I’ve only ever played a few survival games before, I’m not the type of player whose main motivation lies in exploration, I’m not a fan of the horror genre, and one of my biggest fears is that of suffocation. Therefore, an open-world survival game set in the depths of an alien ocean didn’t really seem like my cup of tea.
Forty hours later, I’m really glad I eventually decided to give it a go, as it’s been an experience unlike any other.
Congratulations, survivor: you have exceeded your weekly exercise quotient by 500%.
Data indicates that swimming was your favorite activity.
Subnautica is a single-player game where you play as the lone survivor of the crash landing of the spaceship Aurora. As far as the eye can see, ocean surrounds you and your lifepod. When you dive underwater, however, you find rich and disctint bioms teeming with life. As you soon find out, you’re not the first one to crash on the planet, and blueprints and designs litter the seafloor. This creates a unique, geograhical progression and crafting system where more advanced gear is not only a reward of exploration, but also a prerequisite for diving deeper for something even better.
You start by gathering food and resources, purifying water, and learning how to avoid fish who chase you down to explode on you, take a bite out of you when you try to gather scrap metal, or fart toxic gas if you swim too close. As you explore and learn more about the planet, they soon turn into minor annoyances, especially in comparison to what lurks in the deep.
And in order to find your way off the planet, the deep is where you eventually must go.
Detecting multiple leviathan class lifeforms in the region. Are you sure this is worth it?
Minor spoiler: it’s not as easy to die in this game as you’d think. (The fact that I managed to pull it off during the first five minutes of gameplay is my personal feat, definitely not how it’s supposed to be played.)
Despite your PDA’s persistent warnings you about your hunger, thirst or oxygen levels, it’s not particularly complicated to balance and pay attention to these (there is even a difficulty which removes food and water management entirely). Early on you might mistake a crabsnake for a harmless slug or forget to return to the surface for oxygen in time, but as you progress and learn, these become minor issues.
It is easy, however, to be terrified. The sense of dread is derived from the helpless feeling of floating under hundreds of tonnes of water on an alien planet when an ancient sea monster lurches towards you, and there is nothing you can do to stop it. Subnautica is clever enough to realise that when you die too many times to an enemy, they stop being terrifying and become a source of frustration instead. Therefore, it is not impossible to escape even the most dangerous and close encounters. The sense that you got out by the skin of your teeth remains. It lingers, and the distant roars and glimpses constantly remind you of them.
It’s also easy to feel alone. Your sole companion is your PDA (that is, of course, until you name your submarine or get a pet fish). At times, the weight of that comes crashing down on you, and it’s more suffocating than being surrounded by so many cubic meters of water.
It’s also worth noting that this is deliberately designed to be a primarily non-violent game experience, as its creators described it as “one vote towards a world with less guns”. You have a knife and a couple of other means of confrontation, but seeking creative, evasive solutions is much more encouraged.
You’re the best captain ever, and I’m not even squidding.
Beating the game can take any time between twenty and two-hundred hours, depending on playstyle and personal preferences. Although the story could be summed up in five short sentences, and you could even decide to completely ignore it, it’s definitely worth experiencing. While there is little to no tutorial or guidance, whenever aimless floating around would become boring, a radio broadcast or a new discovery smoothly steers you towards something exciting to discover. The game is a perfect mix of tense and relaxing, so it is just important to take your sweet time building yourself a cozy base in a pretty purple cave where you can hang cat posters and set up your coffee machine as it is to hunt for blueprints and secrets.
Summary:
- Score: 10/10
- Liked: mesmerising atmosphere, amazing sound design, crafting system
- Disliked: being scared by ghost leviathans, existential dread, lack of an option for a map
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