PC and console games

Developer: Unknown Worlds	Graphics:
Publisher: Unknown Worlds	Sound:
Year: 2018	Difficulty:
Genre: Action-adventure	Lastability:
Number of players: 1	Rating:	8/10

I’ve found squid stuck to my windshield. Should I read a comic book, again?

At the moment, I’m enjoying a rather amusing pastime: judging a video game by its title screen! Remarkably, the first impression often holds up. Take a look at some examples: Space Hulk: Deathwing (pretentious and overstuffed), Deep Rock Galactic (a “laundry detergent packet game”, chaotic and characterless), Vermintide 2 (direct, stylish, engaging!). And then there’s Subnautica, where, looking at those rudimentary neon blue menus and the default Windows font (Trebuchet MS?), the first words that came to mind were “amateur” and “unfinished”.

To be honest, the right word would be “indie”. Subnautica actually came out in early access in 2014 and has not stopped evolving since (an expansion just arrived in 2020). I got into it late, for fear of early access syndrome. You know, when you’re drawn to the announcement of a game in development, try it, love it, play it a lot, then get bored due to the lack of content; and when it finally releases, months later, you’re already burnt out and don’t feel like going back. I’ve suffered from this with Space Engineers and Risk of Rain 2. I understand that this is a contemporary constraint inherent in the production costs of a 3D game; but it distresses me. What can I say? I like my games finished and debugged.

To wrap up the first impression, I do have one big compliment to offer: you can configure all the keys (yes, even the arrow keys! Even “Ctrl”!), and, to top it off, you can assign a single key to multiple actions! It’s so simple and yet so rarely implemented. I remember cursing Borderlands for not letting me use the same button to reload my weapon and open a door (without resorting to a macro).

Yes, this review will be an excuse for me to vent my frustration about current games, something I don’t often get to do in other sections. I will also shamelessly spoil the plot of Subnautica, so if you plan on playing it, go ahead, and come back to read the rest of this page later. Its strength lies mostly in the joy of discovery. So, I’d recommend diving in (oh oh oh!) without knowing any more than this: it’s a survival game in an underwater world, “handmade” (meaning no procedural generation, what a relief!), where the classic resource management goes hand in hand with a traditional crafting system. Your short-term objectives: find something to drink, something to eat, escape from predators. And when you get the chance: explore the area, reach out to any survivors, then make like a tree and get out of here.

The story begins like this: the interstellar ship “Aurora”, carrying around 150 passengers and crew members (including you, of course), crashes on a planet almost entirely covered by water. You regain consciousness, alone, inside a tiny floating escape pod. You possess a pocket-sized computer (that talks), a diving suit, and a very convenient crafting device, capable of desalinating water, cooking fish, or synthesizing all sorts of objects from metals and other “biological” ingredients gathered on-site.

Once you exit the pod, you find yourself in the water, surrounded by a bustling, colourful wildlife. It’s loud too. A world that seems to be doing just fine without you. The scenery is pleasant and believable. However, a little later in the game, when you get to scramble “in the dry”, I mean, walk, you’ll clearly feel that the game engine isn’t optimized for that. Like a fish thrown onto the deck of a trawler, so to speak. Plus, the emerged world will present you with textures that, up close and personal, are undeniably less pleasant to look at than the underwater world seen from 100 metres away.

The “survival” aspect is quite lenient, with death not inflicting much penalty (except for the traditional hardcore mode, which gives you only one life). As soon as you bite the dust, you’ll wake up in your little starting cocoon, in possession of all your items, or almost.

As for the exploration phase, I’d describe it as “semi-autonomous”. While there’s no map available (a good thing), the game doesn’t shy away from the ubiquitous navigation points displayed on the screen. I felt too often like I was being led by the hand. I would have preferred if they’d just let me figure things out with no indication, not even a compass. Why not make use of that charming starry sky to orient myself, for example?

And yet, despite its moderate difficulty, the game really gives you the creeps! I attribute this to the quality of the staging. Between the lack of light in the depths, the size and aggressiveness of the creatures (which unfortunately increases as you go deeper and the light becomes scarcer!), and the visual effects indicating that something just slapped you in the face (a crack appearing on your helmet’s visor, or water starting to leak into your submarine’s cockpit). Everything you observe constantly reminds you that you are tiny, fragile (and unarmed, most of the time).

The sound design isn’t lacking either. You hear the predators long before you see them. Some carnivorous fish even roar like wild beasts, but the unidentifiable sounds are the most nerve-wracking. There’s a wide variety of creatures, each with its own little tune. In the dark, every new sound sends waves of anxiety! Also, short, baroque musical sequences play at selected moments, and you’re left wondering how or why. It’s simple, once the “action music” kicks in, I start running for no reason, it’s pure Pavlovian reflex. My buttocks are clapping in applause!

While I’m at it, I’d like to applaud the absence of procedural generation, a gimmick that’s far too overused nowadays. I believe taking the time to build a unique environment is the only way to create an immersive game (it would be the height of irony to miss immersion in Subnautica, wouldn’t it?). [An abyssal summit. – Ed.]
For example: FTL, where the “procedural” approach totally kills the atmosphere, in my opinion. I’d rather play a game once and remember it. You could say the same thing about the lack of a two-player cooperative mode. When a game is designed for single-player, it’s more polished in its staging and automatically more memorable.

I have two anecdotes to illustrate this successful atmosphere.
Spoiler alert!

My first adventure begins when I receive a distress message, sent by other survivors like me, trapped in their own escape pod. However, they couldn’t give me their exact location: “about one kilometre southwest of the Aurora wreck”. I had a compass, but to figure out the distance, I had no choice but to craft a beacon and place it near the crash site. The plan was to move southwest, checking back occasionally to the beacon, whose position and distance were constantly displayed on the screen. So, off I went, piloting a lovely little submarine I had just learned to build. I stopped in front of the “bow” of the Aurora and got out with fins on, to drop my beacon. The game lets you name your beacons, which is handy for scouting the area. So, I clicked on it and started typing: “Aurora (bow)”.
As soon as I opened the parentheses, a deafening rumble made me jump out of my seat. A giant shark, the size of a building, swooped down on me! I panicked and dashed toward my submarine, parked just a few metres away, but the monster passed right in front of me and snatched my vehicle, shaking it frantically. I spun around and took off for the swim of my life, going straight ahead, not caring which direction. I heard an alarm blaring from the submarine, like a cry of pain, and a few seconds later … silence…

I managed to make it back to my escape pod. My insides were knitting doilies, but I was safe and sound. The beacon hadn’t been touched, and from that moment on, until the end of the game, there it was, a strange little display on the screen: “Aurora (”, with the parentheses open, taunting me. I never dared go back to the site to rename my beacon…

Not long after, I managed to get in touch with a cargo ship, which redirected to rescue me! The captain of the ship sent me the coordinates for a small island and arranged to meet me there. I prepared some supplies and set off in Submarine Number 2. I was a bit bummed that I had finished the game so quickly, as it didn’t seem like I’d explored everything. I eventually arrived about half an hour early, which gave me time to explore the island. There, I found a kind of alien ruin, which I wandered through. It was obviously deserted, and there wasn’t much to do, so I eventually left and waited for my rescuer on the beach. A few minutes later, the captain radioed me, and his crew began their descent; I saw a dot in the sky growing larger.

“Survivor, we see you!”

“Man, I don’t know how you held out down there.”

And just then, the ruin began to move … to change shape … a protrusion started to glow, and … boom! A beam of energy struck the ship. Explosion. Silence…

I stood there for a moment, stunned, alone, on my beach, a tuna sandwich in hand. I saw myself making the trip back and returning to my pod once again (at least I managed to bring my submarine back intact). I felt sheepish, lost, insignificant. The game had just pulled one over on me, making me think I had finished it, only to realise that I had just lost my only hope of leaving this planet (and my only human contact, for that matter). In reality, I was just at the very beginning! And that was precisely the moment, the best part of the adventure, its peak.

Later on, I learned how to build habitable modules. A base, basically. And gradually, the routine started to settle in: collecting stuff to make things, upgrading a vehicle to go deeper, gathering new resources to unlock more upgrades, and so on. Let’s be real, once you’ve set up a farm, the "survival" element becomes trivial; and once you get a stun weapon to protect yourself from predators, the tension plummets dramatically.

Paradoxically, for me, what actually ruins the carefully crafted atmosphere is learning more about the storyline. Did we really need a storyline? The mystery gives way to predictable developments, like “go fetch this and click there”. Personally, I got bored pretty fast near the end, especially once a whale started talking to me… Suddenly, I felt like I was in a Miyazaki film, and I really can’t stand Miyazaki films (I’d rather be in an episode of Rick and Morty, given the choice).

Another thing that annoys me is the lazy use of every video game cliché imaginable, like those inevitable audio logs, carelessly left behind by “former survivors”. Were there really no other ways to subtly introduce the plot details? Or those fish infected by a mysterious bacteria, recognizable by … a greenish glow? Seriously! And that darn high-tech alien lab that’s shoehorned in at the end, totally out of sync with the game’s theme (survival in a wild world with limited resources), which personally, I had no interest in seeing (fans of bad video game B-movies might remember Blood Omen 2, among many others!).

Of course, these ancient ruins are always sealed with electronic doors, impassable unless you have the appropriately coloured key. The key, which by some miracle, has been conveniently left out in another ruin, just a few metres away. So, if in a thousand years you want to visit my room and find the door locked, make sure to check the floor at the other end of the hall, I’ll leave my keys there for you now!
Finally, the arrangement of the “biomes” seems a bit too artificial: these clearly marked areas, each with very specific fauna and flora, that change completely the moment you cross an impossibly straight boundary!

Now, onto the main complaint: the general lack of ergonomics and counter-intuitive mechanics. I had decided to go through the adventure from start to finish without any documentation, no Wiki, no YouTube. It was generally enjoyable, but at times, incredibly tedious!

My first difficulty lies in inventory management. There’s never enough space to store the mountain of items you pick up, knowing full well you’ll need them eventually. I had to craft about fifteen little “floating” crates (which, by the way, stay at the depth where you drop them) to store everything, and spent ages trying to organise them. On top of that, these little crates drift over time because I kept accidentally nudging them. I spent about thirty hours doing this because I didn’t know I could build a base yet (and was too scared to leave the starting zone, where I could still touch the ground). Why not let us build a big crate from the start, instead of fifteen tiny ones?

My second issue is with the construction part, which I found pretty messy. I couldn’t understand the purpose of the air pipes, for example. I bothered to build a 300-metre network to bring air from a pump floating on the surface to my base, even before I built my first room (to be fair, I had the brilliant idea to build my base 300 metres deep because the place was labeled “recommended habitat”, and I foolishly follow recommendations). In the end, I couldn’t connect the end of my pipe network to the building I had just constructed. I gave up. A little later, I built my first generator and was surprised to find out it generated air as well as electricity. I spent the next hour dismantling 300 metres of titanium pipes (not knowing how to recycle them, I just dropped them on the ground, in the middle of the coral)…

Later, I built a detection room: a big ball covered in antennas and cameras, the purpose of which I never quite understood. And then it hit me, a few dozen hours later: as its name suggested, it was a room. So, you had to be inside it to use it! Naturally, that meant it had to be connected to an access path, something I wasn’t quick to figure out. When I finally decided to try it, I was able to see the position of “containers” in the area. It didn’t specify, however, which ones had already been opened and emptied… My initial question still stands: what’s the point?

Ultimately, Subnautica offers a unique atmosphere, a careful execution (although it gives in too easily to stereotypes), and conventional mechanics, sometimes clunky. It will, however, leave me with some strong memories. Coming from a jaded and hard-to-please player like me, take this as an unequivocal recommendation!

Other images here, here, and here.

Where to buy it? Steam