Subnautica 2 is only in early access, but it has a promising story available so far. Spoilers below the cut.
As expected in any Subnautica game, you are a human exploring the edges of space when your ship crashes on a water planet. In this instance, you are one of 40,000 colonists on the Cicada, a ship attempting to escape the Kharaa infestation that (predictably) escaped Alterra control.
However, when you wake up, you have no memory of this. You are "printed" to a body by NoA, an AI advisor who woke you up from a digital storage of human souls. You do not know your name. You are the Qualified Investigator meant to uncover why some colonists had disappeared.
Through your exploration, you learn that you were woken years after a core set of colonists had begun establishing bases on this planet. Unfortunately, the water is saturated with toxic levels of heavy metals and rampant viral blooms. The planet is gradually killing you. You collect Black Boxes recording the colonists' final moments, as well as voice memos they recorded. The colonists "reprinted" each time they died. They eventually turned on each other, with little clarity whether it was due to heavy metal poisoning, a telepathic/viral compulsion to feed themselves to the massive world tree looming in the distance, or madness due to "print loss" from reprinting so many times. In some instances, NoA reset specific colonists, and at least once, reset the entire colony--wiping their memories.
As the game progresses, you uncover an ever increasing number of conflicting narratives about what is happening on this planet. An extinct alien race left messages for the Architects in the hopes they could fix their planet when they had failed. Perhaps another (or maybe the same) aliens killed human colonists on sight, but they have also disappeared. The PDA presumes hostility and danger in every instance, but some of the behavior suggests play or curiosity instead. Recordings suggest that NoA could go insane, but only if it is useful to do so.
The Alterra technology--NoA and the PDA--constantly push you to paranoia. The colonists themselves left recordings of starvation, lack of resources, betrayal, and death to reinforce this. The ecologist realizes that the ocean itself is dying; it is in a final stage of life before a mass extinction event. The lead surgeon decides that people must reprint if they get sick because it simply takes too many calories to tend to them. Two colonists sabotage the bio-beds that reprint them, causing an explosion that kills numerous colonists--including children.
Then the story takes a drastic shift once some survivors escaped NoA's observations. You find bases where they cultivated plenty of food to eat. Most of the recordings become conversations of curious exploration and attempts to problem-solve together. They don't resent the aliens for killing them and instead wonder what the aliens fear they will do. They still fear madness and permanent death, but they have adopted a new attitude: they need to work together, and perhaps adapt to this alien technology instead of forcing everything to fit into Alterra tech. You take over where they left off, repairing alien tech to try to find a way to save all life, not just your own.
The result is a delightful meta-narrative. All of the colonist perspectives focus on competition, desperation, fear, shame, and isolation. Everyone is a debt-slave to Alterra working here until 0 Debt Day--unless NoA resets their memory. They are lied to constantly. No one trusts each other. Senseless death and resentment only worsen. But once the others abandoned the chain of command and the mission to establish a colony, the relief is immediate. They jailbreak the technology, grow their own food instead of hunting animals, and begin trying to save the dying planet. They have hope in spite of the challenges.
They're still trying to survive. They just stopped believing that they needed to kill everything else to do it. Humans are not a virus despite the gaslighting that we're no better than Kharaa or Proteavirus; humans just another living thing here, and there's symbiosis everywhere. They simply had to recognize it for what it was instead of accepting the Alterra AI's every word.
All that from about 12 hours of early access. I've only gotten to the first depth module.
I'm so excited for the full game.
