Nothing can stop me from blogging about Subnautica 2 two days in a row
I can now shamefully say that I've dumped a huge amount of hours into Subnautica 2. The night of the 14th, I stayed up well into the 15th, and I'm likely to do the same again tonight.
One of my observations is that the game has quite an enormous amount of plot and weird setpieces built into it already. I've discovered an enormous clam puzzle, several megafauna I hadn't seen yesterday, and a large number of different alien sculptures. Also: a bajillion voice logs.
Because of the difficulty of creating reactive, scripted disaster situations in videogames, most games about disaster or catastrophe occur in the aftermath of a catastrophe, after everyone has stopped moving around (so that you do not have to animate them moving around). It creates this overwhelming sense that videogames can only occur after a disaster, not during one. It also means that narrative designers have a very sophisticated understanding of the many different ways you can depict an aftermath using the cheapest possible development assets...
Audio logs aren't free, but they're cheaper than art and animation, and I've been glad to use both them and text logs in a bunch of projects. The audio logs in Subnautica 2 are very ambitious. They have a sprawling cast, and address a number of juicy sci-fi tropes in fun ways. The ability to "respawn" after death is the big one here - it's diegetic, and the NPCs have a lot to say about how it impacts their memory, autonomy, relationships, and so on.
The logs are also a bit chronologically confusing. They narrate a rebellion among the members of a sprawling research installation. The installation itself was made up of many small hideouts, and during the rebellion they ended up being owned by different competing groups of people. These groups did not decorate their hideouts substantially differently from one another, so you're sometimes left struggling to figure out what faction you're looking at, when they where here, what they did, what their alliances were like at the time they left this message, and how final their deaths were.
This is fun! It's also overwhelming. I think I have now given up trying to figure it out.
This feels like the kind of game I will re-digest in the form of wiki pages!