Subnautica: Below Zero
PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series
Like its 2018 predecessor, Below Zero is a game of vivid atmospheric shifts woven around a simple bodily necessity: oxygen. The need to keep tracking back and forth between the ocean’s surface and the deep makes for a world that is always changing, taking on different moods from second to second. As you dive, sunlight gives way to bioluminescence. Day-and-night shifts pattern the water above while schools of glowing fish trace the contours below. Each aquatic biome, from cave system to kelp forest, has its own atmosphere and soundtrack of animal calls, which blur together in your wake as you hurry to make the most of your dwindling air.
New weather systems add to this sense of a constantly shapeshifting environment – hail froths the shallows, and lightning throws icebergs into menacing relief. The sensory onslaught can make navigation difficult and, once again, Unknown Worlds doesn’t give you a map. There are story waypoints to latch onto, plus beacons you can deploy over resourcerich areas, and a handheld mineral detector to weasel out deposits at close range. But these tools never entirely dispel the disorientation, and the result is a setting that never stops feeling alien because it is always challenging your efforts to reduce it to familiar territory.
If only the whole game were as surprising as its ocean. A standalone expansion upgraded into a sequel, it mostly retains the original’s rhythms of exploring, gathering backstory and upgrading. Some frozen land-based stretches aside, the biggest alteration we see after six hours with the Early Access build is the focus on plot. Rather than a generic survivor, Below Zero casts you as Robin Ayou, a fully voiced
The setting never stops feeling alien, challenging your efforts to reduce it to familiar territory
protagonist searching for her sister in the icy lower latitudes of the first game’s planet, Alterra. You start off once again with a drop pod boasting an all-purpose fabricator and inexhaustible supplies of O 2 and electricity. From this solid starting point, you gather the means to build habitats, vehicles and a small arsenal of handheld gadgets. Weapons are mostly absent, continuing the developer’s commitment to non-violent play following the 2012 shootings at Sandy Hook.
Gradually, the world around you expands from a placid reef, where avian packhunters compete for the fish you process into drinking water, to more hazardous environments, such as fields of boulders suspended from air-filled plants. While there’s a touch of ability-gating, the more important limits on exploration are pressure and oxygen supply: it’s common to spy tempting artefacts narrowly below a submarine’s maximum safe depth. On land, meanwhile, you have to worry about body temperature rather than oxygen, to say nothing of tunnelling ice worms. These frosty
stretches encompass around a quarter of the game’s horizontal span; they’re a nice break from swimming, but naturally they lack the wonder and intrigue of life beneath the waves.
Once again you unlock crafting blueprints by scanning PDAs and bits of wreckage – these key into an overarching narrative (largely told through found text) of corporate colonialism and exploitation. The writing is snappy with satirical flourishes, though the (currently incomplete) plot feels like an exercise in treading water for Subnautica; there are, as ever, ancient structures housing eldritch secrets on the seafloor. Robin herself is a likeable, can-do personality, although since this is a survival game first and foremost, you won’t hear from her too often.
Below Zero is perfectly engrossing from moment to moment, but we’re still waiting for it to justify its promotion to fullblown sequel status. Too often it feels more like an economical reworking than a dramatic new vision. There’s an in-game analogy for this, in fact: the Seatruck, a modular submarine that can be configured as a scout craft, like
Subnautica’s Seamoth, or a hulking mobile base, like the Cyclops. It’s an entertaining toy, but also an exercise in rearranging the pieces. Here’s hoping the same doesn’t prove true of
Below Zero as a whole.
Q