Subnautica

Subnautica takes you to beautiful and terrifying depths.

There’s an enticing-looking hole near my main Subnautica base. It’s one of the more manageable underwater cave systems in the game as it’s not too deep and it consists of tiered concentric circles of terrain with only a few tunnels leading off. The arrangement draws your eye to a plant called a Rouge Cradle and is ripe for a few screenshots. But this colorful, relatively simple space can still hurt or kill me easily.

This particular segment of Subnautica’s ocean-based survival adventure contains Drooping Stingers—poisonous jellyfish-like plants that hang down across tunnel entrances. There is also at least one Sand Shark. I can see it throwing up clouds as it burrows along the sea bed below.

There are mushrooms which, if I hit them with my survival knife, will release harmful acid. I also spot a tadpole-shaped Biter, which will nibble down my health bar, given the opportunity.

There is also the capacity for death in the usual survival game ways. I could run out of food or clean water. I could run out of air if I spend too long captivated by caves and strange life forms. The latter is the usual cause of death for my avatar. I just love investigating Subnautica’s curated waters too much!

The basic premise of Subnautica is that you have crash-landed 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 survivor, 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 sandstone and limestone 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 familiarized 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.

You’ll discover the stunning kelp forests early on, basking in their green splendor before spotting the eel/crocodile creatures. They’re Stalkers. They might try to take a bite out of you, but they prefer to play with the metal of wrecked craft.

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 left up to you in the main Survival mode. Other game modes allow you to make that choice more explicit. For example, 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, so is better for roleplay.

I spent around 70 hours in one of Subnautica’s Early Access builds a few years ago, before the story was implemented. I divided the time between building an underwater base and exploring the world, letting the exploration loop back into the habitat crafting by using the trips to gather resources or pick up seeds so I could create a little underwater garden.

You will discover the stunning kelp forests early on

drop in the ocean

With the 1.0 release, even though I was trying to focus on the story in order to deliver a review verdict, I kept defaulting to a lovely, restful flow between three things: Building up my habitat; exploring different zones; and pursuing the narrative. That’s not great time management for a review, but it’s a great quality in the game itself, lulling me back into those patterns and letting the different forms of play ebb and flow, depending on what I fancied doing.

Undersea exploration isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, though, so you’ll need to take your own comfort level into consideration alongside my recommendation of the game.

One colleague finds jellyfish to be deeply unsettling, and thus is not keen on those Drooping Stingers. A former colleague has a phobia of crabs, and will struggle with Cave Crawlers. One friend finds the idea of being underwater a struggle, so I’d never suggest this to him unless pitching it as a horror, and another gets really freaked out by gigantic things lurking in the deep sea, so would hate some specific zones.

I’m at the opposite end of the scale. I find sea life endlessly fascinating both in and out of fiction. In Subnautica each biome is infused with its own distinct combination of alien and familiar beauty. I love exploring their caves and crevices and I love following the creatures around—even the more aggressive ones—with my scanner in hand. Each successful scan rewards me with new facts about life on this ocean world. Did you know that the boomerang fish has little teeth it uses to grind corals down?

This pursuit of knowledge probably explains why I will also happily dive into a labyrinthine cave system, often without remembering to lay a path of glowing markers so I can make my way back out.

For someone like me, playing on Survival mode, the worst thing that can happen is you lose a bit of progress when you die in said cave system, or you get a jump scare thanks to an aggressive creature swimming up behind you. I won’t spoil it for you, but something in the deeper water destroyed my little submersible craft in an instant. That sense of being confused, threatened and suddenly stranded two kilometers from my ‘home’ is the closest that I’ve come to real panic.

Home, by the way, is a gigantic, sprawling base near a thermal vent. You go in via a little hatch and find the main manufacturing and storage facilities. The further you go the more the base errs towards decoration and relaxation. An observatory is in danger of becoming a greenhouse, glass corridors offer views of glowing plants in outdoor grow beds, and my bedroom is a repository of scavenged knick-knacks.

The thermal vent location was initially an aesthetic choice, but now the heat helps generate electricity to keep the lights and fabricators running. I’ve also built a room full of aquaria—half a dozen glass cases of swimming fish inside a delicate windowed room inside a vast ocean of swimming fish.

In terms of irritants, there are a few. One is pop-in, both of objects and textures. I don’t mind it because it feels like a logical casualty of how believable undersea set design has to work. Swimming through clear ocean towards a point means there are none of the usual obscured viewpoint moments which you can use to swap in more detailed textures in other environments.

sea views

Acquiescing doesn’t mean you won’t notice it, but I’ll take the trade-off if it means the game can run properly, and I still get some truly lovely landscapes to experience once I’m close enough.

Habitat-building can also be finicky. For example, I have absolutely no idea why one of my multipurpose rooms won’t let me add glass windows, but the rest will. More information on your HUD when placing objects would make it much less exasperating—“this room needs this much clear space below”, or “this interaction is causing a problem”.

In the later game I ran into some truly frustrating issues. In one, I left my Seamoth (the small submarine) to scout for resources, and returned later to find that it had ‘burrowed’ about two meters into the floor. There was no way to extract it, so my choices were to abandon it and go through the rigmarole of collecting all the resources to build it and its upgrades all over again, or to bring up the debug console, spawn a deprecated item called a terraformer, and dig the thing back out.

About six hours later the Cyclops (my massive submarine) became stuck in a really deep cave system. I tried everything I could think of to free it, from removing energy-sapping leeches, to checking for obstacles but to no avail. I had to abandon it, and I still don’t know why. The craft itself is a big resource and time investment, but it also contained the Seamoth at a depth the Seamoth couldn’t survive if I undocked it, so that’s gone, too.

A more flexible save system would have been useful. With multiple save files for the same playthrough I could have simply reverted to an earlier save, taking the hit in progress in order to try and avoid the bigger loss of my craft. Unfortunately I had saved in this particular run after getting into the pickle. From a file size point of view the system makes sense, but it means glitches can be monumentally costly.

I really enjoyed how the story unfolded and Subnautica lets you engage with it as much as you choose. It offers information to keep you moving if you prefer having a specific task, but isn’t overbearing or insistent with any of it. The main arc was compelling, with some lovely emotional moments. That said, it struggles to create a meaningful connection with anything off-world. By contrast you develop a real affection for this alien world so some story strands suffered by dint of being at odds with that balance.

To put these negatives in context, though, I have spent nearly 50 hours on my current playthrough and my total playtime is over 120 hours. I am actually still playing (although I did indeed rage-quit twice because of the vehicular issues). I have collected more than 2,000 screenshots of the beautiful world and its strange creatures and, now that the review is over, I can go back to meandering at my own pace. It is, without doubt, my favorite game of the last five years.

Subnautica lets you engage with [the story] as much as you choose