The same goes for collecting construction resources. You'll never dread having to collect food and water to sustain your character, but you also won't feel it's so easy that the mechanic itself is pointless. You might not suffer from thalassophobia or submechanophobia, but you'll certainly experience what that's like while exploring Subnautica's alien depths.Īlong with the hand-crafted, painstakingly detailed landscape and geometry, Subnautica nearly perfects survival game mechanics that are almost always far more tedious than fun. There hasn't been a game that leverages and plays with draw distance better than Subnautica. It's not even a horror game in the slightest, but you'll have a tingle in your spine for the majority of the time you play, even when you know you're safe. Subnautica's atmosphere is right up there with Silent Hill 2 and BioShock, its environment the most (and far more) alien and fantastical since something like Oblivion's Shivering Isles. Survival games tend to go with procedural generation in order to (lazily) create 'new' content, but you can't teach an algorithm art direction. Don't worry, they look great in their natural biomes.)Ĭhoosing to craft the landscape by hand was a genius move. Pop in some headphones, press play, close your eyes, and imagine yourself swimming alone through a dark abyss. (Disclaimer: the creatures in the video are spawned in via console commands, and that's why they don't match their surroundings. You can check out some of the more terrifying sounds below. The result: the level of immersion in Subnautica is unreal, from the dazzling art direction to the often terrifying soundscape. Rare for a survival game, Unknown Worlds chose to focus on atmosphere and narrative, deciding to go with a brilliantly hand-crafted landscape instead of the genre's usual, tired procedural generation. First, Subnautica has created one of the best atmospheres and detailed worlds in the history of gaming, and second, it has dispensed with or perfected many of the tedious and uninspired tropes of the genre. Two design decisions have pushed Subnautica far beyond, for instance, the limited environment of farming sims like Stardew Valley, the vast exploration of games like No Man's Sky, and the intricate base-building of games like Starbound and Terraria.

Subnautica game type