Imagine a film like The Martian or Castaway and the game The Long Dark combined into one: a man lost on a planet he has little information on and he has no one to help him. He must use his wits and surroundings to survive and hopefully escape. But there’s more danger than just starving to death. There are unknown creatures lurking and you’re on a planet with conditions unlike Earth’s. This is Subnautica, a game where you must constantly adapt to your surroundings in order to stay alive.
The game begins with you crash landing in the ocean of an unknown planet and all you have is a small escape pod with some first aid materials and a small crafting table. You must venture out into the ocean, far from shore, and gather as many materials as you can to build survival gear and cook food. The most interesting thing about this game is that the game teaches you how to do pretty much nothing. You have as much knowledge as your actual character does. You feel like this character, the game doesn’t hold your hand or teach you much. It’s up to you to figure everything out. When playing I actually felt like a survivalist, I felt like I was adapting to my surroundings.
Subnautica also does an excellent job of making you feel very cautious of your surroundings. Each creature has a dangerous and unsettling look to it even if they aren’t actually dangerous. I found myself travelling the depths of the ocean very slowly and carefully, unaware of what dangers may lie below. I constantly found myself discovering new dangers to watch out for, some more obvious, some more discreet. Many times I would be swimming through a small cave to find materials to build my submarine, and I would get caught off guard by a plant that would shoot out a small explosive projectile. It caused me to scream out loud a few times honestly, but it taught me to never feel safe no matter where I am.
As I played the game, I felt like I was getting more powerful. While the game doesn’t give you a rocket launcher or massive machine gun (which isn’t a bad thing), you get more tools to help you with your survival. For example, since most of your time is spent out in the ocean, you’ll need to craft oxygen tanks and durable scuba gear. Since you need to spend lots of time looking for specific materials, you feel satisfied when you finally craft that special piece of equipment you’ve been trying to make for hours.
While playing the game you need to be aware of many different things such as your health, thirst, hunger, and oxygen. While you can turn the hunger and thirst meter off to make the game a bit more easier on yourself, I highly recommend keeping them on as it makes the game a lot harder and more enjoyable. You feel like much more of a survivor when you are desperately scavenging for food and trying to preserve your food or get other resources out of it. I was pleasantly surprised with the amount of options you have when cooking food, if you have salt you can turn it into jerky to keep it from becoming rotten or inedible, you can turn it into water, or just a regular piece of food to tide you over until you can get salt to make jerky or a bigger fish. It adds more depth to something so simple.
While Subnautica is a great survival game, it has many technical issues that need to be addressed. Since the game is still in preview, it can be forgiven since they will more than likely fix these issues in due time but regardless they should be noted before purchasing the game.
The game suffers from significant frame rate issues. While I don’t know the exact frame rate, the game is very choppy and never looks better than 20 FPS. It can be very jarring and severely affected my enjoyment of the game. The game also suffers from some very rough textures, lots of the fish and creatures in the game look like their textures haven’t fully loaded and the environment looks a bit unfinished. It would’ve been nice if the developers had waited a bit longer to release the game so they could iron out these issues but I am sure they’ll fix these problems within the next few months. I really hope so because Ark: Survival Evolved is still pretty bad on Xbox One with no reprieve in sight.
Overall, Subnautica is one of the best survival games I have ever played. There is so much depth to each feature and it’s incredibly satisfying when you successfully create a new piece of equipment. The world is rich with creatures and materials, some unearthly. With more features to come in the future, I am excited to continue playing Subnautica. The technical issues may cause some annoyance, but under the technical issues is a great experience.
Cade is a games journalist, Gaming Writer at ComicBook.com. They contributed 108 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, and Xbox news: served as Editor-in-Chief at GameZone before joining ComicBook.com.