SUBNAUTICA
You’ll never look at the sea the same way again
This is one of those games where the less you know about it, the better. Even the name of a single item could spoil a huge chunk of the experience, and that wouldn’t be fair. Well, not on our watch. This review doesn’t give away any of the best surprises. But if you have even the slightest interest in games about adventure and discovery, get this now. Subnautica starts with your spaceship crashing on an alien world. You manage to board an escape pod, which keeps you alive… at least until you reach the planet’s surface. You wake up to discover your pod is on fire. But you pick up a fire extinguisher and put out the blaze, leaving the pod damaged but mostly functional. Your pod has a health pack dispenser that takes time to recharge, a fabricator to make new items (think the replicator in Star Trek), and a broken radio.
As you emerge from the smoking wreck, all you can see is your crashed spaceship burning in the distance. That, and water. Miles and miles of water and nothing else besides glimpses of coral and some bug-eyed fish that are jumping out of the wet stuff near you. Hunger and dehydration are kicking in. You’ve got a simple choice: stay here and die, or dive in and try not to.
Where other games give you quests in an immersion-shattering menu marked ‘quests’, Subnautica’s tasks are cleverly suggested through recipes in the fabricator’s menus. As you explore the watery alien world, you discover new blueprints for tools and machinery, which enable you to explore and build even more.
As you begin to make more and more complex items, you suddenly realise there’s far more to the game than meets the eye. Your goals broaden exponentially as you find your feet, opening up into a story with excellent pacing. Planet 4546B is very much like Earth in the way the climate works but, being alien, everything on it has the potential for the extraordinary. And so as you venture further from your starting point you frequently find things to surprise, excite, and even scare you.
FROZEN WATER
However, it has to be said that some of the illusion is broken by the technological limitations of the Unity game engine. It feels wrong to talk about the metaphorical ‘man behind the curtain’, but when the curtain keeps falling down, it’s difficult to ignore him. The draw distance is roughly 1km, so you can see your crashed ship and other objects of note clipping in and out of existence as you move around. Similarly, the game often freezes momentarily as you move between the surface and the submerged area. Massive environmental features like fronds and mushroom-like
“YOU FREQUENTLY FIND THINGS TO SURPRISE, EXCITE AND EVEN SCARE YOU.”
structures can suddenly load in all around you, and diving down can see the bottom appear in big square chunks. Texture variety and quality is lacking in places, though the game certainly has moments of extreme beauty. Crucially, you’ll always want to believe in its world, to see what it has in store for you next.
The scanning mechanism is a brilliant way to allow you to learn about this alien world, while also putting your fate literally in your own hands as you find broken items, learn their blueprints, and replicate them in your fabricator. The sense of achievement and table-turning on what at first appeared to be insurmountable odds is wonderful.
DROWN AND OUT
The game isn’t easy, and there’s a period of a few hours where your oxygen tank won’t be big enough for what you’ll want to do, which means you often have just five to ten seconds to explore the sea floor before swimming up again to the surface. There are ways around that, but the frequent threat of drowning may give you some anxiety. Still, there is a dangerfree creation mode (and a one-life survival mode if you’re ultra-brave), and the main game is generally well balanced, if a touch on the difficult side.
Subnautica tackles several genres all at once and somehow delivers on all of them. Few games take one premise and execute it so impressively. So take the plunge, avoid Google, lock yourself away for the month, and discover a world you’ll never forget.