During its maiden voyage, the interstellar vessel Aurora performs a slingshot maneuver around Planet 4546B, an uninhabited sea planet around which there is a plan to build a new phase gate. The ship, however, never makes it back, being struck by an energy pulse when near the planet and crashing into its sea. You play as Ryley Robinson, a technician who escapes the Aurora on a lifepod and awakens in the shallows of 4546B, and who now sets out to find other survivors and a means to escape the planet.
Subnautica is played entirely in first person and follows a very typical survival game loop: Ryley has a hunger and thirst bar, needs which must constantly be managed as he scours the planet for recipes and resources to use in crafting. While, at first, you won't be able to get too far, once you are able to construct more elaborate means of traveling the ocean, you'll make expeditions further and further from the shallows and find even rarer materials. While the idea of "underwater levels" might make some people flinch, Subnautica is far from the stereotype, featuring comfortable and precise controls.
In fact, the star of the game is the underwater exploration: Planet 4546B is beautifully realized, with multiple biomes where you can find all manners of interesting fauna and flora. The game fosters a variety of feelings towards the ocean and the life: the familiarity of the shallows and its surroundings, the place you'll settle on and come to call home, opposed to the dangers of the depths, where huge creatures lurk and where you won't want to stay for long, lest one of them decides to have you for dinner. It helps that, for most of your playtime, you'll rely on a small submarine called the Seamoth, a vehicle that puts you up close with the denizens of this ocean and makes you feel incredibly tiny and vulnerable.
Ryley, however, isn't going through all of this just to stay alive: his goal is to find a means to escape the planet, and to do that, he first has to untangle its mysteries. What lies deep into the planet's surface? Why was the Aurora destroyed, and what happened to it and the rest of the crew? Who are these people who were not Aurora crew, but whose audio logs and notes you find scattered about? The game's opening act pulls you in the direction of lifepods and other landmarks, gradually building up the gameplay systems and, through a building tension, teasing you to discover the truth behind 4546B and the fall of the Aurora. During those moments, it felt like a near perfect experience.
...and then it drops the ball, pulling the brakes on its story and leaving the player to figure out where to go at random. This is a deliberate design decision inspired by games such as Don't Starve, which, it's said, let the player learn by trial and error so that they appreciate their knowledge more due to the struggle to get there, and, well, maybe some survival fans enjoyed that approach. More power to them -- I did not. The more I progressed in Subnautica, the more I felt like it was making a legitimate effort to annoy me.
Mandatory crafting recipes become scarce and are pushed to incredibly far-away and hidden places, where they'd never be stumbled upon randomly. Directions that were given by waypoints before became blink-and-you'll-miss-it allusions to relative locations. Missed an audio log, or forgot what the PDA said? Well, tough luck. After even that dries out, the game then devolves into googling guides for cardinal directions of places there is no in-game information about, and finally to having to watch video guides step by step to find some random hole in the ocean floor where you can find something new.
The last section of the game is obscene in this regard, as it forces you to go incredibly deep into the ocean through very narrow openings in caves, while piloting a large, clunky submarine that all but eliminates that feeling of intimacy towards the ocean -- it alone caused me to abandon the game for months. Glitches also become commonplace, and saving before setting off in any direction is mandatory so to not get softlocked or die a random death. If you did find every data log until that point, the game does get tied up in a nice, satisfying little bow, but I fear most people will either skip parts of the game and get confused, or won't be bothered to finish it.
Subnautica was this close to becoming one of my favorite games, but it disappointed me a fair bit, and proved some 10 hours longer than it had to be. Nevertheless, the package it offers is still quite unique and compelling: so few games exist about ocean exploration, and even fewer that were made with so much care or that carry so much depth. I didn't even touch on this, but the base-building and customization the game allows are on another level. Fans of survival games, as well as those who enjoy getting creative with construction, owe it to themselves to at least give it a try.
Subnautica is played entirely in first person and follows a very typical survival game loop: Ryley has a hunger and thirst bar, needs which must constantly be managed as he scours the planet for recipes and resources to use in crafting. While, at first, you won't be able to get too far, once you are able to construct more elaborate means of traveling the ocean, you'll make expeditions further and further from the shallows and find even rarer materials. While the idea of "underwater levels" might make some people flinch, Subnautica is far from the stereotype, featuring comfortable and precise controls.
In fact, the star of the game is the underwater exploration: Planet 4546B is beautifully realized, with multiple biomes where you can find all manners of interesting fauna and flora. The game fosters a variety of feelings towards the ocean and the life: the familiarity of the shallows and its surroundings, the place you'll settle on and come to call home, opposed to the dangers of the depths, where huge creatures lurk and where you won't want to stay for long, lest one of them decides to have you for dinner. It helps that, for most of your playtime, you'll rely on a small submarine called the Seamoth, a vehicle that puts you up close with the denizens of this ocean and makes you feel incredibly tiny and vulnerable.
Ryley, however, isn't going through all of this just to stay alive: his goal is to find a means to escape the planet, and to do that, he first has to untangle its mysteries. What lies deep into the planet's surface? Why was the Aurora destroyed, and what happened to it and the rest of the crew? Who are these people who were not Aurora crew, but whose audio logs and notes you find scattered about? The game's opening act pulls you in the direction of lifepods and other landmarks, gradually building up the gameplay systems and, through a building tension, teasing you to discover the truth behind 4546B and the fall of the Aurora. During those moments, it felt like a near perfect experience.
...and then it drops the ball, pulling the brakes on its story and leaving the player to figure out where to go at random. This is a deliberate design decision inspired by games such as Don't Starve, which, it's said, let the player learn by trial and error so that they appreciate their knowledge more due to the struggle to get there, and, well, maybe some survival fans enjoyed that approach. More power to them -- I did not. The more I progressed in Subnautica, the more I felt like it was making a legitimate effort to annoy me.
Mandatory crafting recipes become scarce and are pushed to incredibly far-away and hidden places, where they'd never be stumbled upon randomly. Directions that were given by waypoints before became blink-and-you'll-miss-it allusions to relative locations. Missed an audio log, or forgot what the PDA said? Well, tough luck. After even that dries out, the game then devolves into googling guides for cardinal directions of places there is no in-game information about, and finally to having to watch video guides step by step to find some random hole in the ocean floor where you can find something new.
The last section of the game is obscene in this regard, as it forces you to go incredibly deep into the ocean through very narrow openings in caves, while piloting a large, clunky submarine that all but eliminates that feeling of intimacy towards the ocean -- it alone caused me to abandon the game for months. Glitches also become commonplace, and saving before setting off in any direction is mandatory so to not get softlocked or die a random death. If you did find every data log until that point, the game does get tied up in a nice, satisfying little bow, but I fear most people will either skip parts of the game and get confused, or won't be bothered to finish it.
Subnautica was this close to becoming one of my favorite games, but it disappointed me a fair bit, and proved some 10 hours longer than it had to be. Nevertheless, the package it offers is still quite unique and compelling: so few games exist about ocean exploration, and even fewer that were made with so much care or that carry so much depth. I didn't even touch on this, but the base-building and customization the game allows are on another level. Fans of survival games, as well as those who enjoy getting creative with construction, owe it to themselves to at least give it a try.