Subnautica

Subnautica is a survival game that puts you in the place of a stranded space traveler on an ocean planet. Survival is a somewhat controversial genre that a whole lot of people despise or just don't give a damn about, so you may have just knee jerked into closing this review. I'd love to tell you: "Hey wait a minute and listen to me, Subnautica is barely the kind of survival game you're thinking of!". I desperately want to tell you: "What if you had Metroid's level of atmosphere, but underwater?". I would actually say it's almost closer to a walking (swimming?) simulator with survival chores tacked onto it more than anything (which is not an insult, walking simulators are really cool). It certainly wants to be that kind of minimal survival game. But I'd be a damned liar if I said that.

The Game

 The survival elements are rather light on the surface, and it features minimal combat (beautifully excused by your corporate overlords disabling weapon production on all 3d printers after a massacre in a similar survival situation). Gaining resources is primarily a matter of picking things up (as opposed to more elaborate mining systems or combat challenges the genre trends towards), getting new technology is a matter of finding or scanning things you find in the environment. A few other survival elements also exist (needing to eat/drink, repairing equipment after use with batteries, powering your base to operate equipment, etc) but most of them quickly fade away into minor chores after upgrades. 

 The real core loop of Subnautica is just about going to new places, finding upgrades in them, creating those upgrades with gathering you did along the way, and then using those upgrades to go to even more new places (your traversal mechanics getting shook up slightly along the way). The only real omnipresent survival element is that the places you explore will almost always be on a time limit of your oxygen supply, but it's really more of a flavor timer than anything since resupplying at a safe point is rather trivial.

 The terrible, terrible problem of Subnautica is just that it didn't cut down the survival genre enough. In particular, the dreaded scourge of the genre is in full force: inventory management. If you're unfamiliar with it, Minecraft basically established that inventories have to be terrible chores where you have to move items into chests between runs. Lots and lots of chests. It's a genre staple that has stuck around for good reason because it gives purpose to player's bases (if you can carry everything then why have a base, other than for crafting stations). Even more importantly, the need to organize things (ie, put the gold and silver in their own chest) is a facsimile of how people organize their actual homes in real life, creating a sense of place. While annoying, plenty of games have done a good job minimizing the annoyance while maximizing the flavor it creates.

 Subnautica does the opposite and maximizes the annoyance instead. Specifically, it defies genre standards by not letting you stack items of any kind. While it's very generous with the number of slots in your inventory and chests to compensate for it, it makes transferring items between chests an enormous chore. The first problem this creates is just that the game will ask you to transfer your main storage multiple times: first because you built your base in a really stupid shallow spot where your vehicles can't easily get into. Then because you only start out with being able to build small tubes, so when you finally find the recipe to make a big room you end up with a big chore of hauling things around. Then the game will do this again when it introduces a mobile base where you can store everything if you choose to do so (of course said mobile base has a number of limitations where you will occasionally still need a normal base to do certain things anyway). I didn't actually exercise most these options, opting to store my crap in the tiny annoying tube base rather than moving it over and over again (and using the mobile base as a secondary base instead of a primary). So that's a real hassle.

The second problem not having stacking creates is just that it makes it hard to stockpile things (until very late in the game where you get said mobile base, then it just becomes a nightmare to transfer your stockpile without taking multiple trips). Unless you go back to base every single time you hit your inventory limit, you will constantly be leaving resources behind. Sometimes I left things behind just because my chest for that thing was full and I didn't have a great place to put another chest of those things in my tiny tube base. This limitation was almost certainly a design choice, because the result is that you will constantly be be running out of things and going "ugh I'm out of this, time to go back to that biome that has them". And sometimes this design choice worked out really well with me discovering something I missed the last time, or a new area along the way. But mostly it created a certain chafing annoyance every time I thought about starting the game up again. The apex of this is the final thing you have to build in the game: it only tells you the resources you need for each stage of building it, so it's impossible to create a shopping list ahead of time. The end result is that I had to go back and forth (a several minute trip of just heading forward) to the endgame area like 5 or 6 times to build the final thing since I would inevitably have not brought enough for the next stage of building. While some of this can be mitigated with smart base positioning (or just obsessive gathering even if you don't think you'll need something again), it's easy to screw it up without foreknowledge.

And let me be clear here. I think Wind Waker's sailing (the thing everyone complains about as being too slow) has the best sense of adventure a game has ever accomplished. I thought the treasure map quest in Wind Waker was a good time and I hated that subsequent re-releases cut it down (I almost tried playing the Japanese version to see the longer version of it!). I think Death Stranding, a game about walking back and forth to places delivering packages, was the best game released in 2019. So when I say that Subnautica is filled with way too much tedious back and forth travel caused by a crummy inventory system, I really mean it. 

The World

The actual appeal of the game is the world. Underwater settings are woefully underrepresented (likely due to early 3d attempts at swimming controls ending in tragedy), but Subnautica completely nails the feeling of exploring an alien ocean in isolation. It's not even that the art design dazzles you with exotic glowing plants and alien one-eyed fish, contrasted by the player's sleek futuristic vessels. It's that in the same way that Red Dead Redemption had exactly the right "wood creaking under cowboy boots" sounds that movies have trained us to expect, Subnautica has all the right creaks and groans of an underwater base, and the creepy moans of giant things we definitely don't want to encounter. The deeply atmospheric soundtrack that kicks in sparingly takes you the rest of the way to traveling to this alien planet.

The story has a pretty minimal approach, primarily driven by distress signals you get on your radio, and cliche voice logs of the other survivors you find scattered about. What makes it work is that it twists and goes past your expectations just enough to excite your imagination. Looking back on it after finishing it, it isn't that impressive from a distance, but in the moment it's exciting. Scanning the fauna and learning about the planet's ecosystem is also delightful, though I wish the game paused your oxygen counter while reading.

Topping it off is the game's brilliant way of handling exploration. Rather than uncovering a map, you get beacons you can place that the game will point you towards at all times. This is a perfect balance of letting you find your way back to important places while still making it easy to get lost in the world. It's also sized tastefully enough that every point of interest in the game is generally at least a little unique, and traversing the entire map isn't too exhausting. The only real mark against it is that the game uses distress signals too heavily, directing you to most of the important locations in the game ahead of time, which can rob you of a sense of discovery. It's also a minor technical mess with tons of world pop-in, fish flying into rocks and clipping through things, getting warped into a rock by an attacker, etc. These things are understandable given the scope of the game relative to the team's size, but it does hurt the game's strongest assets.

As much as I spent most of this review complaining about the survival mechanics, they also add a certain something to the pacing of discovering the world. A certain something to the sense of danger to the world. Excitement when you finally find what you need to go deeper, but also irritation when you feel like you're looking for a needle in a haystack. So would I recommend that you play Subnautica? Yes, especially if you're into atmospheric games about exploring things. But with a very heavy caveat that you need a stomach for terrible inventory systems and other such nuisances. I generally like survival games and backtracking, but this game was too much for me several times (so much so that I quit playing it the first time and only came back to it later. And frankly, I'm not sure it was worth going back to finish it.). It's a world worth exploring, even if you don't see all of it.