So apologize if I shouldn't spin this into it's own topic, but I kind of want to talk about this game and the early signs this might be a legitimate masterpiece genre-defining game down the line, and I think it's a game who's ripples are going to be felt in the years to come and will grow from where it is right this very moment pretty soon.
For those who don't know, Subnautica is an underwater survival game that was in Early Access on Steam for the last 2.5 years, and just fully released a week and a half ago to the full version. It is hitting Xbox One later this year confirmed, and they also have announced there will be a PS4 version but no exact date announced.
So I had seen this game briefly here and there over the years, but I finally got around to playing it and seeing what 'splashes' (pun intended) it's been making around the internet, and all I can say is... Goddamn.
Legitimately, no joke, going off my own feelings after just playing it for 12 hours and looking at the reception both from users, critics, and digging deeper into it, I think Subnautica may end up being a revolutionary game. On Steam it's currently over 2 million sales, but I can see this number growing a lot in the months to come, and especially once it hits consoles.
The initial turn-off for a lot of people on the surface is the game is a single-player only survival game, there is no multiplayer component and they have confirmed there never will be. That may disappoint some at first, but delving into the game I completely see why. I'm not typically a fan of survival games, they have a lot of flaws I could sit here writing a game design thesis on, but Subnautica has successfully avoided nearly every pitfall of the genre, all the while having super creative solutions to problems of the genre and engineering an experience I (and apparently many others) have never had with a survival game. No joke, I think this is the most innovative and well done survival game since Minecraft (though for very different reasons).
So Subnautica is different than most survival games in the fact that it's set in an almost entirely underwater world. It's set on an alien planet so all the life is foreign with only resemblances to real world aquatic life, but it captures the element of being underwater perfectly and better than any game I've ever played. This is going to be hard to explain, but this game is one of the only games I've played that successfully makes you feel like you're "under the water"... There's a lot of games with water in them, but Subnautica goes a huge extra mile here and stimulates a lot of real world feelings associated with the ocean. Everything from the visuals to the sounds when going from above and below water, to how things change the deeper in the water you go with the visuals and sounds add a lot. And of course the underwater aspect adds some to a survival game, there is a native and immediately understandable goal and objective provided. You start off with a lower oxygen tank, and you can only go so deep before you need to surface again to get air. This adds to some early risk and reward and makes a unsaid but immediately understandable goal that there's things the deeper into the sea you go. This unsaid objective is portrayed completely through the scenario you're in, being stranded in an alien ocean and needing to scavenge and survive. You start off in some shallow waters, but venture out a bit and you see the ocean floor gets deeper and deeper. It's scary, but also fascinating, which leads to one of the next things why this game works.
The world is lush and interesting. One of the biggest flaws of so many survival games is they have barren large worlds with repetitive going ons that draw thin after a few hours. Subnautica's ocean is big, but not TOO big (it's about 2.5k by 2.5km width), but it also ends up being a lot bigger due to depth and the verticality of the world. But the ocean is not barren, it's absolutely full of things to see and do. There's several different biomes, and each one has a legitimately completely different feel to them with different things to come to discover and expect from each. This may not sound as impressive in writing, but having the biomes change so much and having some really unexpected biomes I don't want to spoil come into play makes it so if you can slip into a completely different experience when you're willing and ready, the sort of things you do and tackle in each biome is quite different. It's a game full of discovery, you can literally spend hours and hours playing this and still be discovering new stuff.
I also will throw out there the world has the 'right' level of randomization; The game is not randomly generated per say, but there are randomly generated parts of it. It makes it so different runs have surprises but the world is structured and detailed enough to be lush and personalized. I think they found the right balance of what to make random and what to make designed by hand.
Which leads into the next thing; more than ANY other survival game I've played, it is a game about discovery and learning your way. I HIGHLY suggest not looking up a wiki or spoiling the game for yourself and going in as blind as possible. The game avoids doing entirely cryptic shit for progression while also giving you little to no instruction. How you do things in the world are intuitive and make some level of real world sense, or have intuitive designs to make them easy enough to learn and perform if you think of them. It's a game where the discovery is vast, but the crypticness of how to do things isn't a huge barrier to entry. When you first start playing you'll probably die from thirst or hunger, but you quickly begin to learn the lay of the land and from experiences you learn more and more and begin to utilize that knowledge which opens up new possibilities. It has a perfect balance of leaving you to your own devices while making progression more open and intuitive with some good applied real world and in-game logic that's easy to understand and perform when you figure stuff out.
A lot of people loved Breath of the Wild recently due to it having a 'living breathing' world, and Subnautica has this in spades but with an even greater sense of mystery. Underwater life is strange, and how they all interact with the world is fascinating to learn and observe. Everything in the sea acts upon it's own behaviors, and even things like rock, seaweed, and coral formations act into the world. There's a lot of freedom to experiment and play around with things in the world which are pretty fun to toy with and learn.
And then there's base building. You start off in an escape pod that's crash landed that you work to repair to get some extra functionalities from it, but you begin to build things. The building in this game is surprisingly easy and intuitive with great results, it can become absolutely addicting to build your own underwater facilities, or to build something like a submarine and personalize it to your own taste to go seafaring. You can create multiple bases, or sprawling underwater labyrinths if you desire, it's done in such an easy and fun way to mess around with that you can lose hours just building bases.
Helped is the underwater machines you create also are quite fun and different. You can begin to build crazier and crazier things that change how to approach and play the game as well. As some people here may echo, the Cyclops is literally one of the most fun vehicles in any game I've ever played. It takes a bit to build it, but it's absolutely worth it. If you want a powersuit with a grappling hook, then make one and try to be a slow but powerful tank that can sink to the depths. Or make something agile and aerodynamic. The vehicles are a lot of fun to play in as well and provide different gameplay experiences.
And if all of this wasn't enough, the game actually has a pretty good story. This is maybe the first survival game I've played that legitimately has an engrossing narrative to partake in. It has voice acting and writing way better than it should have, and the slowly unveils more and more of a bigger mystery as you go along the game. I won't spoil it, but it's surprisingly engaging and is great to splitting up between oceanic fairs.
Add to this unlike most survival games following the story is ALSO intuitively designed. There's a radio in your starting escape pod/bases you build which gives you distress calls that give you points to travel to that edge you to the next story objective when you're ready. The radio stuff comes in frequently enough to give you stuff to do, and move you along a surprisingly interesting narrative.
And to all of this, this is a game that both does beauty extremely well, as well as terror. The alien ocean is beautiful and full of lush details and countless sights to see, and there's is some serene relaxing elements to the game. However, this is also quite possibly the scariest survival game made yet. And not just in startle scares, it can be legitimately unnerving and terrifying. The game is not combat focused, it has no guns and for a long stretch at the start you'll either have no weapons or a dingy knife, but even the more powerful weapons though good against smaller pests can't reasonably tackle some of the leviathans and nightmares of the deep. Some oceanic forces are nearly unkillable unless you're really talented, and much in the ocean wants to kill you. There is a surprising variety of life in the sea, from peaceful types of types that defend territory, to predators and things much stranger than that. But staring down into a deep sea chasm and seeing something shuffling in the darkness, or lowering yourself into a deep sea cavern and see some shape coming closer to you from the darkness, can be absolutely scary as all hell. It's not a horror game, but some of its scariest moments can rival the best of the horror genre, and it makes sure you're never feeling too safe in the deep.
The game is chock full of surprises, and it legitimately is a game I think is best to go in blind and discover things on your own. There's a lot I'm not saying, but I think more than any other survival game this game is all at once more mechanically interesting, well-designed, with an actually good story, that can actually be both beautiful and scary, full of a sense of wonder and discovery, with a populated and lush world with much to do for literally hours and hours of game time, and an incredibly easy world to get lost and immersed in with quite possibly the best realized underwater game environment of all time.
This is maybe forward saying, but I legitimately think this game is a game changer of the like how Ocarina of Time changed games, how Halo changed FPS, how RE4 changed third-person games. I think this game will have massive ripples on the survival genre. It is not only incredibly well made for what it is, it also solves so many issues of the genre it stems from with intuitive design and ingenuity, and is quite possibly the best survival game ever made, and hell even one of the best 'open world exploration discovery' games ever made.
I am curious what ResetEra thinks?
For those who don't know, Subnautica is an underwater survival game that was in Early Access on Steam for the last 2.5 years, and just fully released a week and a half ago to the full version. It is hitting Xbox One later this year confirmed, and they also have announced there will be a PS4 version but no exact date announced.
So I had seen this game briefly here and there over the years, but I finally got around to playing it and seeing what 'splashes' (pun intended) it's been making around the internet, and all I can say is... Goddamn.
Legitimately, no joke, going off my own feelings after just playing it for 12 hours and looking at the reception both from users, critics, and digging deeper into it, I think Subnautica may end up being a revolutionary game. On Steam it's currently over 2 million sales, but I can see this number growing a lot in the months to come, and especially once it hits consoles.
The initial turn-off for a lot of people on the surface is the game is a single-player only survival game, there is no multiplayer component and they have confirmed there never will be. That may disappoint some at first, but delving into the game I completely see why. I'm not typically a fan of survival games, they have a lot of flaws I could sit here writing a game design thesis on, but Subnautica has successfully avoided nearly every pitfall of the genre, all the while having super creative solutions to problems of the genre and engineering an experience I (and apparently many others) have never had with a survival game. No joke, I think this is the most innovative and well done survival game since Minecraft (though for very different reasons).
So Subnautica is different than most survival games in the fact that it's set in an almost entirely underwater world. It's set on an alien planet so all the life is foreign with only resemblances to real world aquatic life, but it captures the element of being underwater perfectly and better than any game I've ever played. This is going to be hard to explain, but this game is one of the only games I've played that successfully makes you feel like you're "under the water"... There's a lot of games with water in them, but Subnautica goes a huge extra mile here and stimulates a lot of real world feelings associated with the ocean. Everything from the visuals to the sounds when going from above and below water, to how things change the deeper in the water you go with the visuals and sounds add a lot. And of course the underwater aspect adds some to a survival game, there is a native and immediately understandable goal and objective provided. You start off with a lower oxygen tank, and you can only go so deep before you need to surface again to get air. This adds to some early risk and reward and makes a unsaid but immediately understandable goal that there's things the deeper into the sea you go. This unsaid objective is portrayed completely through the scenario you're in, being stranded in an alien ocean and needing to scavenge and survive. You start off in some shallow waters, but venture out a bit and you see the ocean floor gets deeper and deeper. It's scary, but also fascinating, which leads to one of the next things why this game works.
The world is lush and interesting. One of the biggest flaws of so many survival games is they have barren large worlds with repetitive going ons that draw thin after a few hours. Subnautica's ocean is big, but not TOO big (it's about 2.5k by 2.5km width), but it also ends up being a lot bigger due to depth and the verticality of the world. But the ocean is not barren, it's absolutely full of things to see and do. There's several different biomes, and each one has a legitimately completely different feel to them with different things to come to discover and expect from each. This may not sound as impressive in writing, but having the biomes change so much and having some really unexpected biomes I don't want to spoil come into play makes it so if you can slip into a completely different experience when you're willing and ready, the sort of things you do and tackle in each biome is quite different. It's a game full of discovery, you can literally spend hours and hours playing this and still be discovering new stuff.
I also will throw out there the world has the 'right' level of randomization; The game is not randomly generated per say, but there are randomly generated parts of it. It makes it so different runs have surprises but the world is structured and detailed enough to be lush and personalized. I think they found the right balance of what to make random and what to make designed by hand.
Which leads into the next thing; more than ANY other survival game I've played, it is a game about discovery and learning your way. I HIGHLY suggest not looking up a wiki or spoiling the game for yourself and going in as blind as possible. The game avoids doing entirely cryptic shit for progression while also giving you little to no instruction. How you do things in the world are intuitive and make some level of real world sense, or have intuitive designs to make them easy enough to learn and perform if you think of them. It's a game where the discovery is vast, but the crypticness of how to do things isn't a huge barrier to entry. When you first start playing you'll probably die from thirst or hunger, but you quickly begin to learn the lay of the land and from experiences you learn more and more and begin to utilize that knowledge which opens up new possibilities. It has a perfect balance of leaving you to your own devices while making progression more open and intuitive with some good applied real world and in-game logic that's easy to understand and perform when you figure stuff out.
A lot of people loved Breath of the Wild recently due to it having a 'living breathing' world, and Subnautica has this in spades but with an even greater sense of mystery. Underwater life is strange, and how they all interact with the world is fascinating to learn and observe. Everything in the sea acts upon it's own behaviors, and even things like rock, seaweed, and coral formations act into the world. There's a lot of freedom to experiment and play around with things in the world which are pretty fun to toy with and learn.
And then there's base building. You start off in an escape pod that's crash landed that you work to repair to get some extra functionalities from it, but you begin to build things. The building in this game is surprisingly easy and intuitive with great results, it can become absolutely addicting to build your own underwater facilities, or to build something like a submarine and personalize it to your own taste to go seafaring. You can create multiple bases, or sprawling underwater labyrinths if you desire, it's done in such an easy and fun way to mess around with that you can lose hours just building bases.
Helped is the underwater machines you create also are quite fun and different. You can begin to build crazier and crazier things that change how to approach and play the game as well. As some people here may echo, the Cyclops is literally one of the most fun vehicles in any game I've ever played. It takes a bit to build it, but it's absolutely worth it. If you want a powersuit with a grappling hook, then make one and try to be a slow but powerful tank that can sink to the depths. Or make something agile and aerodynamic. The vehicles are a lot of fun to play in as well and provide different gameplay experiences.
And if all of this wasn't enough, the game actually has a pretty good story. This is maybe the first survival game I've played that legitimately has an engrossing narrative to partake in. It has voice acting and writing way better than it should have, and the slowly unveils more and more of a bigger mystery as you go along the game. I won't spoil it, but it's surprisingly engaging and is great to splitting up between oceanic fairs.
Add to this unlike most survival games following the story is ALSO intuitively designed. There's a radio in your starting escape pod/bases you build which gives you distress calls that give you points to travel to that edge you to the next story objective when you're ready. The radio stuff comes in frequently enough to give you stuff to do, and move you along a surprisingly interesting narrative.
And to all of this, this is a game that both does beauty extremely well, as well as terror. The alien ocean is beautiful and full of lush details and countless sights to see, and there's is some serene relaxing elements to the game. However, this is also quite possibly the scariest survival game made yet. And not just in startle scares, it can be legitimately unnerving and terrifying. The game is not combat focused, it has no guns and for a long stretch at the start you'll either have no weapons or a dingy knife, but even the more powerful weapons though good against smaller pests can't reasonably tackle some of the leviathans and nightmares of the deep. Some oceanic forces are nearly unkillable unless you're really talented, and much in the ocean wants to kill you. There is a surprising variety of life in the sea, from peaceful types of types that defend territory, to predators and things much stranger than that. But staring down into a deep sea chasm and seeing something shuffling in the darkness, or lowering yourself into a deep sea cavern and see some shape coming closer to you from the darkness, can be absolutely scary as all hell. It's not a horror game, but some of its scariest moments can rival the best of the horror genre, and it makes sure you're never feeling too safe in the deep.
The game is chock full of surprises, and it legitimately is a game I think is best to go in blind and discover things on your own. There's a lot I'm not saying, but I think more than any other survival game this game is all at once more mechanically interesting, well-designed, with an actually good story, that can actually be both beautiful and scary, full of a sense of wonder and discovery, with a populated and lush world with much to do for literally hours and hours of game time, and an incredibly easy world to get lost and immersed in with quite possibly the best realized underwater game environment of all time.
This is maybe forward saying, but I legitimately think this game is a game changer of the like how Ocarina of Time changed games, how Halo changed FPS, how RE4 changed third-person games. I think this game will have massive ripples on the survival genre. It is not only incredibly well made for what it is, it also solves so many issues of the genre it stems from with intuitive design and ingenuity, and is quite possibly the best survival game ever made, and hell even one of the best 'open world exploration discovery' games ever made.
I am curious what ResetEra thinks?
