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.
Sometimes a game comes along that’s so good it ruins an entire genre for you.
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