![]() ![]() Nothing demonstrates this better than Subnautica‘s vehicles. Whether you’re grabbing fish to eat or building your base, you’re constantly touching and interacting with the world. Subnautica‘s splendid sights are coupled with rich, highly tactile mechanics. As you push further and deeper into Subnautica‘s world, you’ll discover decaying old bases left by previous explorers of the planet, and other structures built by hands that may or may not have been human. But Subnautica lets you not just simply travel to it, but explore its twisted, burning interior for resources and new story threads. In many other games the Aurora would simply be a dramatic bit of skybox. When you first breach the surface of Subnautica‘s ocean, the first thing you see is the smouldering wreck of the Aurora, looming over the horizon like a metal mountain. ![]() ![]() These biomes play home to some incredible locations that, when explored, unveil the history of the planet. Descend further, and you’ll eventually come across the Lost River, a labyrinth of ancient tunnels threaded through by a ghostly green torrent of corrosive brine. Hidden beneath the crimson carpet of the Grassy Plateau (itself a remarkable sight) is the Jellyshroom Cave, a vast subterranean cavern filled with glowing pink fungi. These biomes are so much more imaginative than the plains and forests you’ll see in other survival games. Progression happens vertically as much as it does horizontally, with new biomes revealing themselves as you delve deeper into the ocean. Subnautica makes brilliant use of its aquatic setting. The game’s story, meanwhile, gradually unravels via your lifepod’s radio, with recorded SOS messages from other lifepods pulling you toward key game locations. Rather than relying on procedural generation, for example, Subnautica‘s alien planet is meticulously crafted, designed to pull the player in specific directions. In this way, Subnautica offers an experience of pure discovery from the very beginning, spending the rest of its time rewarding you for your curiosity and willingness to learn. But even here, you don’t know which fish are edible, how nutritious they are, or how likely they are to murder you when you first approach them. Your food source at least is broadly obvious, in the many fish that dart through the game’s crystalline waters. Your basic equipment is not axes and pickaxes, but O2 tanks that let you spend longer underwater, and item scanners that help you learn more about this world. Your foundational resource is not wood, but titanium, found by breaking outcrops of rock hidden in the twisting coral reef where the game starts. There is no wood to chop, no deer to hunt, and no land to walk on as far as the eye can see.Ĭonsequently, you can’t rely on assumed knowledge from other survival games to progress, and so both your expectations and your experiences are completely refreshed. However, Subnautica‘s alien world has a completely different ruleset to Earth-bound survival games. You need to eat food and drink water to stay alive, and harvest resources to craft useful items and build structures. Mechanically, Subnautica features all the elements you would expect in a survival game. Your character escapes the fireball via a life-pod, awakening after the descent in some shallow waters near the Aurora’s crash site. It’s onto this planet that your space-cruiser, the Aurora, crash-lands after suffering colossal, unexplained damage. Subnautica whisks its survival story away from deciduous forests to planet 4546-B, an uncharted, presumed uninhabited world covered almost entirely by ocean. Those expectations then fell back into the water and never re-emerged, sinking irretrievably into the abyss of Subnautica‘s unparalleled survival simulation. Then along came Unknown Worlds and blew my expectations of what a survival game could be out of the water. READ MORE: ‘Eternal Threads’ preview: a captivating time-travelling tragedy. ![]() The game might have a quirky art-style like Don’t Starve, or a horror emphasis like The Forest, but they were all based upon the same basic principles establish by Minecraft. Before Subnautica, survival games were all about braving the elements in Speedtree-powered forests, chopping down trees to make campfires and lean-tos, hunting animals with flint-tipped spears. That’s what happened to me when I first played Subnauticain 2018. Sometimes a game comes along that’s so good it ruins an entire genre for you. ![]()
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