The regions are so imaginative and unique, literally unlike anything you’ve seen before but also, with a sense of inspiration from our own oceans.īut what will you find in the deep blue sea? You can scan items from the crash to recreate them with your 3D printer in order to build gear and a habitat. From the eerie kelp forests to the grassy plateaus, the blood kelp zone and the mushroom forest.

Suddenly, the shark-infested shallows of the starter zone don’t seem as bad. That fear of the unknown is what makes this game so great and knowing that anything could be out there trying to get you. Subnautica isn’t a horror game, but taking your tiny sub along the ocean floor and suddenly, the floor disappears into a sudden drop into the black unknown, where giant leviathans will try to eat you and the wails of unknown creatures pierce through the darkness, definitely gets the heartbeat pumping. So to take a submarine and go and explore a totally alien planet that consists largely of oceans is even scarier. In fact, around 80% of the oceans on Earth remain unmapped. We know very little about our own oceans, less so than the planets in our solar system. But the first-person view of exploring the unknown is both awe-inspiring and straight-up terrifying. And those elements are part of the gameplay loop. Too often, games have you punching rocks and building forts while keeping track of your hunger and thirst meters.

To compare this to the wide variety of survival games on the market would be a disservice to this game.

But the joy of the game really comes in its minute-to-minute gameplay. There is a mystery to solve here and it gets pretty wild so I won’t spoil it.

The objective of the game is simple and familiar to anyone who has played a survival game before: gather enough resources to get off the planet while also discovering just what happened on this watery rock. In Subnautica, a deep-space vessel called the Aurora has crashed landed on an alien planted dominated by uncharted and diverse oceans and you, the player, are the sole survivor.

Subnautica game notes