You are in the middle of the ocean, enveloped in darkness. A huge extraterrestrial species can be seen swimming in the distance. Hell no, you might say to yourself before doing a one-eighty and jumping into the sea.
Subnautica immerses the player in a terrifying yet stunning underwater environment, bringing to life that innate human fear of the unknown. The elevator pitch for Subnautica does not exactly scream contender for Game of the Year. Is it possible to find a crafting survival horror game that is almost completely submerged in water?
In other words, people had reservations. But from the moment your character straps himself into an escape pod of a nose diving spacecraft, only to be left stranded on a strange and unforgiving oceanic planet, the PC phenomenon Unknown Worlds, which debuted on Steam in early 2014 and is now available on PS4 and Xbox One, leaves a lasting impression.
Subnautica – 2018
The setting of Subnautica is a not too distant future. The Aurora, a deep space starship constructed by the Alterra Corporation, was sent on its first mission to a system located in the furthest regions of known space. Its major objective is to build a Phasegate, a component of the high-speed space transit system.
The majority of the crew is unaware of the alternative goal, which is to find and maybe rescue the people from The Degasi, a spacecraft that crashed ten years ago on planet 4546B. As it gets closer to 4546B’s orbit, the Aurora is hit by an unexplained electromagnetic pulse and starts to fall to the planet. Several members of the crew, including Ryley Robinson, the player character, jump into evacuation pods.
The occupants of the other lifepods die for different reasons, leaving Ryley as the sole survivor. Ryley discovers documents indicating that only three members of the Degasi’s crew survived the original crash, but subsequently two of the three are verified deceased and one is presumed dead. Ryley also learns about the Precursors, an old, advanced alien species that arrived on planet 4546B around a thousand years ago in pursuit of a cure for the Kharaa Bacterium, a highly contagious sickness.
Kharaa was discovered by the Precursors while exploring an undiscovered planet, and the sickness spread owing to a quarantine failure, killing over 140 billion people. The Precursors searched thousands of worlds for a cure and eventually discovered a species of organism on 4546B called the Sea Emperor Leviathan that generated an antibody that could treat Kharaa.
The lone surviving Sea Emperor, on the other hand, was too old to manufacture the enzyme in sufficient quantities to have any impact, and the Precursors were unable to force its eggs to hatch. The Precursors seized the egg of a similar species, the Sea Dragon Leviathan, to explore the Sea Emperor’s egg-hatching mechanism, but the mother demolished a Precursor research center and mistakenly discharged traces of Kharaa into the planet’s biosphere.
After being forced to depart, the Precursors activated the Quarantine Enforcement Platform, a massive weapon that shoots on any spacecraft attempting to leave or land on the planet. This weapon was found to be the cause of the Degasi and Aurora disasters. The Sea Emperor, who wants her offspring to be free, talks with Ryley telepathically and assists him in discovering the prison where she is imprisoned.
She instructs Ryley on how to hatch her eggs, which he accomplishes and is healed by an enzyme generated by young Sea Emperors. Ryley then shuts the Quarantine Enforcement Platform (which can only be done by someone who isn’t infected with Kharaa) and builds a rocket using schematics found in the Aurora’s debris. The Sea Emperor talks with Ryley one more time upon fleeing the planet, assuring that the two “go together” regardless of their differences.
Subnautica’s sea legs stretch well above its starting introduction. It’s a brilliant setup, accomplished with finesse and zeal. After the crash, players are able to explore the depths underneath their floating, damaged escape pod, which serves as an apparent base of operations in the early hours of the gameplay. You’ll have to explore your environment, acquire materials, improve and construct new gear, and eventually figure out what happened to your crew while trying to figure out how to get out of this subaquatic nightmare. Subnautica is a complete horror by all means.
While Unknown Worlds does an excellent job of conveying the bioluminescent beauty of life beneath the sea, your sense of wonder and interest will quickly turn to terror as you learn about the creatures and cryptids that live in these same seas. Unknown Worlds plays on the universal dread of not knowing what lurks beneath our feet when swimming in the big blue oceans, thalassophobia(the fear of deep water bodies) is the crutch of the theme.
The same fear you would get while playing games like Amnesia or Outlast, can be experienced while playing Subnautica too, which is engineered and shown to us perfectly. Subnautica’s horror characteristics are further enhanced by the fact that you are sometimes rendered helpless in the face of foes.
Some of the weaker hostiles can be handled with your survival knife or the PRAWN exosuit’s industrial drill, but the ocean’s apex predators are virtually impossible to kill. Your finest weapons for surviving in the perilous depths are alertness, stealth, and diversion. Running the Cyclops submarine on silence while trying to navigate a corridor without alerting the sea monster patrolling is one a task and a half, as you will realize while playing this masterpiece of a game.
The area in the game is massive, with 15 biomes just on the surface. Many of these will be difficult to investigate if you’re scared of the vast areas and poor visibility of the water. An audio cue from your guiding robotic voice, Karen, will play as you enter a new biome.
“This natural biome fulfills 7 of the 9 preconditions for triggering horror in humans,” the voice will remark in the Blood Kelp Zone, one of the surface biomes. The problem is that if players want to obtain certain significant bits, they’ll have to explore it. It’s extremely likely that the first time new gamers come across anything as horrible as this biome, they’ll toss the disk out and never look at Subnautica again.
However, by enveloping the player in an oceanic universe that demands to be explored, this work of art has a way of luring people back in with its spine chilling animals and stunning surroundings. The story’s natural evolution pushes survivors to face an ocean rich with exotic alien organisms, and it also compels you to do so, solo.
Unknown Worlds Entertainment announced Subnautica on December 17, 2013, with Charlie Cleveland as director and lead gameplay programmer and Hugh Jeremy as producer. Cleveland was strongly influenced by Minecraft, which “changed the gaming industry” and “threw away all traditional challenge and progression driven games,” according to Cleveland. The release of Minecraft coincided with the publication of Natural Selection 2 by Unknown Worlds.
The crew was burned out and wanted to try something different, so they decided to create such a game. Other influences included scuba diving, James Cameron’s cinematography, and “Simply the sensation of exploring the ocean’s deep, dark, alternatively beautiful and terrifying depths. I’m feeling like an explorer, nearly an astronaut, and I’m not sure what I’ll discover “.
Cleveland initially saw it as an exploration game rather than a survival game. Unlike many other survival games, which abandon narrative in favor of more freeform playground action, Subnautica’s tale is a well-written, surprisingly well-acted sci-fi mystery that encourages you to play long past the 30-hour mark. The radio in your escape pod is a constant supply of side tasks that help you piece together a narrative thread, keeping the game moving forward by drip-feeding contextual knowledge and dramatic revelations that deepen your grasp of the universe and its many secrets.
Subnautica’s terrestrial environment doesn’t look as beautiful as its oceanic counterpart, with flat, ugly textures that reduce the game’s production values to Steam shovelware levels. Fortunately, you won’t be spending much time on land in Subnautica, and their story-driven nature makes the expeditions a little more bearable, especially as a break from the horrors beneath the water.
Once fully produced, the images and graphics are striking and expressive. The variety of extraterrestrial life hits a mix between allusions to known marine creatures and alien oddity that made us want to swim up close and personal with even the tiny fish and crustaceans. This sometimes ended in a bite to the face, but in general, a creature’s shape and sound tell you everything you need to know at a look.
Predators have sleek outlines and prominent teeth, whereas less scary fauna has a more inviting design that reflects its place in the ecosystem. Furthermore, the game’s music design is both gorgeous and scary. The biomes often have their own sounds that will have you flinching and peeking behind your back, ranging from increasing, cheerful music to absolute quiet. The most deadly biomes are frequently devoid of sound except for the hushed roars of nearby Leviathans, creating a terrifying mood.
Subnautica is a game that immerses players in a large underwater world full with bizarre species and gripping storylines. It’s a remarkable piece of game design that will live on in the hearts and imaginations of millions of players around the world. Itis a model for how open-world survival games should be made.
From the surface to the seabed, it’s fanciful, fresh, and terrifying, with a tale that kept shocking the people, and a cast of aquatic monsters that truly haunts dreams. Even after more than 50 hours, I still haven’t figured out all of the game’s mysteries. It’s a measure to how alluring those mysteries are that players willing to overcome their concerns and repeatedly plummet their submersible pods into the deepest recesses of the ocean’s merciless abyss.
Subnautica: Below Zero (2019)
You’re in luck if you’re looking for more underwater adventure. Subnautica: Below Zero, a new icy chapter from Unknown Worlds Entertainment, is now available. Subnautica: Below Zero is an underwater survival game in which interesting diversions frequently derail even the best-laid plans.
We arrive on planet 4546B as scientist Robin Ayou to look for her long-lost sister, Sam, but our first objective is to stay warm, fed, and hydrated (and making beacons). The early hours are spent hunting for fish and garbage to keep alive and fashion rudimentary equipment, starting with nothing more than an underwater linen closet with a fabricator and a tiny storage container.
There is no combat; just survival is possible. Below Zero takes place on the mostly submerged alien world of 4546B some time after the events of Subnautica and depicts a more personal and emotional story. As a sassy, feisty xenobiologist on the lookout for her sister, who was declared deceased in an accident by the Alterra business.
And what kind of knucklehead believes a faceless megacorporation will tell the truth in the future? There are more bizarre, alien puzzles to solve, including a lot more information about the mysterious Architects. All of this is accompanied by outstanding voice acting that will take you down a bread crumb trail to the truth.
You’ll get to unlock and play with latest tech like the spy pengling, an adorable little robot that can access areas Robin can’t. As you track down uninhabited Alterra facilities and piece together what happened using context clues and voice logs, you’ll get to unlock and play with new technology like the spy pengling, an adorable little robot that can access areas Robin can’t.
Combat is still restricted, particularly in the water, but this is by design. If you could merely strap a machine gun to your suit, Subnautica would lose a lot of its sense of danger. It’s a lot more exciting to have to sneak past or escape the gigantic ice worms and sea creatures that protect several important story places and resources. Subnautica: Below Zero has planet 4546B on its side, despite the fact that the formula has been done to death over the last decade.
It’s a lovely area to explore, full with vibrant landscapes that each yield a unique mix of raw minerals. You swim between crystalline icebergs, mazes of coral passageways, and colorful cave networks, evaluating the risk of suffocation against the possibility of oxygen plants in the next chamber. While the overall theme is exploration and expansion, there are strong narrative hooks that pull at you from time to time, whether it’s the secret of your sister’s disappearance or the willingness to expel that alien AI from your brain, and all these prompts towards larger questions and riddles weave neatly through your survival rituals.
Unknown Worlds’ art direction, on the other hand, continues to wow. You’ll be overwhelmed with awe as you cross the tangled pathways of the Twisty Bridges or swim with strange wales in the Fallen Lily Pads, with various new land and aquatic biomes to explore. Each place and creature has such a distinct character because to the use of color and shape, with immediately recognized and unforgettable silhouettes for major landmarks and creatures. It’s simply a lovely, lovely game.
The harsh texture pop-in from the original Subnautica appears to have vanished, however it can still be found in a few places, such as at the edges of icebergs. The sound design and music are also as fantastic as they’ve always been. When you can hear the distant sounds of gigantic marine life forms and the bubbling of your rebreather through the shimmering gloom, the chilly, oppressive, yet beckoning sense of the Arctic sea comes alive.
You’ll certainly get to the stage where you can close your eyes and construct an approximate mental map of what kind of critters are nearby, including their relative position and distance – which is not only handy but also really astounding that it’s feasible at all in such a massive, 3D area.
Subnautica: Below Zero is a huge, chilly mouthful of one of the best open-world survival games since the genre’s debut. It may not be as large as the original, but each trench, cave, and vicious shark-squid-thing has so much style and substance that it’s difficult to criticize. New vehicles, new devices, and overall technical performance masterfully complete out the experience. You’ll not be disappointed, whether you were starving for more Subnautica, or had no idea what you’re in for.