It’s our pleasure to announce our first ever guest spot! Long time friend of the GCR crew, didithecoolest, brings us her review of Subnautica.
// Point 1: Water is wet
In a game where the whole point is that there’s no land, I have to address the most obvious part of the environmental design: the water.
While most games throw a water level in to challenge and frustrate their players (looking at you sonic), Subnautica decides that drowning is the main mechanic. You spend 99% of this game finding new ways to avoid drowning, in an alien ocean that has no interest in helping you – but somehow this stressful state sucks you in like a whirlpool.
I was playing the revamped PS5 version of the game, which originally came out in 2014 (I was busy ok?), and honestly the physics underwater hold up. From dropped items and loot slowly sinking or floating once you let go, to zipping around in vehicles – I always had the feeling of being underwater. The 3D movement of your character becomes even more apparent once you acquire an early-game vehicle, the seaglide, which lets you jet around and dive out of the water for a delightful way to traverse the environment.
In the rare instances you find yourself out of the water, you immediately miss the freedom of the movement. Your character cannot jump, and you can barely climb over small ledges and hills in the dry environments (you also take heavy damage falling off of these surfaces). I found myself annoyed while exploring the few dry areas, hoping I could speed through these to get back into the water.
// Point 2: The fishy freaks
This game really had fun with their monster and creature designs, from adorable hoverfish to terrifying leviathans, this world felt vibrant and genuinely threatening at times. One key aspect in the designs was the scale and size of predators. From tiny leech-like annoyances to whale sized carnivores chasing you down, variety is what added a realistic touch to the game.
The humble hoverfish
This guy, I mean look at him. An adorable smile, flippers that let him glide and hover underwater? This creature is halfway between an axolotl and a newt, mixing the cutest parts of both creatures to make it into the standout fish for me.
It’s for good reason that these fish became my main food source. Not only do they have a friendly face I could admire in my alien tank, they were also one of the more filling options in Subnautica.
While their cuteness did make me feel guilty at times…
Now for the freaks.
Warpers
This is a creature bred of pure hate. These guys cost me many, many resources and vehicles. With the ability to teleport the player out of their vehicle to STAB them, these guys are the worst. If you manage to scan these guys in between stabs, your PDA even informs you that these aren’t fully organic.. which makes it a literal killing machine.
Credit where credit is due, the creators of this game nailed the aesthetics of these half-mechanical creatures designed to hunt down your character. Their hits pack a punch, and with no weapon to quickly deal with them, I often opted for the easiest solution – running away as fast as possible.
Reapers
The leviathan you are most likely to meet in the start of the game, these guys are vicious, strong and fast. Not only are they attracted to light and movement (aka you) they are also persistent. Not once, but thrice I thought I had escaped one of these bastards by driving my vehicle at top speed for hundreds of meters, only for its jaws to clamp down on my seamoth (RIP Seamoths 1 through 3). Their stubborn chasing combined with their roars was enough to put me on edge when venturing into unexplored areas, as being killed right as I reached an important objective was a real possibility if I was unlucky enough.
Half ocean snake, half insect inspired face, the design of reapers gives players a clear warning: turn back now (or don’t, we don’t care if you get eaten).
While I could have written about all of the leviathans and other predators, I think it’s best I leave the rest for curious readers to experience by themselves. While this game is over a decade old, I had managed to avoid any sort of spoilers about it, and half the fun is (usually by being mauled) discovery!
// Point 3: The colours of fear
This game is not a graphical wonder, the visuals are standard enough for the 2014 release. However, the clever use of colour and light make this a point in my review. The amount of light dispersed through each area, the visibility, and the colour choices make each area in this game feel distinct.
Some areas like the shallows are vibrant, with lots of colourful fish, plants and coral giving the starting area a tropical feel. The real dangers start appearing in the other, typically darker environments – like the kelp forests. These feature long kelp strands, making everything green as the light filters in. Once night, you realize that the kelp seeds glow, providing a little light as you get lost in the forest.
In the deeper areas, the lack of light leaves you suspended in a dark blue space during the day, turning black at nighttime. The deepest areas are pitch black – aside from the areas which have bioluminescent plants and fish that bring an ethereal look. In the darkest areas, you also become acutely aware of how much light your equipment emits – sometimes these lights were so blinding I found it easier to navigate using the natural light coming from the fish and plants on the ocean floor.
Along with each environmental change also came a change in the threats – the limited visibility in some areas made them particularly tense to navigate, as a wrong turn in murky waters could lead you face to face with a large predator whose colours blended in until it was too late.
The environment, along with a fun instrumental soundtrack created an immersive experience. I would go from calmly collecting resources to fleeing an area as quickly as I could when I heard a roar or a sudden change in the music. By the end of my playthrough, I could tell from each noise what was approaching me, and how screwed I was.
// Point 4: The plot thickens
As I mentioned before this game has been around for a while, but I had not heard much about it in terms of game play and much less about the story. If you want to go in blind, feel free to stop reading here, but you may already have an idea of what’s going on here.
You land on this planet in an escape pod, a survivor of the Aurora – a ship that has just crashed into a sandbar nearby. Your handy dandy Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) system gets you started on procuring basic items such as food and water, and you begin to explore the shallow area your pod landed in.
Your escape pod conveniently has a radio built in, which receives various signals throughout your play through. The most interesting is definitely the ones you start receiving from a merchant ship trying to reach the Aurora after they received a brief distress signal. The voice acting in the various radio messages and PDA recordings was surprisingly good. I was expecting to read through each entry, but was happy to hear the different voice actors throughout the game.
A few hours in, you may start to notice that some of the fish are uh…weirder looking than others, and for good reason. By eating one of these infected specimens, you develop an illness, threatening your survival even more than the predators and the risks of drowning, starvation and dehydration.
While the story is very generic, it lends itself well to the survival genre so I had no issue with following it along to guide my exploration. From seeking out information about this strange planet and how your ship actually crashed onto it, you learn about people who did not survive the crash through leftover PDAs and abandoned pods.
Eventually, you find yourself equipped to go deeper, and that’s when things start to get interesting. Alien artifacts, structures and resources litter the deeper areas of the space you can explore. Slowly, you unravel the mysteries of who used to inhabit the planet (other than fish), why they’re gone, and why they’re at fault for your ship’s crash. The resolution of the game is predictable, but I still found myself enjoying it, finding satisfaction in building up my escape rocket and eventually leaving the planet behind.
