Subnautica

 

Subnautica is a game I did not know too much about, other than its yet another game in the trend of the survival crafting genre. I don't hate that genre, but usually I avoid most of them as they tend to be early access, and they are neverending without a plot or a way to complete it. Though I quickly checked and it turns out you can in fact beat Subnautica, and its said to be about 20-30 hours long. That, plus the whole deep sea exploration thing is actually really cool and appealing to me, I figured I'll give it a shot.

Something which I'm not a huge fan of with games in this genre, is often there will be no storyline, no way to complete the game. Many of the games just go on forever with no clear beginning, middle, end. But Subnautica has a plot, and you can finish it and reach the End credits, which was a main factor in my interest in the game and eventually buying it. 

The game has a few modes, Survival (which is the default mode), Hardcore (permadeath), and Sandbox (no death, no damage). Of course I just went with the standard survival mode. The games premise is pretty simple, your giant galatic ship crash lands on an alien planet, its full of life pods from the crew which get scattered around the planet, and you wake up on one of these small lifepods. Thats how the game starts. The first impression was a lot of intruige, the game does a good job with just letting the player roam and figure things out by themselves. So you just do a lot of diving around in the water by your lifepod, scrounging for resources to continually craft more and more advanced stuff to help you traverse this alien planet.

The graphics are immediately striking. The first obvious sight is the massive crashed ship infront of your lifepod, the Aurora. Still on fire, this thing is so big that it acts as a nice landmark wherever you are in the game, you can come up to the surface and see this ship in the distance. Thats probably one of the main reasons the Devs put it like that, so you don't just feel like you're out into the aimless open ocean. It's a clever idea to make an important landmark. Infact, the very first thing I did was to jump off my lifepod and swim towards this giant ship, just to see what would happen. Turns out you just die because, at least at the start of the game, its too radiated and you can't get close. Still was interesting. Besides some threats here and there, the game overall has a very nice atmosphere, calming often, almost comfy. Its a very colorful game, with lots of diverse and strange things to find underwater. There are tons of fish swimming around all over the place, of course you can use them for food and even water, there's always something interesting to look at. Since you're on an alien planet, everything is just a bit strange. There are different biomes, which become obvious as you start to travel around. The starting location is this shallow area, very close to the main ship Aurora's crash site. But as you go in other directions, you come across all sorts of other strange alien biomes. Giant mushroom tree area, These areas with big blue orbs, These giant almost floating rock areas, its kind of hard to describe because the game takes place on an alien planet and everything is so forign looking, but it definitely fills you with a sense of wonder, mystery, and at times trepidation, like a lingering sense of fear. Of course as you go deeper and deeper, you start to come across even more strange and even disturbing sights and sounds.

Its kinda unfortunate the game has no co-op functionality, it seems like a no brainer for this kind of game, and could really enhance the experience doing everything with a friend. But maybe they wanted to push that isolated vibe more?

The games mechanics are quite simple, and almost elegant. You dive around, with an oxygen meter, at first you only get like 30 seconds of breath, but you can upgrade you tank by collecting various materials and bringing them back to your lifepods Fabricator. The crafting is well done and simple, the Fabricator interface is intuitive and easy to understand, you just need to bring the ingridents to the station and it shows you the recipes where you can fabricate items. Your lifepod has some essential objects - the radio to get periodic radio messages, the Fabricator which is the primary and only way to craft items in the game, and it even has a healthkit spawner, every day it makes a free healthkit for you. So a lot of what you are doing at first is diving around your lifepod, picking up any materials that seem useful, going back to the Fabricator to craft new items so you can dive deeper, and progress further and further from your lifepod.

But at first the most obvious question in my mind, OK? What do I do? The game isn't linear or have a hand-holding storyline. It mostly expects the player to use their own volition to go about the game world and figure out how you must progress. Thankfully its not completely aimless, you have PDA which logs almost everything you do. You can craft a Scanning device, which is one of the most important items in the game. You can scan almost everything you come across, and it adds an entry into your PDA, often giving you helpful tips and advice.

The first thing on the PDA is Basic survival tips, then you get some random radio messages, usually a distress message from an old Lifepod that sank and it gives you the coordinates, which is indicated on a Beacons page on your PDA, this page looked to be the most important pieces of story progression, as they get their own dedicated objective markers. So for much of the game I would just wait around for these radio messages, and then go to them.

There are your standard survival mehcanics. Food and water. Food is easy enough to come by, you can literally swim up to almost any fish and just grab it and put it away in your inventory to later cook at the Fabricator. For water the most accessible source is grabbing a bunch of Bladderfish and going to the Fabricator to turn them into Filtered water. Thats what I did for the whole game pretty much. The food and water is done pretty well, its fine to have to keep up with it, although it does drain pretty fast and at times can feel like busywork. Still its good to be a part of the game, as it helps with immersion.

You craft all sorts of tools, Lasercutter for opening certain doors at certain wrecks, usually to help you find more blueprints and stuff to craft, Flashlight which is really important, there is a Repulsion cannon, Statis gun which I never really used much, Repair tool which can easily be used to repair your vehicles, and so on. Theres a nice variety of stuff you can play with and interact with, which keeps the crafting and blueprint unlocking exciting and fresh.

Usually they take you to a new biome and you go to the Lifepod, find a PDA of their last moments, and you usually unlock some new Blueprint or thing you can craft. Still, I was starting to get a sense that I don't know if I'm meaningfully progressing the story, sometimes there would be hours of real life time where I'm roaming around not doing much, getting no radio calls, trying to figure out whats next.

So the fact that the game doesn't really hold the players hand and leaves you to figure things out is both a good thing and a bad thing, because at times you can start to feel stressed out that you've maybe missed some tiny nook and cranny which has the utmost of important pieces of story progress in them. In fact, one or two times this pretty much happened, and I sadly had to look up online what I missed. There are crucial upgrades, story spots, and materials you can easily go right past, they are not always obvious or easy to spot, youre just kinda expected to stumble onto them by pure chance almost. You could be playing for a dozen hours and not come across it.

Another issue that became annoying without an obvious fix at first, was storage. For the first handful of hours in the game, I was using the Lifepod. The lifepod has one storage compartment, but thats it. It wont let you build anything inside of the lifepod. The only way I could find to get more storage was to craft these little floating containers and put them outside the Lifepod. So I'd have a dozen of these annoying floating containers I'd have to coonstantly go back and forth just to store my items. It wasn't clear how exactly I'm supposed to get more storage. Sadly, after a bunch of hours, I had to just look it up. So to get more storage you have to use this tool called Habitat Builder, which is how you craft your own base, and I had to build some kind of base, I used the base item "Multipurpose Room" which is like this big circular building, I put it nearby the Lifepod, and still It would not let me enter it. I was like, what the hell? How do I enter it? I looked around in game but it also wasn't obvious. Sadly had to look this up as well, turns out you need to attach a Hatch to it. Okay, like that makes sense, but I feel like the game could of had an initial popup text message or something when youre at the building like "CANNOT ENTER WITHOUT A HATCH".

Anyway with that all done, now inside of this Multipurpose Room I could start to build Lockers. Finally I have some damn storage. This was like 10 hours into the game, it was quite annoying having no storage all that time. Maybe its just a skill issue on my part, sure theres some of that, but also the game could of made it more obvious how I'm expected to get storage. Now I have my own base, full of lockers, as well now inside of this base you can build even more powerful tools, such as a sort of Advanced Workbench to craft even stronger tools and equipment, as well as even all sorts of stuff like decorations, a Water Filtration object which generates bottles of water for you (although really slowly), you can build all sorts of stuff, things which I never ended up needing but worth noting: Nuclear reactor, All sorts of plant farms, Alien Containment Aquarium, Scanner Room, Bioreactor, and so on. Lots of things to interact with and play with, if building your own base is the kind of thing you love to do. Me? Not too much, I'm not into just building a base for the sake of being creative or whatever, I'm just wanting to progress through the game. So all I really needed was mainly storage space, and the Advanced Workstation, as they are pretty much mandatory to keep progressing.

Of course this review is gonna have a bunch of spoilers so keep that in mind.
At some point soon into the game, the giant ship explodes causing radiation nearby, but you get a way to make a radiation suit.
So I make the suit, and make my way to the ship. By the way, earlier when I said the game has a sense of fear about it, yeah theres giant sea monsters called Leviathans, and one of them lurks near the ship, which is pretty cool and intense to see. Though I will make a minor gripe that the games artstyle is pretty cartoony, almost too cartoony, its still nice to look at, but I feel like especially the Leviathans could of been way more terrifying with a different artstyle. I also think the Leviathans you encounter could have been even bigger, sure they're massive, but still doesn't feel like a real towering threat. Even when you do come across them they arent too threatening, you can easily get away, and they dont charge at you all too much. Even if you do die, all that happens is you drop a few pieces of equipment and respawn at your Lifepod. Infact, you can even manually save your game, and as soon as you die or get in a bad situation, you can simply quit to main menu and press Continue and it loads your save from before something bad happened. I didn't want to rely on this too much, its kinda cheap, but I did do it a few times, its a standard feature many games have what can I say? If the devs didnt want you to be able to do this, they should of disabled Manual saving, something other intense games have done.

Actually another gripe is that the game overall isn't very threatening. None of the sea creatures really bother you. You do come across some hostile creatures at points, namely the Warpers which are these strange Alien creatures that seem to hunt you down and send ominious radio messages at you, but really they don't do much even if youre in their vacinity. The worst they will do is sometimes warp you outside of your vehicle and you just swim back and get back in. The othe creatures dont do that much damage to you or hit you all that often, you can get hit with these electronic pulses which temporarily turn off the power on your vehicle, but its a nusaince more than a real threat. Funny enough the most threatening creature I found was inside of caves, this little homing missle fish that explodes at you, I actually died once to these guys. I find them more threatening than Leviathans and hostile aliens, funny enough. Really theres not that much actual danger in the game from at least the creatures, the real danger most of the time just is managing your oxygen and not drowning.

However if you go too far off the 'regular map' you start to enter The Void, also known as the "ecological dead zone". This is basically just infinite darkness, you can go down forever, its just the end of the map but it is a clever way to incorporate it into the gameworld, by making it seem like youre just gone into the deep , deep sea. There is nothing down here except often the game spawns Leviathans which attack you, probably because the game doesn't really want you to be down here. A very spooky feeling to be gone off into this void, and the Aurora ship seems to be at the edge of the map because if you dive down past it, you quickly come to a big slope downwards where the map ends and you go into the void.

Anyway exploring the ship was cool, but also had some frustration and confusion. For starters, theres two entrances, one of them is pretty easy to miss but is crucial. And of course I missed it, and wondered "I feel like I'm missing something" hours later, and looked it up, sadly. Even weirder is the entrance is blocked off with a bunch of random objects and boxes, so naturally you think its an inaccessible area. Really its not, its a crucial point of progression, and you need to make this Propulsion Gun, almost like Half Life's gravity gun, and you need to pickup the boxes with it to gain entry. Okay, I don't think I would of ever figured that out. Just obscure stuff needed to get through the game is one of the major complaints I have. Inside the ship you find all sorts of PDA's and Blueprints and codes, I came across this vehicle bay where you find Blueprints to make this mech suit called a Prawn. But I only found 2 out of 3 blueprints and could not find the last one anywhere. Hours later when I was stuck not being able to progress again, I thought "You know, I bet I need this Prawn suit to progress further" and I didnt feel like wandering around aimlessly for a dozen hours doing nothing, so sadly I had to look that up again. Blueprints of important crafts you can unlock are scattered about the sea almost randomly, but thanfkully theres more than you need, you just need to come across them. Usually 2 or 3 pieces to unlock the craft. I could not come across this last Prawn piece myself though. I looked up rough biomes where to find them, finally found it and crafted myself the Prawn Suit.

So you do get access to all sorts of different tech and vehicles. You start off being able to craft a SeaGlider, which is like a handheld little device which makes you swim way faster, something I kept in my inventory the whole game. Then you can unlock a SeaMoth, which is like the fastest vehicle in the game, this little jet, with the downside that it has by default a maximum Crush Depth of 200 meters, after this it will get destroyed. Then I crafted the mech suit, Prawn, this by default has a maximum depth of 900 meters which is much more, although its way slower and pretty clunky to move around in. At least it has a jetpack so you can jump around through the ocean. Lastly, at one point I found blueprints for a Cyclops and crafted it, this is a giant submarine, weirdly by default only has a maximum depth of 500, far less than the mech suit Prawn. So actually for the entire game I never really found a use for the Cyclops submarine, its cool you get access to a huge sub, you can walk around in it, it has all sorts of gadgets and switches to press, you can upgrade it, but the thing is so massive it barely fits anywhere as the ocean has all sorts of little cracks and crevices you need to fit through, the thing is really slow, and it has less depth than the Prawn, so sadly I just didnt find it very useful.

Those are the main vehicles, I mostly just used the Seamoth for speed, and the Prawn for when I needed to go really deep.
I was able to find blueprints to continuously upgrade my Oxygen tank, from just 30 seconds, to then 70, then eventually all the way up to 220 oxygen which really helped a lot. At one point all of a sudden a message box pops on the top right of the screen saying you'll be rescued in 40 minute and to go to some rescue pickup location. So you go there, but the rescue ship gets blown out of the sky by this big Alien guy from a nearby Alien facility. That was a shocking plot twist, then the rest of the game is about finding more of these Alien bases and disabling the gun, so you can build a rocket to escape.

But you cant disable the Alien anti-air gun because the button for it does not work if you are infected. And it turns out youre infected at the start of the game, basically everything in the water is infected, all the fish you eat, and probably the water its self. Its an interesting plot and you always want to see where it goes next, although quite a few times like I mentioned previously I had no clue what to do next and was left kinda clueless. You go around this Alien base, which is on land, it was surprising to see land in this game, so you search the island and find these Purple tablets which is later used to unlock Alien areas, but then its like Now what? I fully explored the island and was left a bit clueless from there. There is a second island, which you can teleport to from this Alien gate, and it was a similar thing. I fully explored it, found all the PDA's, but this Island is a damn maze and really easy to get lost and not be able to find your way back to the teleport. That should have been way more obvious.

Basically at some point the radio messages just stop coming in, theres no more. You've been to all the Lifepods, youve checked out the giant crashed ship, then its like what do I do now? I was a bit stumped. Roam around for a few hours not doing much, although I started to be able to build pieces of the Rocket to be able to leave the planet. I build the rocket foundation, and a few more pieces, but the last pieces needed materials I've never seen. The last Beacon I had was "Aurora Rendezvous Point" which is just some location on the second island, with an asssociated note saying some captain went down into the ocean deep and got attacked by a Leviathan. It turns out what you have to do from here is to basically just try to keep going as deep as possible. In order to do this, you need to fully upgrade your vehicles. Mostly the Prawn mech suit.

Again, I feel like at times the game could kind of nudge you towards what youre supposed to do more, because quite a few times I would dive deep down, like 700 meters down, and find these new mystical scary Alien underworlds, like one time I found a giant dinosaur skeleton with a door that needed a Golden tablet, well I dont have any gold tablets. Is that progress? Where do I get a gold tablet? Who knows. But no, turns out that isnt the progression point. The actual progression point is basically to dive down like 900 meters past the Aurora Rendezvous Point, and finding this underwater Alien research facility which is really easy to miss, tucked in some crevice. See what I mean? Crucial progression points are like finding a needle in a haystack, or worse, which is one of the biggest gripes with the game. Its not all bad, like it does fill you with a sense of wonder and mystery, but sometimes it can stress you out feeling like you missed something, wasting tons of time going back and forth and backtracking.

Of course theres multiple Leviathan enemies down here which are both spooky and exciting, this place is also filled with giant skeletons of ancient Leviathans which was a cool sight.

So you checkout this Alien research base, it hints towards a possible cure and theres a wall you cant unlock unless you have a purple tablet. Guess what, I didnt bring a purple tablet. Queue 30 more minutes backtracking all the way just to grab a purple tablet and come back down. I'm rewarded with a PDA entry talking about another Alien base 1400 meters down Southwest of this current one. Well thast the next objective I guess. Thankfully you start unlocking a bunch of shortcut Teleports so you can easily get back here, from the first Alien base with the big cannon instead of having to swim all the way back down here.

But I cant go that low, my suit only goes to 900. Basically the only way I found out how to progress from here is to just save my game and go down as far as I possibly could just to see what was down there, its a Lava location, and here is the materials needed to further craft the rocket as well as the next depth upgrade for my Prawn mech suit. Also, some mandatory materials can mostly only be mined from this Prawn mech suit with a Drill arm, like these big boulders, so you need to go back and craft all those upgrades first. Once I realized the Lava place had this material I needed, I found a spot that wasn't at Crush Depth and was able to mine it with the Prawn and then go back and upgrade my Prawn to now go to like, 1700 meters.

Now I can fully explore the Lava place, theres a giant Lava Leviathan here which is pretty scary, I get a message from my PDA saying theres a base located in the center of the Lava place, you climb around aimlessly for like 30 minutes trying to find the entrance, of course its tucked away in the most obscure tiny crevice. I find it, and it takes you to the final Alien base. Here you unlock a bunch of shortcuts, find out about how to actually cure yourself of the infection, its from the excretions of this Emperor Leviathan, you come across a final room which just has a big tank of water you jump in, and theres a cutscene with a friendly Emperor Leviathan. This is a woman voice who talks to you and asks for help hatching her eggs, pretty crazy sights.

However another roadblock and annoyance happens here. You get a recipe to craft this Hatching Enzymes , to hatch her eggs. It states "Derived from plants found in the emperors natural habitat". Naturally I think, okay I just have to find plants inside this big tank. Thats what it sounds like. So I spend like an hour crawling through this tank trying to find the plants, only managed to find one. Finally I just looked it up and no, thats not what it means. It means you have to find the plants anywhere throughout the entire game world. Its not that bad though, because you just previously unlocked a bunch of teleports to various places throughout the game world, and the plants are all just outside each teleport. So I get the ingreidents, have to go all the way back to my base just to craft it, come back, hatch her eggs, her babies break out and swim around, the giant mama Leviathan dies, the babies leave through a portal, the babies excrete these orange balls and I touch one and infection gets cured. Now I can turn off the Alien turret gun, I go and do so, and now the game is pretty much finished. Now I have all the stuff needed to fully craft the rocket, I do so, climb into the rocket. Theres a funny mechanic here with a Time Capsule where you can attach a custom photo youve taken in game, a message, and some items. I looked it up after what the point of this and it turns out the Time Capsules is actually a kind of online feature, you come across them in game, and its actually left by other players scattered around the game world. Although I think the developer has to manually approve of them for it to go through. Still, a neat feature.

So I blast off the planet, get a cool cutscene, and after the credits it says something like "You are not permitted to enter your home planet until you pay your debt to our corporation, your debt is 1 trillion credits" which is a funny sad twist ending? Like all that and youre just at a cliffhanger stuck in space? Funny I guess.

So thats Subnautica. Honestly I found the game really addictive and could almost not stop playing it, despite its few frustrating spots of lack of guidance, which is both a pro and a con, and despite its lack of real threatening enemies or challenges. Just going around the game world, with its colorful graphics, exciting alien designs, and even the soundtrack is really good immersive and fitting, its just a comfy game to exist in. It has a perfect blend of relaxing gameplay, but also having hints of horror, mystery, suspense, its got a lot of tension, but it also has lots of downtime where youre just diving around the ocean collecting stuff. This makes it a game where you can easily just play it for hours without even noticing how long youve been playing. Its a captivating experience, I'd consider myself a fan now. There is even a sort of sequel, Subnautica Below Zero although its all the same graphics and gameplay just seemingly a new story and environment to explore, which is something I would like to play soon. And there is a fully fledged new game built from the ground up coming out soon, Subnautica 2, which thankfully has co-op which would really enhance the experience. Subnautica pleasantly surprised me, I was kinda apprehensive coming into it, thinking I probably would not like it much, although I found myself hooked and played it constnatly over the 2 or 3 days it took me to finish it. I beat it at around 30 hours played, so its not super long or anything, its a great package despite the few gripes I have with it.

8/10