Subnautica

Short Version

Play this game! But I won’t judge you if you don’t finish it.

Long Version

Subnautica is a first-person, sci-fi, shipwreck survival game published by Unknown Worlds Entertainment for Windows and Mac OS in January 2018, and XBOX One and PS4 in December 2018. I played it on PS4. This review will have some light spoilers. I won’t touch on the story much, but I will discuss gameplay so if you want to go in not knowing anything about it, stop right here.

I became fully addicted to this game right away. It is fantastic. You are the only survivor of the long-range capital ship “Aurora” when it crash lands on unexplored ocean planet 4546B. Your objective: find a way to survive. I love the idea of exploring the ocean, especially an alien ocean. I think the sea is more terrifying than space. Space is scary, don’t get me wrong but in the blackness of space you still have stars, and the relative certainty it’s uninhabited. Deep in the water, there’s nothing but millions of tons of pressure and the absolute certainty you are not alone. Every time I was exploring the sea floor of planet 4546B and the bottom dropped off into nothingness it chilled me to my core.

This game does a good job of guiding you through the learning process but not holding your hand. I died of thirst four or five times before figuring it out. You regularly get cool new things to craft and there’s so much to explore and do, I wanted to spend all day down there, and I did, frequently. Sometimes I would hear unknown creatures roar off in the distance and I would freeze. Then later, after I had met the thing that roared, I would run. Swim. Whatever.

There are a lot of well thought out sequences. Exploring the Aurora is thrilling. Each new depth is unique and challenging. The writing is sharp and funny. The voice talent is superb. Every vehicle has its own personality, and your constant companion, the voice of your PDA, recalls the genius of Portal 2. But I think the highlight for me was building the submersible, The Cyclops. You learn pretty early on that you’re going to be able to build a submersible, and I was already excited, but when I saw it actually take shape I was positively giddy. Looking at it, sitting in the water, unearthed some long buried childhood fantasy. This is mine? I get to drive this? My own submersible? I couldn’t believe it. I went to sleep thinking about how I was going to stock it with extra power cells, water, and salted Peeper and go exploring!

Building the Cyclops and descending to the deepest depths of Subnautica is where the game crests, because once the exploration ends and you’ve seen most of what there is to see, your 9-to-5 as an undersea drill operator truly begins. There is a lot of resource grinding in this game. A lot. I would need several sheets of notebook paper to list all the times I went to craft something and I was 1 titanium short. Then you gotta go back to the scanner, set it to titanium, go out, get it, bring it back. At first it’s cool, you’re excited about making a new thing, but eventually, it sucks. Like when you build the PRAWN suit and you finally have access to large mineral deposits, you rejoice, look at all these resources! Two days later when you’re sitting on the bottom drilling a block of lithium it dawns on you – I’m at work.

I think this game could have benefitted from a fast travel function, running 4000 km trips to and from one location to another is a drag, and heaven help you if you forget something. I get that sometimes you discover new areas on these runs, but for the most part your routes are pretty well traveled. Also an auto-save. The most frightening thing lurking beneath the waves may be the lack of an auto-save.

Getting to the end of this game was a comedy of errors, some my fault some not. The first time I saw a missing section of sea floor, I thought it was a cool, possibly man made cave and made a note to come back and explore it later. Then it started to happen more and more frequently. Walls and floor not rendering quickly enough, having to wait for them to fill in because they’re not just invisible, they’re not there. You can easily drive inside of a mountain, which is disorienting, or, if you happen to be on foot, fall into the planet, which is fatal. Into the code? Into the matrix? Helpfully, this game includes a depth meter so I can tell you that I fell 8,192 km into nothingness before I hit some kind of barrier and continued to fall, but much more slowly. Maybe I hit the mantle, I don’t know. I turned the game off and took a break for the day. Every time I loaded a save game, doors that I had previously unlocked were locked again. Which meant I had to make MORE keys. I loaded up my Seamoth, Seamoth IV, with rare ingredients for one of the final builds only to have it carried off by my least favorite animal as I impotently fired shot after shot with my stasis rifle and screamed at my television. The Cyclops hit a wall and got stuck.

There’s a recurring theme in Subnautica. You discover a new area, or creature and you’re blown away by how cool or terrifying it is, but by the 15th time you encounter it, you’d just like it to fuck right off. In many ways, I imagine this game accurately recreates the experience of being marooned on a strange alien world. At first you’re excited and scared – there are a lot of things out there trying to kill you – but you’ve got resources and know-how and you hop to it with enthusiasm. But the days, they wear on. Progress is hard earned and time consuming, and by the time you claw your fish-eaten body across the finish line, you’re just glad it’s over.

In the end, I got there, and I’m glad I did. It’s a satisfying end, and, all complaining aside, I will ABSOLUTELY play the sequel, Below Zero. I left some unfinished business which I normally wouldn’t do, but the invisible walls were closing in, I had to get out. One interesting feature of this game is the time capsule. Throughout the game you find time capsules left behind by other players with notes and supplies inside. Thank you TC-1005092885, TC-1131852121, TC1888254593, TC-296168882, TC-892519525, KB1056886088 for your kind words and photos! They’re always fun to find, and I prepared mine with care. I took my time writing the note, trying to capture the wonder and awe I felt standing on top of this magical world. The gratitude and appreciation I had for the creators of this complicated, imperfect place. Inside it I lovingly placed an advanced wiring kit. Because they’re a pain in the fucking ass.

Advice to the Player

Write down the recipes – scrolling through the PDA menu is arduous.

Keep the Seamoth hull at 100% at all times – trust me on this one

Some of the little cargo containers are open in back – I lost a lot of time because the first one I came across was closed so I assumed they all were. My bad!

Drive the Cyclops with the cameras – way easier once you get the hang of it.