Subnautica

Subnautica is an atmospheric underwater exploratory game that takes place on an alien planet. It has been on my list for some time, but Epic Games recently gave it away for free so here I am, splashing around and wishing I’d tried it sooner. It has multiple game modes, including a survival mode that includes food and water indicators, a freedom mode (I appreciate the naming, by the way) which is basically a casual mode that dispenses with food/water, a hardcore/permadeath mode and a creative/sandbox mode.

For me, Subnautica succeeds in ways that No Man’s Sky fails. Since the flora, fauna, and biomes have been designed purposefully the entire ecosystem feels stronger and more real. The sparse storyline feels more integral to my PC specifically, as an individual, and thus is more interesting. Subnautica provides a sense of awe and suspense that wasn’t really present for me in No Man’s Sky, where I felt more detached from the procedurally-generated worlds and the things living in it. With NMS, and other games that rely heavily on procedural generation to populate the game world, I can never shake the feeling that a lot of what I’m experiencing doesn’t really “matter,” it is filler that exists to give me a world to traverse but it wasn’t designed specifically for players to navigate.

Subnautica is very much an explore, gather resources, craft, repeat type affair, interspersed with moments where something scares the absolute bejeezus out of you (or alternately, totally wows you), so if you don’t like those things this is probably not the Gaming Experience for you. In the beginning there’s a good bit of swimming back and forth, scrounging around for blueprint pieces and specific resources (seems like it took me forever to find a piece of gold ore when I needed it to set up my first base), but discovery is intuitive and feels natural. Resource management can be a bit annoying, and if you elect to play survival mode, as I have, water and food is a constant limitation. Nevertheless, I keep coming back to it, keep finding new interesting things (and perils), and can easily see how this can extend to a long-term play experience. The building system is interesting so far and the resource requirements feel just about right, which makes sense as Subnautica has presumably been fine-tuned throughout its Early Access process.

It sounds like the main storyline is approximately 25 hours. I just encountered the first big Plot Event and it was pretty damn epic, to say the least. My explorer went into a brief depressive state as a result but is now back to work, doing the best they can, as all my PCs are wont to. I look forward to being able to talk about this one a bit more as I further plumb the depths.