Subnautica
Everything’s better down where it’s wetter.
The basic premise of Subnautica is that you have crashlanded on an alien planet. You can see the burning hull of your ship, the Aurora, from your life pod. You seem to be the sole survivour, and you have no idea what lurks beyond the shallows.
The first order of business is basic survival, so you investigate the vibrant sea outside your pod, seeking out the resources your fabricator needs to craft food, water and essential tools. You’ll break open lumps of lime and sandstone to find deposits of titanium, silver, lead and more. A pillowy-looking fish is useful for water filtration, while others are good eatin’. There are gigantic coral tubes, shoals of boomerang fish, huddles of docile creatures with long noses and glowing bums, and clusters of neon plant life.
Once you’ve familiarised yourself with the basics, you find yourself able to venture further and survive longer. Subnautica meets this increased confidence with beautiful biomes, tempting you with new resources and new creatures.
As you poke around, you start to flesh out the story beyond your own immediate survival exploits. Some of that comes via exploration and some is via audio snippets which your radio will pick up. How you choose to balance pursuit of the narrative against pottering under the sea is up to you in the main Survival mode. But Creative mode strips out all the survival and the story, just letting you build and explore. Hardcore gives you only one life and no oxygen warnings.
Even though we were trying to focus on the story, we kept defaulting to a lovely, restful flow between three things: building up a habitat; exploring different zones; and then pursuing the narrative. That’s not great time management for a review, but it’s a great quality in the game itself.
Undersea exploration isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but we find sea life fascinating. In Subnautica, each biome is infused with its own distinct combination of alien and familiar beauty. We love exploring their caves and crevices, and following the creatures around — even the more aggressive ones — with a scanner in hand. Each successful scan rewards you with new facts about life on this ocean world.
The worst thing that can happen is you lose a bit of progress when you die in a cave system, or you get a jump scare thanks to an aggressive creature swimming up behind you. And something in the deep water destroyed our little submersible in an instant...!
Habitat-building can be a bit finicky, and there are a few irritants to be found along the way (glitches can be costly), and a more flexible save system would have been useful.
We really enjoyed how the story unfolded and the game lets you engage with it as much as you choose. The main arc was compelling, with some lovely emotional moments. And we are still playing it... 120 hours in.
Verdict
A smattering of technical issues keep it from true legendary status at launch, but only just.