Despite a sloppy port and my not having a preference for survival games, I enjoyed this.
Having ticked off the major diving-related games, Subnautica remained, also my brother recommended it. Unlike others I’ve played, it’s set on an alien world so all the life in this vibrant ocean is made up. Also, it’s in the survival genre, so it’s a gritty experience where you have to keep an eye on your food and water intake and your oxygen capacity, watch for deadly predators, and most of all manage your limited inventory space.
It’s not just a “battle the elements as long as you can” affair though. At first you are struggling as the survivor of a spaceship craft, but a story unfolds in this self-contained oceanic zone. You search for other survivors, brave the flaming ship wreckage, then discover alien technology and a deadly disease that infects all life in the area. As your capabilities improve and your options for tools expand, you dive deep into the sunken caves to find the secrets of the planet’s history on your way to escaping and returning home.
The world itself is a fixed environment, with some randomness around resources and creatures spawning. There’s so much to discover, but with the map being so huge it’s very easy to lose your bearings, or forget where to find a cool thing you discovered. I frequently longed for a map to refer to, but it’s part of the game’s intent that you’re lost and alone, having to navigate by landmarks and beacons you’ve constructed, building a mental model of your surroundings. I found this frustrating, since personally after 40+ hours I still was struggling with this due to the sheer size of the map. And I know for certain there were lots of cool secrets I never found.
The progression of your tech tree is cool. Milestones like setting up a base and kitting it out, building vehicles to go deeper and further, or making more advanced suit components felt like big achievements that each help a lot with your exploration. Finding a piece of wreckage and scouring it for usable tech or fresh water was exciting and tense, especially early on when you’re always close to suffocation. I also liked filling out the database with scans of the local lifeforms or lore on the last human party to stumble on this damned world.
The main obstacle that almost made me give up several times on my journey is the bugginess. Aside from problems like long loads, the occasional heavy stuttering, or the highly awkward control scheme that comes from porting a mouse-driven PC interface to console, I had more obnoxious problems like world geometry tiles frequently not loading, making it possible to fall through the floor and out of bounds. Or the game forgetting I was underwater, forcing me to crawl up the walls of a lava cavern as if on land, starving while fish swam through the “air” above me. Or the multiple times it forgot that I’d unlocked doors, trapping me in or out of essential locations. Not to mention the late development of my incredibly useful mech suit getting stuck in a small cave, so that I had to abandon it. It seems like many of these issues are exclusive to, or at least worse in, this port, so the PC version is definitely the way to experience Subnautica. Which is worth doing! I’m a noob with this genre but found it satisfying to master the mechanics, and to exist in this beautiful alien seascape.