Subnautica: Below Zero
PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series
Difficulties are just things to overcome, after all.” So said the doomed Anglo-Irish Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton, who came to embody the fatal romanticism of exploration after his death in 1922. Subnautica: Below Zero would make that quote its motto, if it could. Like Subnautica before it, Below Zero delights in difficulties – little tasks and morsels of busywork portioned out and rationed just enough to keep a thread of intrigue alive at all times, even when you’re swallowing water and drowning for the fourth time in some godforsaken cave 400 metres from the ocean surface.
Where the first Subnautica game coaxed you to the surface with its gorgeous overworld presented as a sort of extramundane Hawaiian resort, Below Zero makes anything above sea level distinctly unfriendly. Hailstones the size of your fist, cutting arctic winds and choking whiteouts sweep over the surface, forcing you underwater for shelter. It’s the opposite of instinctive, and takes some unlearning. Planet 4546B, the alien world upon which you’ve crash-landed, offers a frosty reception indeed.
Once you’re underwater, however, things settle down and a calm descends, letting you take stock of your goal. As rogue research scientist Robin Ayou, you came to this planet of your own volition to seek out your missing sister, Sam. But you lost everything on the way – even your diving gear is in tatters. The early hours of the game see you nudging and prodding everything around you. You learn what you can and can’t eat. You research what will and won’t make good building materials. You discern (largely through trial and error) what is and isn’t going to eat you. Chiselling minerals from veins of ore and braving the gloomy depths of the ocean to find that final bit of fibre you need to upgrade your suit consumes you. You will spend hours combing coral bridges for samples to make computer chips, fritter away in-game days MacGyvering a plant and some batteries together to grant your Seatruck more life so you can get closer to that sunken space freighter two clicks south of your base.
Sam is a curious researcher, and that aspect of her personality is realised as a central mechanic: you’re forced to scan everything you see to glean more resources from the planet. Wayfaring and navigational tools exist only if you interact with them – you have to pull up a map and hold it in your hands. You have to switch on and point your torch. You make your own beacons and waypoints, giving them names to remind you of the landmarks – seamarks? – you’ve discovered so far.
It’s freeform survival at its most absorbing. A vague, yet persistent and unobscured, narrative underpins your survival efforts, and Unknown Worlds’ skill at luring you away from whatever self-imposed mission you’re undertaking is a recurring delight. Dropping in suggestive waypoints, pricking your intrigue with a half-finished path of lights, showing you a glimpse of a yawning chasm of inky-black unexplored depths – the studio uses its full repertoire to coax you away from safety. It’s doubly impressive when you consider it hasn’t really tackled ‘proper’ narratives before. Returning from an alien cave that housed a sentient AI (which ends up living in the gaps in your cerebral cortex), you may well happen upon a Glow Whale or a Vent Garden – uninspired names for hulking leviathans, rendered with such attention to detail you’d think they were recreations of primordial life in the Natural History Museum: Attenborough via Spore. You may be laden with precious loot – rare minerals that will let you craft a new hull to descend farther and locate your sister – but you can’t help risking the loss of your treasure as you swim up to this iridescent man o’ war and marvel at its hypnotic bioluminescence.
So you drown, again. But that’s fine, because you have connected a little more with Planet 4546B, a place frigid and unwelcoming on the surface, but beautiful and inviting below. You could draw the same comparison to the game itself. When you first start picking at the threads (crafting mechanics, resource management) and undoing the knots (tech trees, habitat creation), the game can seem almost impenetrable. There’s a lot to do, and your survival skills are those of an amateur at best. But once you digest the rhythm, understand how to use the materials at your disposal, and invest in some extensive storage solutions, everything clicks. What initially appears to be an inflexible survival game slowly morphs into an underwater research simulator, peppered with narrative hooks and philosophical musings on the nature of consciousness and survival. As you creep your way up the food chain, ensconcing yourself in complicated resource-hungry tech, you start to realise you’ve formed a symbiotic relationship with this planet and its flora and fauna: being submerged in its waters, enjoying the warm comfort of its depths, you realise the connection you have with this planet is almost natal.
Your attachment and sudden desire to protect the planet is picked up on and polarised by some of the NPCs, who seem to exist solely to contrast with you and your survival mission. The other explorers and corporate entities that flirted with Planet 4546B seemed scared of the plants and predators that make up the DNA of this place – but more fool them. Difficulties are just things to overcome, after all.
Below Zero excels when it commits to its free-flowing open-world sensibilities. There’s something meditative and cosy about the swaddling blackness and pressure of the ocean floor at 500 metres down, and Unknown Worlds knows it. That’s why all the best secrets are hidden there. And though the journey may kill you, you can’t help but wonder just how deep you have the potential to go, each and every time you pick up the controller and put your scuba mask back on.
You drown, again. But that’s fine, because you have connected a little more with Planet 4546B