After completing Subnautica some time ago, I've started playing again, but using my old save.
It's a weirdly unsettling experience. Mild spoilers follow.
I'm not sure why I started playing again. I think I missed it - that compelling mix of exploration and freedom, mingled with the thrill and fear of the unknown. Although it had taken me 55 hours to complete Subnautica, it felt like I'd not seen everything I could. That ocean is a big place.
Returning was a strange feeling. It was like I had become a secondary character in the story, left behind when the hero had escaped into space, never to be seen again. The depths of 4546B were no longer an imposed confinement, but a place I'd chosen to inhabit. The last place I'd ever be.
All my old bases were still there, lit and powered but filled with empty storage lockers, stripped of anything useful. They felt cold and abandoned, with only time standing in the way of their inevitable decay.
More than ever I felt alone.
I set off towards the edge of the Crater, allowing myself to be distracted by anything interesting along the way. I watched giant predators feeding on lesser fish. I dove deep into the Grand Reef and walked with the Sea Treaders. I discovered a new route down to the Lost River, guarded by the massive remains of an undersea monster, long dead.
I built new habitats, adding every kind of base module and filling them with furniture and lockers stuffed with resources. I constructed huge new aquariums and filled them with gathered creature eggs and plant samples.
I found new wrecks in new places, some close to the surface, some deep in the darkness. I found new blueprints and lost PDAs, and new time capsules. I explored the edge of the Crater as one might walk the shore of a desert island, or pace the confines of a prison cell. I stared into the abyss, but nothing stared back.
I trekked across the Dunes, searching for sea monsters. I rode the back of a Ghost Leviathan deep in the Lost River, my grapple lodged in its writhing body. At the edge of the Mushroom Forest I lured a Reaper Leviathan into the trees and we wrestled in the darkness, my Prawn's drill arm cutting into its flesh. Trapped and tangled in the coral formations it finally succumbed to my attacks, and rolled slowly and lifelessly onto its back.
I decided that I needed something to work towards. A challenge. A purpose. Something to keep me sane, trapped forever alone in this dangerous world. I started gathering resources, filling every inch of my Cyclops with lockers brimming with materials.
I built a tower from the top of one base to the waves above, and started building a floating footpath of foundation plates towards a second. Soon I'd connected three bases, replacing the journey through the dark between them with a safe but inefficient jog over the water.
I started a new base at the edge of the Crater and started building a shaft down into the abyss, where only the Ghost Leviathans dwell. Battling constantly with pressure and a limited air supply, I pressed on into the darkness, further than I'd ever been before. In the deepest depths of the world I gazed upon the lifeless bed of everything, black and empty, surrounded by monsters that wanted only for me to leave.
After all I'd done, I considered my achievements. I had built deeper than anyone had on this world, I had seen things undisturbed for centuries, I had collected resources and forged them into useful technology. I had survived, and yet the ocean remained indifferent to me, staunchly ignoring my attempts to tame it.
There was no winning. No end to my adventure. No congratulations. For all my efforts, I was still at the mercy of the waters, uniquely vulnerable to depth, pressure and predators.
I was alone. Without the option to end my story, to escape this world, I was left with nothing but gathering and exploring to pass the time. I wondered if anyone would ever find any trace of my existence, or whether all that I had built and explored would remain lost to the sea, watched over only by the uncaring creatures that lived there.
And that is why survival games need an ending. Otherwise they get depressing, and people end up writing rambling things like this. Take note, games developers.