Athanasia casts you as Carmen Flores, a researcher sent to investigate an isolated South American facility in 1999 where local disappearances and strange phenomena have been reported. The mission framing is to investigate, outwit the predators now running through the corridors, and escape.
More context
The Steam copy and the Neon Doctrine landing page frame the same mission: "outwit nature, delve deep and uncover the facility's mysteries" and "escape before creatures find you." The facility is the SAIR lab, and the deeper Carmen pushes, the more the prehistoric predators running through its corridors look like a symptom rather than the cause.
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Who Carmen Flores Is
Carmen Flores is the player character of Athanasia. She is a researcher and explorer called in to investigate a mysterious South American facility where local disappearances and strange phenomena have been reported. The Steam community summary frames the broader mission as outwitting nature, delving deep into the SAIR facility, and escaping before creatures find the protagonist.
What is confirmed about Carmen:
- She is a researcher, not a soldier. The combat verb stack (stealth, hacking, jimmying, refueling, distraction crafting) is the loadout of someone sent to investigate, not to clear a base.
- She arrives at the facility alone. The lore pickups — audio logs from "those who lived, worked and died" at the SAIR facility — come from staff who were there before her.
- She is meant to escape. The mission framing is to outwit and escape, not to defeat the facility head-on.
Specific supporting characters, faction names, and backstory beats for Carmen have not been publicly published ahead of the October 19, 2026 Early Access launch.
The Story Premise
The story is set in 1999 at a South American facility where local disappearances and strange phenomena have been reported. Carmen arrives to investigate and finds the complex overrun by prehistoric predators and otherworldly threats. The Steam copy and Neon Doctrine page describe the facility as housing "a terrible truth and ancestral nightmares that have plagued us for longer than we have been human," tying the prehistoric predator threat to a deeper historical secret.
The mission in three beats:
- Investigate the disappearances at the SAIR facility.
- Outwit the creatures now running through the corridors — dinosaurs pulled from prehistory alongside "time traveling creatures from prehistory and the future."
- Escape the facility before the creatures find Carmen, while uncovering the buried truth behind what the lab was actually doing.
Why the Facility Matters
The lore the facility hides is the reason the Steam copy uses "buried truths" rather than "stop the outbreak." The official channels frame the prehistoric threat as a symptom of something older: "ancestral nightmares that have plagued us for longer than we have been human." The publisher landing page expands the creature roster to "time traveling creatures from prehistory and the future," which signals that the deeper the route goes, the wider the cast of antagonists becomes.
Three lore rules the route already follows:
- Audio logs from staff come from caches of vital equipment. Every cache you loot is a chance to push the story forward.
- Hidden pathways hold forgotten secrets. Side rooms that branch off main corridors usually guard more lore than they guard resources.
- The truth is buried, not surfaced. Solving the route is what unlocks the next layer of the story, not the other way around.
What Has Not Been Published
Specific faction names, supporting characters, ending beats, and named NPCs beyond Carmen have not been published ahead of the Early Access launch. Plan around the mission framing — investigate, outwit, escape — and treat the audio logs as the primary vehicle for filling in the rest as the EA build ships.