:
- Apocalyptic Log: You find emails and voice messages on terminals all over the ship before and after everything went wrong, and later, ANNIE gives you the ability to download audio buffers from the ship's CCTV cameras. Played straighter with Chief Alavaji's logs after the evacuation, which he left for potential rescuers to find.
- Air-Vent Passageway: How you get out of Medical. Slightly more difficult than most examples due to the grate being flush with the wall and requiring a laser to remove.
- Bait-and-Switch Comment: Navigator Carine ren Talove calls out one of the Engineers over the gambling pool and reminds them that she'll tell the Captain about it...then quickly asks to be added to the pool.
- Benevolent A.I.: ANNIE, the ship's computer, who guides you through the ship while trying to determine what happened to it on the side.
- Brick Joke: You find a prybar in the vents near the beginning. A worker later complains of having lost it in one of the crew logs.
- The Captain: Mission Commander Reyes ren Keterek, whom ordered the evacuation when everything went wrong.
- Distress Call: At one point the ship is able to pick up one from New Letarr, revealing that the crew who evacuated there don't have enough supplies to last for very long. It also contains an Easter Egg in Morse Code.
- Diverting Power: When ANNIE is brought to almost full operation, you're able to use a console that routes power to certain parts of the ship, and there's only so much available due to the ship's damaged core.
- Electronic Speech Impediment: ANNIE initially talks in this fashion when power is restored. She gets better as you repair her and the Laeril.
- The Engineer: Rienne Teleda, whom Chief Alavaji personally appointed as Lead Design Engineer for her people skills. Some of the other engineers don't think too highly of her, though.
- Everything Is an iPod in the Future: The Laeril's upper decks are built in smooth white designs, in contrast to the blocky, industrial look of its lower decks. Archive files explain that the ship was half-finished before the Letarri redesigned it for the colony mission.
- Fun with Acronyms:
- The ship's AI, Advanced Neural Network Information Entity.
- One of the crewmembers made a simple computer system called BelOS: Basic Engineering Low-Level Operating System.
- Your HAC chip, or Holographic Autonomic Chip. Doubles as Punny Name, since you mostly use it to "hack" items around the ship.
- The Future: The ship's crew logs are dated in August of the year 5508.
- Ghost Ship: The Laeril was evacuated before you woke up, with only you and ANNIE remaining behind. Though you can find Chief Alavaji's corpse if you look hard enough.
- Great Big Library of Everything: Subverted. While the ship's data archives has tons of background information, most of the data is corrupted or unreadable, requiring you to manually find and load keywords before viewing them.
- Inside a Computer System: A variant. Since the main terminal in the Archives is busted, you have to use a wireless HAC port to view it instead, shown through a 3D holographic interface on your HUD that looks like this trope.
- Instant A.I.: Just Add Water!: Halfway through the game, ANNIE starts noticing that your actions in the game shouldn't be possible. She then later decides that the solar prominence affected your circuitry in odd ways, creating your sentience. Lampshaded in an archive entry on the subject, which says that your HAC chip's model is sensitive to high energy waves.
- Interface Screw: When you enter the core, even with a hazard suit on, the leaking radiation makes your vision show static and an error message. ANNIE decides to tell you where to go until you reach the core's control panel and engage its protection field.
- Master Console: In-universe. Sometimes you have to connect a special BeLOS laptop to various systems and manipulate them using a command prompt to progress.
- Meaningful Name: New Letarr's sun had created a solar prominence of unfathomable capacity, which short-circuited the Laeril's systems and caused it to sink towards the sun.
- MegaCorp: Taeron Technologies, designer of much of the ship's hardware. Most of their information in the archives is basically a product catalog.
- Multiple Endings: When using the Power Allocation Console. Chief Alavaji had set up a profile for repairing the Laeril, while ANNIE asks you to build a supply shuttle for the colony instead. She also accepts the fact that all final decisions will be up to you.
- Repairing the ship results in you pulling your HAC chip out and plugging it into the ship's computer, causing you to permanently shut down as the Laeril turns around and heads for New Letarr.
- Building the shuttle leads to abandoning the ''Laeril'' while you fly said shuttle to New Letarr.
- Night-Vision Goggles: When you enter the pitch-black, unpowered Data Archives after ANNIE is activated, she turns on this function in your HUD, allowing you to see it. The screen also goes white with an error message on-screen if you enter a lit area with night vision still active.
- Pardon My Klingon: A Letarri expletive heard in some of the logs is "kreff".
- Press X to Die: Your HAC chip's flavor texts says that it shouldn't be removed as it contains your memory and programming. You have to do it in the Repair Ship ending.
- Recorded Spliced Conversation: Used to get into the bridge, done by collecting every piece of camera audio around the ship, and then arranging the right parts in an audio editor to form the proper sentence.
- Robotic Reveal: One of the crew log entries mentions a medical robot with a malfunctioning audio-video recording system. Later, ANNIE starts activating parts of your HUD, one of which records all the messages you found on the ship's terminals.
- Side Bet: Some of the crew make a gambling pool over what day and time the prominence will hit, since no one could know for sure. It's never established if anyone won.
- Somebody Set Up Us the Bomb: Critical parts of the ship were damaged by explosives. You were hacked into planting and setting off those explosives, so whoever did it could sabotage the mission.
- Thrown Out the Airlock:
- You have to do this to clear a pile of debris in one room, by disabling the Artificial Gravity in it and remotely detonating a bomb to blow the debris out into space.
- It's also revealed later on that one of the explosions did this to the ship's Research room, requiring you to go outside the ship and enter through the breach left behind.
- Wham Shot: When you first enter Hydroponics, a cutscene plays, establishing that you're in space and the Laeril is very close to the sun and still moving towards it.
- Voice with an Internet Connection: Shortly after her activation, ANNIE talks to you through a remote uplink instead of over the ship's PA. This also lets her see what you see, allowing her to help you more directly throughout the game.
- Your Days Are Numbered: Chief Danir Alavaji received a lethal dose of radiation when an explosion damaged the ship's power core. He stays behind to try and fix the ship while everyone else evacuated. He failed, as his corpse in the core chamber indicates.
- You Monster!: ANNIE remotely shuts you down upon realizing that you were the cause of the ship's explosions. She then reboots you some time later after reviewing the crew logs to discover that it wasn't your fault, and decides that the both of you should work together to complete the mission.
- You Wake Up in a Room: The game starts with you waking up in the ship's Medical bay, after a power outage and several other problems.
