Understrata: the crew has faces now

Last update, the surface crew started talking. Three voices came in over the radio as you dug past your deepest mark, a foreman, a quartermaster, and an archivist, and that was the whole event. A name on the HUD and a line in the dark.

Now they have faces. And the faces move.

Meet the three

Foreman Reyes runs the dig. He hands you the drill on your first descent and spends the rest of the game watching your fuel and your depth, telling you when to back out before the heat or the fall gets you.

Quartermaster Idris runs the processor and buys everything you haul up. Dry, a little bored, and openly unconvinced by the old orbital survey that called this rock barren. She keeps a private ledger, and yours weighs more than the survey’s.

Archivist Wen keeps the records, and notices things. That the strata run too even. That the rock layers cleaner than rock should. He files it away without saying yet what it means.

And they talk

Each of the three got a talking version of their portrait. To keep repeat transmissions from feeling canned, everyone has three separate talking loops instead of one, and the game chooses which loop plays from the words in the line itself. So the same transmission always plays the same way, but across a run the mouths keep landing differently. Three voices, three loops each, nine in total. It bugged me that they all opened their mouths in sync, so now they don’t. Here they are, all going at once.

The log keeps going down

The transmissions reach deeper than they used to, and the further down they get, the more the crew stops talking about ore and starts talking about the rock. Idris keeps arguing with the survey. Reyes keeps mentioning the charter that worked this reach a long while before you did. Wen keeps noticing. One of the deepest lines is Wen’s, and it is the closest any of them comes to saying it out loud:

The deep keeps its own records. We’re only just learning to read them.

None of it triggers a cutscene. You hear it because you went somewhere no one has been, the fuel ticking down the whole time, and then you keep digging.

What is next

More of them, and the ones already down here reaching further. More of their contracts on the board. Still no dates, that part does not change. But the crew is starting to sound worried, and that has been the plan the whole way down.

— Vosk