There is a brightness setting in the ingame settings menu. Does that not help?
If not, I will make a note.

I've never heard any good things about HDR on PC gaming. Until recently (2023), nearly every game using HDR on a Windows machine had massive problems. I've read that things got better with recent Windows updates, but a lot of games still have problems with extreme darkness. Monitor manufactures also tend to implement very cheap and slow HDR into their devices, so they can slap this HDR label on it. If your monitor was under ~$500 e.g., it probably has very poor HDR support.

SoS uses OpenGL as graphic interface. Microsoft only officially supports their DirectX interface for HDR. Other graphic interfaces (like OpenGL) have to handle this by themselves.
This handling is tricky and error prone, because OpenGL is not only for Windows.

The dev can not change the Graphic interface to DirectX that easily. This would break compatibility to Linux / Mac devices and introduce all sorts of new problems.

TL;DR HDR for PC gaming isn't worth it... too much trouble xD

Originally posted by Vanir:

There is a brightness setting in the ingame settings menu. Does that not help?
If not, I will make a note.

It helps a bit with the issue, but overall things become very grey/washed out and still on the dark end. (Monitor being used "AW3225QF")

ArgOn seems to know much more than I do on the subject. A lot of indie titles seems to suffer quite a bit with these monitors.
Without knowing much on the subject myself, it does seem to primarily be with non DirectX games. The monitors themselves can be amazing when they do work with certain titles, but can really become a drag on all the amazing indie games out there.
(Not blaming the devs in anyway, I can't being to know how much work it might potentially be to add support for these things.)

Forgot one thing: which version are you on? It is unlikely that it got fixed by accident, but you never know.

Originally posted by Vanir:

Forgot one thing: which version are you on? It is unlikely that it got fixed by accident, but you never know.

Version 0.66.49
Main release/default branch.

Originally posted by Xenon Dragon:

Originally posted by Vanir:

Forgot one thing: which version are you on? It is unlikely that it got fixed by accident, but you never know.

Version 0.66.49
Main release/default branch.

If a solution presents itself, I will use it. For now, I have none, and it's up to other people to either fix it seamlessly in windows / drivers, or give me access to fiddle with it programmatically.