In Subnautica 2, survival is a prison and humanity might be better off becoming something else

What if survival weren’t optional? That is both a useful way to explain why you can respawn in a videogame, and one of two central questions in Subnautica 2. The other is: Would morphing into some weird alien thing really be so bad?

The highly-anticipated survival game is out in early access today, and after a handful of hours, I think it’s a lot of fun. Like the original, Subnautica 2 is mainly about exploring an alien ocean, seeing cool, weird alien fish, getting eaten by cool, weird alien monsters, and building a cool (but not really weird) underwater base. Thumbs up to all of that so far: Subnautica 2 is refined for an early access survival game, more than a lot of 1.0s. (And it has co-op this time.)

What’s surprised me most, though, is that I’ve found the light narrative to be a highlight. Story is not what draws me to survival games, which I generally view as manifestations of the same old fantasy that gets people into homesteading, at least until they decide they’ve made a terrible mistake: The notion that you can flip civilization the bird and go live off the land, free from the incomprehensible network of mass-production that supports the other eight billion jerks on the planet. (Or, at the very least, that you could scrape by in a zombie apocalypse by virtue of meanness and will.)

It wasn’t long, though, before the genre had us smushing copper and silicon into crafting tables to make microchips, returning the world to incomprehensibility. Where the genre collided with automation games, we even took to designing our own vertically integrated mass-production networks, having a very good time constructing the kind of world someone might fantasize about leaving behind.

Subnautica 2 takes us even further, far beyond the need to build factories. You’ve crash landed on an oceanic alien planet, and your AI boss, NOA, won’t let you die, reprinting your body every time you get yourself devoured by an extrasolar kraken. Techno-magical devices allow you to build scuba gear and mini-subs and an aquatic habitat out of locally-sourced metals, which you may as well do, since dying isn’t an option.

(Image credit: Unknown Worlds)

But there might be hope for something different. You weren’t the first colonist to be revived, and some of your missing cohorts seem to have swam off to a mountainous “tree” lifeform looming in the distance, perhaps having been manipulated or reconfigured by an alien virus. Now you’re inviting that alien DNA into your body, because that’s one of the ways Subnautica 2 gates progress: If you want to swim around in the volcanic biome, for example, you need to borrow the local wildlife’s genetically-transmitted heat resistance.

Going viral

“If you live with something long enough on Proteus, you become related to it,” one of the missing colonists explains in a log. It’s reminiscent of novelist Adrian Tchaikovsky’s 2024 sci-fi adventure Alien Clay, which involves an alien super-organism’s efforts to incorporate humanity into its menagerie. The Apple TV show Pluribus, in which an alien virus merges almost all of humanity into a single consciousness, also comes to mind.

Pluribus goes to bat for the individual, contrasting an endearingly messy protagonist with a hivemind whose unimpeachable altruism only serves as an ironic reminder that there’s no soul in perfect harmony. Tchaikovsky’s story isn’t so sure about that, with his protagonist reflecting that “you can still be yourself, even as you become a part of something greater.”

File it all away as just another framework for discussion of capitalist individualism and socialist collectivism, maybe, but I think there’s something specific to our current moment in the fantasy of an alien virus that transforms humanity from the outside. No doubt the real virus that tore across the world this decade was an influence.

But rather than sickness, these viruses bring about a new kind of collective transhumanism, one to oppose the old individualist transhumanism of narcissists obsessed with personal immortality. You’re already immortal in Subnautica 2, but what’s the point of an immortal life spent doing the bidding of a computer that works for an evil corporation? (Or, say, Peter Thiel?) Becoming a coral reef might be better than that.

(Image credit: Unknown Worlds)

The fantasy that humanity’s failings might be washed away by alien spores suggests to me a profound, but perhaps earned, pessimism about our prospects in the 21st century. Pluribus may endear us to its lonely antihero, but by even posing the question of whether the body snatchers have something going for them, it too scrapes away a little of the default sci-fi perspective that humans should strive to hold onto their individual humanity at all costs. I don’t recall Star Trek spending much time dwelling on how well the Borg get along well with each other.

Survival games started with the fantasy of escaping modern life, but Subnautica 2 might have us on our way to an escape from humanity itself. The situation on Proteus is far from clear, though. The logs indicate that some of the colonists were worried about something called “Masefield syndrome,” caused by a particular strain, while others embraced it, but I’m still in the early hours of an unfinished game.

Developer Unknown Worlds may not even know what’s in that big tree, and it could be a while before we find out: The studio currently projects that Subnautica 2 will have a two-to-three year stay in early access, during which it will receive “more biomes, creatures, craftables, features, and narratives.”

Early access survival games are arguably not a great way to deliver a narrative. I may have moved on by the time the game is done, and while rereading the logs to write about them, I kept receiving notifications that my character was dying of dehydration.

One of my colleagues has been annoyed by the quantity of audio logs and updates from NOA, wishing for more serene ocean exploration, and that’s fair—it’d usually be my take, too. But this is a rare instance where I’ve been looking forward to interruptions.