Welcome to the Trash

I was expecting a suspenseful, atmospheric grind through the abandoned spaceship. Instead, a squad of Ministers immediately shows up and captures Sean et al. The Ministers also believe the Stone is vital for their nefarious plans, and can't risk the Republic getting it first. Almost as soon as the Ministers take control, we discover that the spaceship isn't empty at all, but is instead full of countless horrible monsters: the remnants of the genetic experiments for eternal life that comprise the the Philosopher Stone

Isolated from the others, Sean and one of the Ministers have to team up to make it to the Stone and get off the spaceship alive. It turns into a horror story in the vein of Prey (the 2017 video game) as they have to stealth past and fight through hordes of vicious humanoid predators, childlike scavengers with way too many teeth, and the ship's rogue autorepair nanobots. They also encounter a Republican soldier who had been stationed on the ship for the past five years, who is the only surviving member of a previous team sent to recover the Stone. They're going to kill each other when they reach the end, but for now the other monsters are even worse. It turns into the most wild example of found family I've ever seen

The narrative style is very interesting. Sean has some form of PTSD from when the Ministers destroyed his home as a child, so various events in the story trigger flashbacks to that. It's a neat way to explore the backstory, but it flows really well with what's happening in the present. There are some pretty deep mysteries that get slow-dripped to the audience this way, like "what are the Ministers really" and "what happened on Sean's home planet," and I really enjoyed figuring them out

i feel physically ill.