Moderate spoilers for the incomplete Subnautica 2 Early Access storyline follow.
When I play Subnautica 2, I often feel like I’m swimming in two worlds simultaneously. On the one hand, there is the world that goes on without me, the world of wobbly native beings going about their lives, unconcerned by my presence: schools of unharvestable fish passing like fireworks, growth cycles half-deciphered in flooded laboratories, tufted hammerhead sharks lazily circling their territories. On the other, there is the world which continues For me, its rewards and dangers are color-coded and reasonably predictable, its flora and fauna are gated and structured according to their role in the crafting and progression systems.
The latter world is one I recognize from other, more conventional open worlds that exist to be painted in your colors, worlds that function like haunted fairgrounds for endlessly distracted tourist-soldiers. “You go to the village, all the rides start up,” comments writer and designer Nikhil Murthy in a conversation about the imperial-colonial current of the open-world genre, several months before Subnautica 2’s release. “You leave the village, all the rides turn up broken. They only move while you’re there. And it makes the world feel empty, because if Ganondorf is there, if he has this giant floating castle of evil, and you have all these heroic figures all over the world, why are they waiting for you? Why are you the center of everyone’s attention?
An Indian developer (and infrequent RPS contributor) whose projects range from basketball roguelikes has Civilization shipmentsMurthy amassed a rich body of writing about how open worlds could move away from this “amusement park” design. “(The idea) that this person is the hero who comes out of nowhere and goes back to nowhere, and it’s all built up just so this guy can have fun,” he continues of the main characters in general. “So what are we talking about, you know: there’s no right, there’s no wrong, there’s no statement to make. It’s like we’re here for one person’s enjoyment, and it’s a narrative that has a colonial heritage.” As Murthy argues, game worlds that “wait” for the player continue a tradition of solipsistic escapism that dates back to colonial fantasies like Rudyard Kipling’s picaresque novel Kim, with its characterization of India as an ornamental chess set, the backdrop to a “Great Game” between Britain and Russia.
I think Subnautica 2’s open world qualifies as “postcolonial”, in the sense that, while it harbors something of Murthy’s hollow “amusement park”, it swims against the tide of the genre. It’s both an ornate pillaging landscape and a story of indentured settlers moving away from the violence widely expected of open worlds. It famously offers few weapons, except for a few tools that can be reused for self-defense. While you’re encouraged to hunt smaller creatures for food and water (there are a few “vegan” options, including seaweed salads, but I’m not sure entirely plant-based playthroughs are possible), the game gives you minimal means or motivation to combat the larger predators that lurk in some areas.
All of this reflects a desire to avoid characterizing the player as “conqueror, colonist, dominator”, in the words of design lead Anthony Gallegos. Instead, Subnautica 2 presents you as a grotesque disposable job – a 3D-printed “Pioneer” clone by “Noa”, an automated supervisor, to investigate the disappearances of previous Pioneers and their bases. The reprintable clone premise flips the script on the concept of a “blank tablet” protagonist; you “come out of nowhere and return to nowhere,” as Murthy says of the classic “man of action” lead role, but that’s not an expression of your power; it is a mark of your helplessness.
As for the current Early Access release, Subnautica 2’s plot traps you between this insidious AI overlord and a networked indigenous organism of comb-like growths that reworks other life forms to an ambiguous end. The two sides mirror each other, each seeking to control the bodies of the game’s humanoid characters. The oceanic entity infests the castaways, causing delirium as well as some useful mutations; he always seeks to attract people to the strange tree structure on the horizon.
Noa, meanwhile, gives you a tree of crafting recipes to unlock, all while trying to maintain control over the corrupted flesh of his minions through a purgative “medical” regime of euthanasia and reprinting. The lines between these omnipresent antagonists are blurred at the time of writing: Noa is something of a sea monster, its network of autonomous core terminals modeled after the cognitive architecture of cephalopods.
It’s a far cry from the basic open-world hero story told by The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Your biobed rebirths are a parody of Link’s emergence from his enchanted sarcophagus. Yet much of the plot exists primarily in the writing. From moment to moment, Subnautica 2 pulls you away from its interrogation of off-world colonialism in favor of some familiar routines of exploration and extraction. There are fixed biomes of creatures designed to be easily recognized as resources or threats. The artistry of these creatures reflects the study of ocean wildlife, but also has much in common with the animated props in many other video games. Above all, you have time: with the exception of early access developer updates, the world only changes significantly when you act on it.
Given the sense of entitlement that these features induce, it is understandable that some players feel left out by the “absence” of weapons. Most open worlds are designed to be conquered. These are exotic and passive landscapes, to be explored from start to finish, possibly resistant but without the ability to really change the player, except in an orderly manner through an extractivist progression system. Given this fundamental power relationship, restrict An open-world player’s ability to kill may seem like it’s going against the grain, even though it’s actually consistent with the sanitation of empire delivered by the imagery and descriptions of “unspoilt” worlds—their magnificent “emptiness” is the result of considerable bloodshed outside the frame.
While playing Subnautica 2, I often thought about my earlier conversation with Murthy about decolonizing the open world. Many of his ideas for postcolonial design involve simply reversing or distributing the action, allowing other characters, events, places, and things to “happen” and continue to happen, without the player’s involvement. “It can even look like a dynamic impasse, where you enter the situation, not from the beginning of the story, but in the middle of the story,” he says. “A city is constantly under siege and there’s just constant back and forth, so when you go in, you don’t feel like you’ve arrived at the beginning of the chapter, but rather in the middle.”
Murthy also argues for worlds that don’t quite understand each other, for history books that disagree, and for sites of inconsistency, rather than for the regular formation of a single, authoritative corpus. “I think it’s important to give that to players, to tell them that there are things that the game itself doesn’t know, that as a game designer I don’t really know,” he says. “The game itself, the game world, there are things in it that he doesn’t understand.” He also advocates for permanent consequences; players should be able to scare the world, even if they’re acting with the best of intentions, rather than resetting locations between visits.
Murthy has commented on Bluesky about Subnautica 2’s non-violence debate, and I see many of the above ideas in the current Early Access version of the game. By the time you arrive, the confrontation between Noa, the Tree, and the other human settlers is well underway. The other colonists offer contrasting views in audiologists on how to counter the AI and the possibility of “solidarity” with marine life – a noisy constellation of possible solutions to the same problems you face as a player. The seabed is littered with failed efforts to put these ideas into practice, abandoned bases and laboratories that you scour like a hermit crab in search of a new shell. I won’t spoil too much, but there are other, deeper artifacts that charge all these convolutions with new complexity.
The ocean simulation is also less player-centric than the original. A deceptively minor technical adjustment is that creatures are more able to respond to each other. Larger, territorial creatures seek to repel each other. The world thus has “living” action that extends beyond its relationship with the player and is more compelling, in its own way, than any petrified description of knowledge or any scripted encounter featuring abysmal intelligence.
Yet liveliness is carefully limited. It’s possible to overexploit a biome, but predators never flush the crevices of water slugs and other animals you need to get clean water and food. Much of this can be justified by pointing out that players haven’t existed here long enough to see larger changes, but the plain truth is likely that if the world of Subnautica 2 were as unruly and invasive as portrayed, it wouldn’t live up to expectations for its genre. Its world isn’t yours to destroy, nor is it entirely a vehicle for your entertainment, but on some level it’s waiting for you.
