Swim in the Wreckage: Subnautica 2 Early Access

Not far from the start of Subnautica 2, you'll encounter a shallow patch of seafloor covered in a homogeneous forest of huge, spiraling pink coral. When you see it for the first time, the PDA—the game's ubiquitous computer voice—will chime in to remind you: "Simple ecosystems are often a sign of ecological distress."

The waterlogged moon the game is set in, Proteus, is dying. But it's also trying to kill you, from the very moment you land. While the original Subnautica had the protagonist infected with the Kharaa bacterium—a nod to the Natural Selection series that made Unknown Worlds' name as a studio—on Proteus, the world itself is poison; the ocean water is full of heavy metals. I mean, there is also a virus that drives you to madness. But the suffering starts with lead and cadmium.

Subnautica was never really a horror game to me; I do not have a deep fear of the ocean and my reaction to having my submersible grabbed by a Reaper Leviathan was always "oh, this asshole again." I loved that game, and the somewhat-maligned sequel Subnautica: Below Zero, but never for the sheer terror that others seem to experience.

But Subnautica 2 does feel more like a horror game to me, not because of its blunt-headed sharks or aggressive giant squid, but because the storytelling has embraced existential and ecological horror in a way I really never expected it to.

In a way, it's a deliberate pushing back on what this game could be, in less thoughtful hands: an exercise in adventure tourism, one that treats its world as a cool-looking place to explore and nothing more. Colorful underwater vistas, imaginative speculative biology, and a dash of deep-ocean terror—that's the formula, and they added a co-op mode. That would have been an easy sell, and in fact if you watch the original teaser trailer, that's what's being sold: "You like Subnautica? Here's more of it."

I'm perfectly happy to trot up to the trough for that. The game certainly is that; there's a whole new world to explore, but the ways and means are very familiar. You break distinctive mineral deposits to collect resources to build bases, submarines, and tools. Those enable you to go further and deeper in search of more crafting recipes and more exotic resources to build them with. Along the way, you encounter a story told through audio logs, environmental storytelling, and the semi-helpful commentary of the PDA.