Subnautica, an almost twelve-year-old game recently revitalized by its successor, Subnautica 2. Subnautica is a well-known seafaring psychological horror game that takes place upon an alien planet that is completely water. You are the lone survivor of the ship Aurora’s crash landing. This is one of the games that has changed a genre as a whole due to its popularity and just how memorable it is. The real question here is, however, is it still worth playing even years later? Yes, Subnautica even today, is one of the best games in the genre and possibly as a whole; within this review, I will be going over the gameplay loop, lore aspects, replayability, genre relevance, and new player experience.
When you first launch Subnautica, you are met with a cutscene showing the interplanetary ship. The Aurora crash-landed on the alien planet 4546B, an oceanic world with diverse ecosystems and creatures beyond human imagination. You are a janitor and the sole survivor of the crash. Now, you have to pave your way to survival when all the odds are against you, the game itself noting that the survival of the player character is a near-zero chance.
Starting out with the gameplay loop, it is very enjoyable. The game allows for a multitude of things to do, such as building a base, progressing your gear, exploring, collecting resources, or even researching the alien fish within the planet itself. After more than 20 hours on a single save file, I can say with confidence this gameplay loop does not get boring, and throughout the whole game it is enjoyable. Unlike many games in the genre, this game does an amazing job of giving an actual gameplay experience versus just being focused on the lore aspect and the horror factor, with the gameplay pushed behind. To go deeper means you have to improve your gear, which means collecting blueprints and resources, along with building a better and better base, making players truly be able to experience everything. From the get-go, I decided to take the long swim of going to the crash of the original ship, something that many new players do; however, it is not advised, and I was immediately jumpscared by radiation and a leviathan-class alien that will kill you on contact. This gave me curiosity for what could be, as later in the game once I had upgraded my gear, I went back to research what was there, and it was truly amazing.
Does this mean the lore is not as great compared to the other games that are similar? Not in the slightest. The lore within Subnautica is diverse, with hundreds of organisms, including fish, sharks, leviathans, and plant life, that each have paragraphs of information on them that create a diverse ecosystem that could very well exist and function on a real planet. The main story line is not lacking either, however, as each day you find more and more abandoned emergency escape pods that are destroyed or remnants of people who tried to survive the crash and failed. After around a week of in-game time, the Sunbeam, another interplanetary ship, will attempt to rescue any survivors that may have survived from the distress call, and what comes after is one of the most surprising events of the whole game. You could spend hours upon hours reading all the data entries of the game for all the different sea life and still be reading; there always seems to be something new that adds to the lore, and it seems that nothing is there just as a coincidence; everything adds to the lore in some way. By far, this is the best part of the game for me, as being able to see what the developers were thinking when creating an ecosystem was very interesting for me, as I’ve never seen it done in a way like this in any game I have played across the years. Overall, the lore for this game is some of the best I have ever seen, only really being beaten out, in my opinion, by games such as Five Nights At Freddy’s, which is mostly based around its complicated lore that people have yet to crack.
This game takes psychological horror to the extreme, appearing as a fun open-world game that quickly devolves into one of the scariest games about the ocean. The game doesn’t do this with the normal jumpscares or trying to appear as scary, but rather makes the environment so unsettling around the player that it evokes a primal fear that can’t be stopped. Something about diving deeper into an ocean where you are unable to see more than 10 feet in front of you, knowing there are aliens all around you that you simply can’t see, allows for the game to do some amazing things with its genre.
This, however, is where the praise ends, as, like-minded with many people who have tried to replay the game, you have realized there is a lack of replayability after your first long save file. Everything begins to feel the same, as the map is set to be the same every time, and nothing changes from save file to save file. While yes, there is still more than 20 hours of gameplay in a single save file alone, I wish there was any kind of replayability to it outside of the hardcore gamers who love the game so much they will put up with the repetition the game holds within future save files. Many people have shared this, and it is something we will sadly have to deal with and truly the only thing holding this game back from being one of the best games ever released.
While this game is truly amazing with so much to do, at points the game makes the player feel overwhelmed. There is almost too much to do; and the game points to you having little time in the first hours of the game, so the player tries to rush through everything while also not being able to truly experience the game. Yes, this gets better later on; however, early on within the game, there simply feels like too much and not a specific direction the game wants the player to take aside from exploring abandoned ships, which requires better gear every time. I took issue with this in my first few hours of gameplay, as it made me feel that I was required to rush through and not truly enjoy the game that the developers have worked so hard on, and looking back on it, I regret moving so fast when I should have taken my time. Overall, the pacing of the game in the first few hours needs work, as it makes the new player experience so much less enjoyable than it could be; if the pacing were corrected, the game would feel that much better.
Right now, the game goes on sale frequently for around 8 dollars as compared to its 25-dollar base price—a must-get for the hours upon hours of enjoyment you get from the game. All in all, Subnautica, even after 12 years, is a must-play, especially after the release of Subnautica 2, the continuation of the game. This is by far the best game within its genre and a 5-star game even with its flaws.
