Subnautica Review

Single-player game, played on PC with an Xbox One controller. You start the game in an escape pod of a burning spaceship. Warning sirens are blaring, and as your pod is jettisoned from the ship, an explosion rocks your pod, jostling a panel loose and knocking you out. You wake up and climb out of your pod to find yourself floating in the middle of an alien ocean, your giant spaceship burning on the horizon. Isolated, and needing food and water, you dive into the shallows around your pod, and try to find enough supplies to last until help arrives. Took me about 30 hours to reach the end.

Graphics and Tone: The ocean is both beautiful and terrifying. On this alien planet, there is a huge amount of plant and aquatic life, which serves as something pretty to look at, a resource for you to collect and use to survive, or a nightmare trying to eat you and tear you to shreds. The world’s day and night cycle makes things genuinely dark at night, a problem which a flashlight only partial solves. But night also shows off the huge number of luminescent creatures that swim around you. Music is sparse, playing a few energetic tunes after certain events, but most of the time letting the bubbles and clicks of your surroundings take the front seat. This is a really good thing, as most predators have distinct growls and cries, alerting you that you need to get out of Dodge. Your health, hunger, thirst, and oxygen needs are front and center through all of this, reminding you throughout all your exploring that you still need to eat and drink to survive.

Mechanics: Breathing, eating, and drinking demand your attention at all points of the game. You have to go to the surface to breathe, you can’t explore too long without needing to eat or drink, and exploring just a little too far out could mean dying just meters from the surface. Fortunately, edible fish are everywhere, and oxygen supplies can be expanded or built deeper in the water to help you explore more. The raw materials you find while exploring, in addition to any tech from your spaceship wreck, helps you build and create more useful items and tools. Once you’ve gotten comfortable with your basic needs, these new tools help you conquer the rest of the game, to include overcoming the crushing pressure of the depths or countering the radiation from the crashed ship. Predators are almost invincible, thereby requiring use of your tools to incapacitate, distract, or just run away from them. Mostly you’re running away, since they can ruin your day and make you drop all your newly gathered materials where you die. Not recommended.

Reasons why I like this game: Survival is about as simple of a goal as you can get, but it’s never really that simple. You have your main goal front and center, get off the planet, but making sure you take care of yourself and actually live to do that pulls your attention in several directions at once. This mental strain is both enjoyable and stressful, as just gathering enough metal to build a ladder off the planet would get boring quickly. There is a lot to explore and discover in the ocean: pieces of your wrecked ship, environments with new resources, new technology, and sometimes audio logs and journal entries of fellow crew members. As you discover more and more tech you can create a number of new items, that will help overcome the increasing challenges of the ocean. Having multiple solutions to a problem means that even if I missed some piece of tech, I can still find a way around the problem. Only a few pieces of tech are truly necessary to progress, which is good, because the ocean is huge and finding everything can take a healthy bit of time.

Reasons why I don’t like it: Toward the end of the game, when areas become deeper and more dangerous, there’s sometimes much less to gather and discover. It’s hard to offer a solution to this, as it’s just a transition to a different kind of gameplay. However, that doesn’t make swimming, for what feels like extremely long periods of time over vast expanses of not much to do, feel any better. This really is only an issue toward the end of the game, when you have discovered the majority of what the ocean has to offer and are just trying to find those last few critical pieces of the puzzle to get off of the planet. It is somewhat challenging to complete this phase. It’s a test of your creativity to use the tools you’ve already made to conquer the ocean completely, but it doesn’t help that the final areas just feel empty compared to the reefs you start the game in. Somewhat janky visuals also hurt, like fish swimming through obstacles or the ocean floor not completely loading as you look out into the distance.

Things that made the game great for me: One of my favorite quotes from survival training was “The ocean makes cowards of us all.” Making games immersive is more art than science, and after experiencing moments of genuine terror and fear in this game, I can say that the nice people that made this game are definitely artists. The first time the night falls and the first time you look down into a bottomless chasm are experiences that tap into very real fears. In some games night is merely an inconvenience that requires a few lights, rendering it just another obstacle. Subnautica is able to make the experience of darkness something more. My theory is that, by constantly having your mind occupied with your basic survival needs, there’s not enough brain space left to consider darkness and the unknown as just obstacles. Instead, because you’re so focused on the rapidly ticking clock of your oxygen and how you will get water next, when a third input presents itself, your mind reacts to it at a basic level: dark is scary, I am scared. It’s this combination of elements that helps elevate the ocean from just a sandbox for you to play in or a series of obstacles to overcome to something much more real.  

Things that ruined the game for me: At the end of the game, I looked over the long list of items and tools I could make and realized that I hadn’t used most of them. For all the multiple solutions to the challenges in the ocean, my solution was normally to take the least resource intensive route, even if that meant taking more time. My base of operations was always very spartan, just enough rooms to store all my materials, because that’s all it needed to be. I think that’s more of a reflection on how my mind works and how I approach problems, and not a dig on how Subnautica is structured. It would have been cool if the game had made more of the tools you find obligatory instead of optional, but I’m convinced that the game would not have been nearly as enjoyable for people with higher creative potential, or even me, if that were the case.

Overall: Very immersive, gets its hooks in you, and has enough depth that it can give you that sinking feeling in your stomach when you’re in danger. Okay enough water puns. Subnautica is a great survival game, well worth your time. While the graphics weren’t always consistent, they were never bad enough to ruin the game for me.

That feeling: This isn’t so bad. Everything is bright, I’ve got a few supplies, I just need a catch a few more fish and…is it getting darker? Crap. It is getting darker. Oh man it’s dark now. WHAT WAS THAT SOUND. WHY IS IT SO DARK. WHERE IS THE EXIT. I NEED TO BREATH RIGHT NOW. PANIC. Okay it’s light out again. Glad that only happens once a day.