The game begins with Prisoner 849 being the only survivor of the Vortex Rikers Prison Ship crash-landing. Your immediate objective is to find a way out of the ship.
This level shows examples of:
- Air-Vent Passageway: How you get off the Vortex Rikers prison deck. If you look closely, you can just about make out a Skaarj watching you through the fog from the other end of the tunnel, but he vanishes as an explosion rocks the corridor.
- Developer's Foresight: At the end of the level there's a hatch that needs to be shot in order to exit the ship. It's required that you have a weapon with you, and the Dispersion Pistol is said weapon.
- Early-Bird Cameo: You can find clips for your Automag before getting the weapon proper in the next level, provided you're good with lift jumps or you can land in the right spot.
- Electronic Speech Impediment: If the randomly exploding equipment, corpses strewn everywhere and general broken-ness of the vessel weren't already good indicators of how screwed the Vortex Rikers is, the onboard computer's voice acting up in all sorts of odd ways contributes to drive the point home.
- Foreshadowing: You find a Skaarj Scout who runs awa from you when he sees you after it killed some crew members.
- In Case of X, Break Glass: At the end of the Vortex Rikers level, there's a glass box with two medpacks inside of it, with the "Break Glass" text above it. There's another instance where this is required, break the glass in order to open the hatch to the level's exit.
- No-Gear Level: 849 starts the level with 12 HP and no weapons to speak of. Only near the end you get the Dispersion Pistol.
- Prison Level: The game begins with Prisoner 849 escaping from a crashed Prison Ship. The manual proclaims she got jailed for a crime she didn't commit.
- Prison Ship: The eponymous ship.
- Shipwreck Start: The game begins with Prisoner 849 regaining consciousness after the Prison Ship they were in crashes on the planet Na Pali via magnetic fields messing with the ship's systems, killing (almost) every other passenger and conveniently enabling the player's escape.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential: There's an execution chamber ready to execute a prisoner next to the holding cells. The prisoner's dead by this point, however you can choose to gib him.
