urbanshade and the truth about sebastian solace

the pressure iceberg starts with a corporate logo. everything in the hadal blacksite belongs to urbanshade, and if you actually read the documents you collect instead of sprinting past them, a picture forms of a company running deep sea experiments that went catastrophically wrong. surface layer, you dodge anglers and hide from the eyefestation. deeper layer, sebastian solace. hes the merchant who sells you gear and cracks jokes, but the files and his own words reveal hes z-13, a former urbanshade experiment who defected, which is why hes tucked in a back room selling to survivors instead of being one of the monsters. hes not comic relief, hes a survivor of the same horror youre running from, just further along. deeper still, the entities arent random, the eyefestation, pandemonium, the reaching hands, they read as products of whatever urbanshade unleashed, a whole corrupted ecosystem. the genius is almost none of this is forced on you, the story is optional archaeology, logs and environmental detail and npc asides. my theory, urbanshade wasnt containing something down there, they were cultivating it, and sebastian is the one witness who got out with his mind mostly intact