Nothing can stop me from blogging about Subnautica 2 two days in a row

I can now shamefully say that I've dumped a huge amount of hours into Subnautica 2. The night of the 14th, I stayed up well into the 15th, and I'm likely to do the same again tonight. One of my observations is that the game has quite an enormous amount of plot and weird setpieces built into it already. I've discovered an enormous clam puzzle, several megafauna I hadn't seen yesterday, and a large number of different alien sculptures. Also: a bajillion voice logs. Because of the difficulty of creating reactive, scripted disaster situations in videogames, most games about disaster or catastrophe occur in the aftermath of a catastrophe, after everyone has stopped moving around (so that you do not have to animate them moving around). It creates this overwhelming sense that videogames can only occur after a disaster, not during one. It also means that narrative designers have a very sophisticated understanding of the many different ways you can depict an aftermath using the cheapest…