Last year my favourite gaming experience was the Talos Principle, and I like Subnautica
for similar reasons. I’m not going to pussyfoot about in this video. After this opening section
I will be openly talking about this game’s mechanics, world and story because the game
left a great impression on me and I’d like to talk about it.
A friend of mine recommended it to me and told me to go in blind, I did, and I enjoyed
it. Even the stuff about it that I don’t find appealing in other games. So if you trust
my opinion about other games I’ve talked about, I advise you play it before watching
this video. It’s a fun game that delivers a lot of enjoyment per hour of gameplay.
Although I’d say I’ve ‘finished’ it, there’s still something special and still
rather mysterious about it that I feel would be ruined upon repeat play-throughs. So I’m
going to move on from it with a bunch of fond memories, but there’s definitely a lot of
replayability if you’re that kind of person. Let’s begin!
Subnautica is a nice game, made by nice people. For a game about survival, and so full of
creatures that want to eat you, it would have been easy to make it a ruthless and harrowing
experience. And yet it remains a game primarily about adventure and exploration, and while
the threat of death is never far away, it’s forgiving enough not to detract from whatever
gameplay element you find yourself pursuing at the time.
When my ship crash-landed and I stepped out of my survival pod, I totally misread what
kind of game it was. It is not an infinite, procedurally generated world about collecting
lots of things. It is instead a compact, hand-crafted and very well thought-out experience. And
all the better for it. It relies on human curiosity to tell its story.
About wanting to know what’s around the next corner, and about pushing a little further
with each expedition you make. It never specifically tells you what to do or where to go. And yet
I seldom found myself lost, or without something to do and with very little guidance I made
my way through to the end of the game. THAT’S this game’s strength; its world
is worth exploring. And there’s little wasted space, other than what’s needed to give
a sense of grandeur and mystery to its biomes. And what an adventure it is! Simply being
set below the water level is a novelty unto itself. Off the top of my head I can’t think
of another game where I prefer the underwater gameplay. But it’s just as well Subnautica
takes to the sea like a fish to water, since everything about being stood on dry-land in
this game feels subpar. It looks rough. Your movement is floaty and its overall quality
slips into the same category as every other survival-based game on Steam. Subnautica takes
the idea of fully underwater levels and swims with it, resulting in some of the freshest,
most unique and most exciting videogame environments that I’ve ever set flipper in.
Being the seasoned gamer that I am, my first instinct was to collect everything in sight.
BAD idea. Storage space is limited, and a lot of what you pick up goes out of date.
It’s a jarring realisation, and a difficult habit to break. You begin by crafting lots
of extra storage containers, but it’s a losing battle- at some point you just have
to stop picking up stuff you don’t need to make space for the stuff you do.
There are 4 things you need to survive: health, food, water and oxygen. And it’s this stuff
you really get to grips with in the early stages of the game. Your playthrough will
be filled with tense moments as you run out of oxygen 30 metres before reaching the surface,
or when you find yourself low on supplies and questioning if you should cut an expedition
short or to push on, and with it risk of running out of food or water instead. It’s honestly
this stuff that makes the game’s exploration so memorable and meaningful, though I’d
have liked ways of becoming less reliant on water in the later stages of the game rather
than to clog my storage space up with bottles. But for the most part the game works excellently.
Your exploration is rewarded with new equipment to craft that suddenly makes your current
limitations and troubles disappear, allowing you to focus on whatever the next constraint
may be. All the while you’re pushing further from home, and deeper into the ocean’s depths
for supplies and answers. And it’s well worth the asking price.
No Man’s Sky may feature a trillion planets, but Subnautica’s one underwater volcano
is the one I’d rather explore. It’s a place filled with weird and wonderful things
to discover. A lot of the creatures come with unique gameplay quirks. I won’t give any
of this away- the beauty is in discovering this kind of stuff for yourself. In overcoming
obstacles, and in bending the environment to your will. It’s one that’s densely
packed with fauna and flora to be harvested. If I needed something, more often than not
it would be right there in front of me. It’s testament to the game’s design that everything’s
sat right there, yet isn’t a distraction when it isn’t needed.
Yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that resources are finite. Stuff I harvested seemed to remain
harvested. I began wondering what would happen if I used up all of a required resource. Would
it have made the game impossible? Are there measures in place to prevent that from happening?
And upon revisiting regions I’d find stuff I had dropped, hours before. This made me
deliberately hoarde stuff away rather than to clutter up the ocean. But it’s just as
well I ended the game when I did, or I swear Subnautica would have been filled with rotten
peepers. There’s vast depth to this alien world,
yet the enemy creatures were disappointingly shallow. Let me be clear: this is NOT a game
about fighting creatures. You are low down the food chain, and your best chance against
most enemies is to swim away as quickly as you can. It’s just that doing this proves
to be a rather OP strategy, because no matter how big or mean the fishies looked, the same
strategy of ignoring them and swimming straight to my destination worked 100% of the time.
They just couldn’t seem to catch up with me. Don’t get me wrong- I’m pleased the
game isn’t a harrowing and ruthless combat experience, but it was disappointing to discover
that each new enemy type behaved exactly like the last. It meant that the terror of encountering
a new monster in a dark cave immediately wore off, once I discovered it behaved exactly
like the others I had already encountered. I’d have liked different enemies to have
different solutions. Maybe ones that look menacing, but which swim off if you stand
your ground. Or ones that genuinely ARE dangerous, but have extremely poor eyesight or whatever.
The toughest enemy I faced was the one you’ll encounter about 2 minutes into your play-through.
At this point of the game, the suicidal red fish swim faster than you do, and you’ll
quickly die from their explosions if you haven’t figured out how to craft a health kit. Also,
there are these huge creatures lurking in deep waters to stop you from escaping the
playable area, but one of these some how snuck into a safe starter zone and killed me about
5 minutes into my first play-through. It messed me up cos afterwards, I purposefully avoided
that place for hours, even though I’ve never had a problem with them in that region since.
After that freak encounter, no monster proved a problem for me ever again.
I started with good intentions but had become a quick-save addict by the end. The idea of
losing my progress, or equipment, was just too much to bear and I found myself saving
before every dive, careful not to do it moments before being eaten by a shark since you only
have one save file per play-through to fall back on. You have been warned.
Subnautica’s campaign is tidily split up into stages, each with different gameplay
cycles, strengths and weaknesses. The first is about trying to stay alive until you discover
the scanner, at which point you quickly learn to scan everything you can to learn more about
the world and to research new items to craft. Your survival pod’s radio is an excellent
idea - from time to time it will ping messages from other survival pods, detailing their
whereabouts and how deep they are. This is an organic way of giving you points of interest
to discover whilst gradually upping the difficulty level. Though how you approach such tasks
-or indeed if you bother at all- are up to you.
The game has no map! This is both frustrating and brilliant, since it encourages you to
learn your surroundings, as well as to use the main crashed ship to get your bearings.
It also encourages the use of beacons, which can help highlights places you think may be
of value to you at a later date. I’ve said it already but this all works so organically
I’m in awe at the game design. The game’s about adventure and it gets it SO right. It
gets you fully invested in what you’re currently doing and surviving a productive expedition
is so, so rewarding. I won’t spoil things for the sake of it,
but there’s a lot to do and to explore in this first part of the game. I don’t care
much for stories but I enjoyed trying to piece together what happened to other survivors
of the crash, and the game drops JUST the right amount of hints and clues about what
else may be lurking on the planet for you to discover.
Vehicles are something of a turning point. Their infinite supply of oxygen suddenly removes
the biggest barrier in your exploration. Though they do come with their own limitations. But
they pave the way to the next bit of the game- and the real highlight for me. And that’s
when you begin discovering the deep caves. Beneath the map- spoiler alert- is a vast
labyrinth of caves and tunnels, leading deeper and deeper. My goodness. It’s been some
time since I last played a game that had this much atmosphere. If you’ve ever looked at
the night sky and wondered what it would be like to explore an alien world, or if you’ve
ever ventured into a cave in real life and felt that sense of wonder and terror at how
small it makes you feel… please, play this game.
When you’re down there, it’s terrifying. And when you’re up at the surface between
expeditions, your mind is fixated on those caves. About what could be lurking around
the next corner, and about what you’ll need to bring on your next outing. Subnautica’s
cave system is a thing of wonder. A high-point in gaming. And it’s simple enough to remember
the way, but complex enough that you never feel quite comfortable with it. This is one
of the reasons I’m afraid to replay this game. For if I get too comfortable with that
network, if I map out every nook and cranny, I fear the game could lose the very magic
that makes it so special to me right now. I try to be objective in these videos, but
the feeling of exploring those caves taps into some of my fondest childhood memories.
And you can’t put a price on making new memories like those.
As for the storyline(s), I feel it does a good job of covering everything you’d want
from an alien world, and you’re free to invest as much or as little time learning
about them as you like so that’s all cool. It’s only at the very end that it falls
a little short, when the mystery about the story and world subsides and it becomes more
about gathering resources. And while it would take no more than 5 minutes to get to anywhere
I needed to go, that could be a LONG and frustrating 5 minutes, especially if it meant backtracking
to places I had been just 10 minutes prior. The game’s got its own menu system but I
found myself increasingly reliant on the game’s online wiki to know which resources were needed
and where they could be found, because otherwise I’d have been punished for not paying attention
to where the stuff in my inventory had been gathered from.
So the game’s about discovery, adventure and about evading scary looking monsters.
But if you REALLY want to fight creatures, you can. It was a portion of the game I barely
touched, but you can build vehicles, upgrade them and kit them out with defensive and offensive
measures. I just didn’t see the point in doing this for combat reasons, what with my
next-gen ‘swim past them’ strat rendering all of that redundant. I used vehicles as
a way of travelling from A to B, and to mine rare materials, and that was about it.
That being said, I’ve read thrilling accounts of players facing up against the game’s
toughest enemies in a giant submarine, detailing the encounter and all the cool stuff that
happened as it tore chunks out of their hull and as they battled with the alarms and fires
breaking out around the ship. They made it sound awesome, but I don’t think the experience
was compatible with my style of play-through. Because of my focus on the main ‘campaign’,
the gigantic Cyclops submarine proved to be a colossal waste of time. It’s effectively
a travelling base that’s so big it gets caught on every corner of every cave. It’s
got lots of cool features and upgrades, which again I’m sure will appeal to a particular
type of gamer… but not to me. I just overclocked the engine, set fire to it, put it out again
then got it stuck in a cave entrance. I guess I was expecting it to be like a bigger, deeper
version of the seamoth. I just wish I had known how irrelevant to my playstyle it would
have been before I spent several hours constructing it.
You can also build bases wherever you please. I made one as a means to an end, being little
more than a refilling station. But again, that’s on me and if you like the idea of
constructing a safe space amidst the acid caves then you’ll probably get a lot of
fun from this feature.
Special mention to the game’s music. You begin to associate certain tracks with certain
actions, and after enough repetition I grew increasingly fond of the dramatic low beat
as I descended into the depths, or that tuneful bell tune in the shallows as I knew already
that I was creating memories that I’d look back at fondly at some unknown point in the
future.
Subnautica has soul. (And sole? :D). These days, in an ever more crowded games market,
it’s refreshing to find one that attempts something new. And to be able to dive into
Subnautica’s underwater world -and to discover so much worth exploring down there- is a refreshing
change. There are few games to compare it to, so there’s less to criticise. And all
this lets me appreciate the journey all the more.