Moderate spoilers for Subnautica 2’s incomplete early access storyline follow.
When I play Subnautica 2, I often feel as though I am swimming in two worlds simultaneously. On the one hand, there’s the world that goes on without me, the world of wonky indigenous beings living out their lives, careless of my presence: shoals of unharvestable fish swizzing past like dropped fireworks, growth cycles half-deciphered in flooded laboratories, crested hammerheads idly circling their territories. On the other, there’s the world that goes on for me, its rewards and hazards colour-coded and reasonably predictable, its flora and fauna gated-off and patterned according to their role within the crafting and progression systems.
This latter world is the one I recognise from other, more conventional open worlds that exist to be painted your colour, worlds that operate like haunted fairgrounds for endlessly distracted soldier-tourists. “You go to the village, all the rides spin up,” comments writer and designer Nikhil Murthy during a conversation about the imperial and colonial undertow of the open world genre, several months before Subnautica 2’s release. “You leave the village, all the rides spin down. They’re only moving while you’re there. And it makes the world feel hollow because if Ganondorf is there, if he’s got this giant floating castle of evil, and you have all of these heroic characters all across the world – why are they just waiting for you? Why are you the centre of everyone’s attention?”
An Indian developer (and infrequent RPS contributor) whose projects range from basketball roguelikes to send-ups of Civilization, Murthy has amassed a rich body of writing about how open worlds might get away from this “amusement park” design. “[The idea] that this person is the hero who comes out of nowhere and goes back into nowhere, and everything is built just so that this one guy can have fun,” he continues, discussing leading characters at large. “Then what are we even talking about, you know – there is no good, there is no evil, there are no statements to be made. It’s just like, we’re here for this one person’s amusement, and that is a narrative that has colonial heritage.” As Murthy argues, game worlds that “wait” for the player continue a tradition of solipsistic escapism that reaches back to colonial fantasies like Rudyard Kipling’s picaresque novel Kim, with its characterisation of India as an ornamental chess set, the backdrop for a “Great Game” between Britain and Russia.
I think Subnautica 2’s open world qualifies as “postcolonial”, in that while it harbours something of Murthy’s hollow “amusement park”, it is swimming against the currents of its genre. It’s both a richly adorned landscape of plunder and a story about indentured settlers that routs away from the violence widely expected of open worlds. Famously, it offers little in the way of weapons, save for a few tools that can be repurposed for self-defence. 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 wholly plant-based playthroughs are possible), the game gives you minimal means or motivation to fight the grander predators that prowl certain regions.
All this reflects a desire to avoid characterising the player as “conqueror, colonist, dominator”, in the words of design lead Anthony Gallegos. Instead, Subnautica 2 casts you as a grotesque of disposable labour – a clone ‘pioneer’ 3D-printed 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 do indeed “come out of nowhere and go back to nowhere”, as Murthy says of the classic “action man” lead, but this isn’t an expression of your power; it’s a mark of your helplessness.
As regards the current early access release, Subnautica 2’s plot traps you between this insidious AI overlord and an indigenous, networked organism of comblike growths that reworks other lifeforms to ambiguous end. The two parties mirror each other, each seeking control over the bodies of the game’s humanoid characters. The oceanic entity infests the castaways, inducing delirium alongside some helpful mutations; it seeks always to lure people towards the strange treelike structure on the horizon.
Noa, meanwhile, endows you with a tree of unlockable crafting recipes, while trying to maintain command of the corrupted flesh of its minions through a purgative ‘medical’ regimen of euthanasia and reprinting. The lines between these pervasive antagonists are blurry, as of writing: Noa is something of a sea monster, its network of autonomous base terminals modelled on the cognitive architecture of cephalopods.
It’s far from the elementary open world hero story as told by The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Your biobed rebirths are a travesty of Link’s emergence from his enchanted sarcophagus. Still, a lot of the intrigue exists primarily in the writing. In the moment to moment, Subnautica 2 distances you from its interrogation of offworld colonialism for the sake of some familiar routines of exploration and extraction. There are fixed biomes of creatures who are designed for easy recognition as resources or threats. The artistry of these creatures reflects study of ocean fauna, but also has a lot in common with the animate props of many other videogames. Above all, time is yours to dispose of – save for the developer’s own early access updates, the world only changes in significant ways when you act upon it.
Given the sense of entitlement these features induce, it’s understandable that a few players may feel jilted by the “absence” of weapons. Most open worlds are designed to be conquered. They are exotic, passive landscapes, yours to explore from end to end, possibly resistant but without capacity to really change the player save for in ways ordained by some extractivist progression system. Given this fundamental power relationship, to restrict an open world player’s ability to kill may seem like contrarianism, though it’s actually in keeping with the sanitisation of empire delivered by imagery and descriptions of ‘unspoilt’ worlds – their beautific ’emptiness’ the result of considerable bloodshed out of frame.
Playing Subnautica 2, I thought often about my earlier conversation with Murthy about decolonising the open world. Many of his ideas for postcolonial design are simply about reversing or distributing agency, allowing other characters, events, places and things to ‘happen’ and continue happening, without the player’s involvement. “It can even be something like a dynamic stalemate, where you come into the situation, not from the start of the story, but the middle of the story,” he says. “A town is constantly being besieged and there’s just that ongoing back and forth, so when you enter it, it doesn’t feel like you’ve come in at the start of the chapter, but more at the middle.”
Murthy also argues for worlds that don’t quite comprehend themselves, for history books that disagree and for sites of incoherence, rather than the steady formation of a single, authoritative body of lore. “I think it’s important to give players that, to tell players that there are things that the game itself doesn’t know, that as a game designer, I don’t actually know,” he says, “The game itself, the world of the game, there are things within it that it doesn’t understand.” He also makes the case for permanent consequences; players should be able to scar the world, even when acting with the best of intentions, rather than having the locations reset between visits.
Murthy has commented on Bluesky about the Subnautica 2 non-violence debate, and I see many of the above ideas in the game’s current early access build. By the time you arrive, the clash between Noa, the Tree and the other human colonists is well advanced. The other settlers offer contrasting views in audiologs about how to gainsay the AI, and the possibility of “solidarity” with the sealife – a noisy constellation of possible solutions to the same problems you face as player. The seabed is littered with abortive efforts at putting those ideas into practice, abandoned bases and labs you pick through like a hermit crab looking for a new shell. I won’t spoil too much, but there are other artefacts, deeper down, that charge all of these convolutions with new complexity.
The ocean simulation is also less player-centric than that of the original. One deceptively minor technical adjustment is that creatures are more able to respond to each other. Larger, territorial creatures seek to drive each other off. The world thus has a ‘live’ agency that extends beyond its relationship to the player, and which is more compelling, in its way, than any petrified lore description or scripted encounter featuring some abyssal intelligence.
Still, the liveliness is carefully constrained. It’s possible to overfish a biome, but the predators never rinse the crevices of the waterslugs and other fauna you need for potable water and food. Much of this can be justified by pointing out that players do not exist here for long enough to observe larger changes, but the bare truth is likely that if Subnautica 2’s world were as unruly and encroaching as described, it wouldn’t meet expectations for its genre. Its world isn’t yours to destroy, nor entirely a vehicle for your amusement, but on some level, it waits upon you.
