Quick Answer: Most "I am softlocked" reports in this game are undocumented interactions, not bugs, and two of them have answers straight from the developers. Stiff hatches need the interact key mashed, not pressed — that is the developer's own wording. The route planner gives you more range for a messy route than a clean one, which is what strands people at the last sonar shift. The 60 FPS cap comes off by turning V-Sync on, which is deliberate and explained. The genuine open defects are the missing mainframe console (confirmed, with a dated fix promise) and the spoken dialogue not matching the subtitles, which four separate reviewers report and no developer has addressed.
Version note: Current for the build after the developers' August 15 hotfix, checked August 17, 2026. The game is three days old and has had two hotfixes already. Patch contents are quoted from the developers' Steam announcements; everything else comes from launch-week forum threads and reviews, with developer replies attributed in place. Single reports are labelled as such.
Three days old, two hotfixes deep. Most of what looks broken in this game is not. (Screenshot: solarsuit.games)
Hotfix Timeline
| Date | What changed |
|---|---|
| August 14 | Reduced the chance of a rare story event that was triggering too often |
| August 15 | Fixed a story-breaking bug that allowed players to interact with an object that should not have been interactable |
The August 15 one is worth understanding, because it corrupted endings rather than crashing anything. A player described the symptom before the fix: they picked up a key during what should have been the good-ending route, and afterwards "it seemed like 2 routes were intertwined, i saw both the normal and mutated crews at the same time along with their dialogue." If you played on launch day and your ending felt incoherent, that was the bug. Update before any route-hunting, or the ending you get will not be the one your choices earned.
The developers also stated on August 14 that more quality-of-life fixes were coming early the following week. That window is now, and nothing has shipped since the 15th.
Not Bugs: Three Things That Look Like Softlocks
Hatches That Animate but Do Not Open
Developer-answered. A player stuck at the biohazard section — needing to reach the radioactive elements, life support restored behind the bulkhead, hatch playing a turning animation and never opening — posted that they were sure it was a bug and could not continue. The developer account solarsuit replied:
"Try pressing it multiple times — to open those hatches you need to apply force to the valve. Do it by hitting the button rapidly to open the door."
It worked. The reporter's response is the honest summary: "Thanks. You really need to make this a lot clearer in the game. It took way to long to figure out what to do."
Rule: mash the interact key on any hatch that turns but does not open. The same player noted they had hit this before elsewhere in the boat and worked around it by accident, so it is not specific to one door.
Running Out of Range on the Route Planner
Covered in full on the beginner guide, but it belongs here too because people report it as a bug at the final sonar shift.
Drawing an efficient route costs you distance. A player who could not reach the green zone — with two torpedo events that claimed to have opened new paths and no visible map change — found the answer himself:
"I had to make very small movements resulting in a lot more 'pips' along my route and that for some reason gave me just enough movement to reach the green zone. If I tried to get to the zone in as few direction changes as possible and minimizing those pips I would run out of movement."
He is right that it is inconsistent, and says the tutorial should explain it. Two supporting notes from that thread: you can route through orange zones, and one player reached the green zone without torpedoing any obstacles at all.
Also from that thread: crew Energy does not limit boat movement. Do not burn a shift resting your crew to fix a range problem.
Doors and Machines That Are Timing, Not Permission
A player on day 4 could not access the coffee machine or the Captain's Quarters, had talked to everyone, and concluded they were softlocked. Another player's read: the coffee pot is once per shift, and it may simply not be the right point in the story to see the captain. Check your task list before deciding the game has broken.
That said — see the next section, because in that same thread it was not always fixable.
Genuinely Stuck: Reload Further Back Than You Think
Two players in the day-4 thread had the same symptom, no interact prompt on the Captain's Quarters door, and only one recovered.
The one who recovered loaded a save from a few minutes before that segment. The other reloaded repeatedly, quit and relaunched, and got nowhere: "i reloaded a few times. just aint working. no E prompt." The advice that came back is the practical one:
"Reloading the last one, or even last 2 saves might not be enough. You'll have to go earlier than that."
There is no chapter select in this game. Keep manual saves at shift boundaries, because the only recovery path anyone has demonstrated for a genuine story break is going back further than feels reasonable. No developer has responded to this thread.
The 60 FPS Cap: Turn V-Sync ON
Counter-intuitive, and the developer explained why:
"if we didn't cap the FPS, on stronger hardware the game starts running at 300–400 FPS and thrashes the GPU with unnecessary calculations. V-sync is tied to your monitor's refresh rate and forces the game to match whatever the monitor is set to. That's the correct setting in your case."
The player who asked — 4090, 32 GB, Windows 11, 240 Hz monitor, game feeling sluggish at 60 — enabled V-Sync and reported jumping to 200 FPS.
If enabling V-Sync does not help, check the other lead from the same thread: your Windows display settings may still be at 60 Hz even though the monitor supports more. Another player reports running at 120 Hz on a TV without trouble.
Confirmed Open Defects
The Mainframe Notes Have Nowhere to Be Read
Your crew announces that notes have been uploaded to the mainframe, and there is no console to read them on. You are not missing a menu. A developer account replied to the thread:
"We're currently fixing this issue and will add the console by the middle of next week"
Two practical notes. The notes are readable from the mess hall in the current build — a player confirmed that, and added that they look important enough to be worth not skipping. And a second player in that thread had reasoned that the inaccessible mainframe was intentional worldbuilding, which the developer's answer rules out.
This is a dated commitment, so it is worth checking against. Nothing had shipped as of August 17.
Spoken Dialogue Does Not Match the Subtitles
The most-reported defect in the game's reviews, and no developer has addressed it. Four separate reviewers describe it independently:
- "There are major and frequent discrepancies between what the voice actors say vs. what's written on screen."
- "how horribly mangled the voice dialogue is vs. the written dialogue that appears on the screen. Numerous instances where the voice lines come nowhere close to what's being displayed"
- "The voice acting isn't bad but it rarely match's what's on the screen to the point it contradicts what's being said."
It gets worse than cosmetic. One reviewer reports characters inside a single conversation losing track of whether a crewmate is alive or dead. A Russian-language reviewer describes a related sequencing failure: a crew member chats with you normally and is then written out in the next beat, as though a conversation in between never played, which they say broke their immersion entirely.
Until this is fixed, trust the subtitles, not the voice line. They are what the story state actually is.
Related and possibly the same root cause: a reviewer describes characters accepting facts that were never established on screen, to the point of wondering whether they had sequence-broken the game. If the pacing feels like it skipped a scene, it may have.
The Warhead Chase: How to Actually Get Through It
The late-game monster sequence is the single most-complained-about section, including from players who otherwise liked the game — one negative review calls it "Absolutely horrible, no way to understand where you're supposed to be going."
Two players posted the sequence. This is player-reported, not developer-confirmed:
- Shoot the monster to its knees.
- Run to the terminal and power it up.
- Shoot it to its knees again, until the terminal goes green.
- Interact with the terminal a second time.
- Shoot it down once more, then run to the ladder at the start of the level.
Why people miss the terminal: a second player clarifies there are two chambers, and the target terminal presents "an 'interactable' white dot on it which really looks like any other terminal." It must be used twice, and then you return to the first chamber for the ladder.
Three things that are intentional and will make you think you are bugged: the gun jams by design for horror effect, you randomly slow down while running, and checking the mission UI does not pause the game. Also, the monster can spawn ahead of you, so running does not reliably buy distance.
The player who worked it out is measured about it — "It relies on you dying a lot till you figure it out... It's good for thrills to a point, but It's unfair level design" — and hopes the developers tweak it. Nothing has been said officially.
Smaller Reports and Missing Features
- No key rebinding. There is no option to redefine keys, raised specifically because running is bound to holding Shift. One thread, no developer reply.
- Ultrawide is untested but appears to work. Asked about 21:9 and 32:9, the developer said "It should work, yes, but we didn't test those modes thoroughly." A player then confirmed 32:9 running with no bugs or issues.
- Graphics look rougher than the first game. One reviewer's comparison against Static Dread: The Lighthouse. Single source, and a matter of judgement rather than a defect.
- Demo saves do not transfer, and the demo is gone. The developers closed it on August 3 and stated twice that saves would not carry over and that the demo build differed significantly from the final game.
- Windows only. No Mac or Linux build.
Reporting Something Not Here
Use the Steam discussions — both developer accounts answer there within a day, and several of the answers on this page came from threads that were a few hours old. The developers also run a Discord linked from their release announcement.