Subnautica 2’s lead game designer says it helped cure his sea terror—only for its new apex ocean predator to give him all-new phobias: ‘This is going to make many people sad and scared’

Getting ambushed by a reaper leviathan in Subnautica has, by now, become a canonical PC gaming experience. It’s distilled oceanic horror, confirming all the player’s thalassophobic anxieties in a singular moment of aquatic violence—and in an interview with PC Gamer, Subnautica 2 game design lead Anthony Gallegos said it had only become bearable after years of working on the sequel.

Until Subnautica 2’s new deep sea monstrosity undid all that hard-won character growth, anyway.

According to Gallegos, he was “terrified” of the Subnautica games when he first joined the studio to work on the sequel, having been left in a sweaty submarine panic by its earlier entries.

“I played through them right before I joined the studio, and I had a really difficult time with it,” he said.

Luckily, throughout the course of Subnautica 2’s development, Gallegos said he was “broken” by the collective exposure therapy of a 9-5 spent submerged in alien ocean considerations.

“I was like, ‘Nope. These are just AI things. I feel nothing when I play against them anymore,'” Gallegos said. “And that was true for all the stuff that I was playing recently, until we just started working on this new chunk of the map.”

According to Gallegos, the team is currently building early versions of a region that’s due to arrive in Subnautica 2’s first big update sometime after its May early access launch. That region, he said, happens to be a hunting ground for one of Subnautica 2’s new marine predators: The Collector, the massive squid monster featured in its 2024 teaser trailer whose hunting techniques are apparently horrifying enough to resurrect Gallegos’ forgotten Subnautica fears.

“The stuff this creature was now doing to hunt for me deeply disturbed me to the point where I was like, ‘Oh man, I have to continue playing this demo to provide feedback, but I really don’t want to,'” Gallegos said. “And that’s a good sign, because I’m a weird person who’s now broken about this, and it was still getting under my skin. So this is good. This is going to make many people sad and scared.”

The Collector will be present in Subnautica 2 at early access launch, Gallegos said, but initially its presence will be “more akin to classic Subnautica”—it’ll be in an area, and it can “get you” if you venture too close. The area being built for the first post-launch update, however, is the Collector’s very own playground.

“It’s its home. This was always how we planned it: The Collector would have the space that it existed in that was very much its place to be,” Gallegos said. “And the goal of that next big world update will be driving that home. I still think the Collector is scary in its regular inception, but I think as we get more into that, it’ll become way more so.”

Gallegos didn’t specify what, exactly, the Collector does on its own turf that’s upsetting enough to put the fear of fish back in him, but Subnautica 2 creative media producer Scott MacDonald said a recent round of co-op—a new feature for the sequel—showcased just how effective of a predator the Collector can be.

“You would think you couldn’t have a scary experience with a bunch of friends, but you absolutely can. It was terrifying: Us all trying to get out of an area where the Collector was chasing us, and it managed to reach out with one of its tentacles and grab one of us,” MacDonald said. “And we just saw them being pulled into its mouth and chomped and killed. With the sound effects, the visual effects—it was terrifying. It was really really fun.”

Sounds awful. Can’t wait. And, it turns out, we won’t have to for long: Subnautica 2 launches in early access on Steam on May 14.