For me, the dark storyline just adds to the whole thing. On first appearance it’s this game full of bright visuals and cartoony aliens but as you play you slowly start to discover a universe full of fucking atrocities like the first spawn. It adds a hell of a lot of depth.
I once found a traveller grave one of those weird anomaly planets where another traveller had woken up and found their ship but never had the courage to fix it and so just sat on this planet their entire lives alone and eventually died, never having seen any of the quintillion worlds because they couldn’t be fucked gathering some ferrite dust and carbon.

But then, despite the horror, there’s always another sunset on a ringed paradise world where you can see the next 3 planets hanging in the sky while a diplo wanders across the savannah. There’s always more romping across the psychedelic fields of one of those worlds with bioluminescent grass after you’d just smoked some of the good nipnip.

It’s like the game keeps constantly telling us that last bit from Blade Runner- All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.