This December, Warframe experienced its last big update of 2023, with Whispers in the Walls. Teased at Tennocon 2023, Whispers in the Walls brought with it melee weapon arcanes, a new syndicate and a bounty system similar to the Zariman, a new Warframe and, the icing on the cake, a new quest, a thrust forward into Warframe’s new story, after the New War.

This article contains spoilers. Do not read. Go and play the quest first. It has level 40 enemies, and I recommend taking an Excalibur for… immersive reasons. Also, take a Helios with you. Have fun!

Whispers in the Walls starts off almost exactly like it does at Tennocon, with you getting a message from Loid, asking to meet him at the Necralisk. In fact, the whole scene plays out exactly like that, but I was a bit sad when the walls didn’t light up as I traversed the staircase into Entrati’s lab. It’s actually exactly the same, with the same path and everything, but on minimum settings instead of max quality. And I have Helios Prime scanning all the shiny loot containers. There are vials of goo everywhere that you can break and leave lying around, as well as somewhat terrifying sarcophagus-like things in the Indifference areas that have fingers around them and give you a new resource, Stela. What we don’t see though is the second miniboss. For some reason.

What has changed though is that cool portal at the end of the mission, after waking up the real Loid, is missing. Instead, we exit via a portal in the mouth of a giant person vessel thing. Loid goes on about how things are kinda hopeless and that Albrecht is gone and all that, and then we activate the computer from 1999, as we did in the Tennocon 2023 trailer. We also pick up the Grimoire along the way, and need to equip it for the rest of the quest. Luckily it’s already max level, but it IS unmodded.

And then we… just get the Warframe 1999 trailer from Tennocon. It’s pretty cool playing through it, but it’s also a bit weird being Arthur the helmet-less Excalibur when I was previously a bright yellow Volt. You start off only able to walk and crouch, and there is a secret back area where you can see Wally, but it’s mostly just the same. You’re an unmodded Excalibur fighting off weird TV enemies that use Infested Runner animations.

We return back to reality and it turns out that Albrecht Entrati actually did use a time machine to go back to 1999. We don’t know this at first though, and we’re asked to look around the lab, where there are a bunch of animals. A massive Norg (from the Plains of Eidolon) in a tank, a flightless, colourful bird and some sort of weird goat deer thing with a dick-like head. We examine them, and then we have Loid send us off into the labs for a Mirror Defense mission where we protect two security devices from both the Necramechs and the Murmur.

A small criticism here, the two new factions, the broken down Necramechs, and the void-fueled Murmur, are both alright. But for two factions that are only ever supposed to fight each other, they do very little of that. They just stand around until you appear, and then they ONLY attack you. Very annoying.

Anyway, with the security apparatus safe, Loid’s kinda at a loss of what to do, and the goat creature pops up with a netracell, introducing us to the next mission type, which is identical to that of an Orokin vault except harder. We have to find a Pom-3, and that involves checking three locations to narrow down the device’s location, finding the device and getting out of there, while the netracell gives us a bunch of downsides, like exploding enemies.

With the Pom-3 located, we get more information from Entrati, in the form of a handful of grainy videos. Apparently he fled to 1999 to stop Wally, the Man in the Wall, the Great Indifference, from attacking Loid and his lab. Except, as we saw in the Warframe 1999 trailer, the Man in the Wall clearly followed him and either killed him and is using his body, or has somehow possessed Albrecht. In the video, Albrecht says that we need to trust him, then asks us to craft a special device, which we do.

While we build this device (which looks like a gargoyle made from Entrati’s pets), we have the Man in the Wall (disguised as our Operator) getting more pissed off at us. He sits there and criticizes us as we build the device, and once it’s done, we take it back to the lab. Immediately, all the animals start talking, thanks to the device we made. Fibonacci the Norg is the guy who hands out bounties and deals with standing, Bird-3  is a panicky thing which handles where we spend our standing, and Tagfer is the last of his kind, depressed over the loss of his love and the NPC that deals with the Netracell end-game activity (which starts at level 200 with Steel Path-like enemies).

Fibonacci explains that we need the last page of the Grimoire. Which Loid ripped out and hid somewhere in the labs. We’re sent off to go and find it, and we come across more and more enemies as we do so. The missing page is found behind a locked gate, with an angry Man in the Wall standing in front of it, demanding we give the page to him. Which we don’t. Apparently this means that we ‘broke our deal’ with the Man in the Wall.

As this happens, Entrati’s main lab gets attacked and partially pulled into the Great Indifference. We rush back via teleporter, only for it to break and we have to run back manually. The animals are missing and Loid has pulled out a Magnus Prime in order to seal some swift vengeance to the intruding Murmur. Outside, a massive Vessel can be seen, angrily standing over the horde.

Boss battle time. The Vessel watches over as we fight the Fragmented One, but not before we place the Grimoire in front of that gargoyle statue. The Fragmented One has more attacks and actually does a lot of damage, capable of stripping your shields in a single attack. As we beat the Fragmented One though, we’re thrown from our Warframe and the Vessel approaches, clearly about to attack. It goes to smash us, the Operator/Drifter, but we use transference and end up in the Vessel in the lab. Rather than fight the Vessel though, we put a caring hand to its face and take away its pain.

The quest ends with a heavily damaged lab but the idea that we can actually win. We get a small morality sun/moon check about what Entrati said about Loid and how he wanted to be remembered, then it’s back to work. We’ve got to get the Vessels working, so we can get back to 1999 and be punctual this time round.

We end with a cutscene with the Man in the Wall, still dressed up as our Operator. They complain about how the child (i.e. us) broke the deal and how we’ll have to pay. We then have Albrecht Entrati approach, with the same Man in the Wall eyes and mouth, who seems to agree, and says that it’s fine because the plan is still ongoing and it’s all going to end as it began.

Overall, it’s a bloody fun quest, definitely more interesting than The New War. It wasn’t very long, I finished it in about an hour and a half, not including the hotfix that popped up in the middle of it. But that was fine. There were no awkwardly long Operator segments, no annoying puzzles, just some interesting characters and cool locations. I do kinda think we needed some more enemies, or at least an introduction to the rogue Necramech and the coily worm Murmr thing, but overall, it was great.

However, there is one problem, and that’s how Whispers in the Wall feels like just another build up, the same way the three teaser quests for the New War were. This is just the beginning, and the Man in the Wall is fucking furious at us. But we won’t see how this plays out until next year, and we probably won’t see more (outside of the incoming clan operation) until Warframe 1999 or a smaller update hits. Which is a shame, because this story is gripping.

Oh well.