BENGALURU: According to its Steam page, Subnautica is an underwater ocean game set in a massive open world full of wonder and peril. That’s true enough, to be fair, but it doesn’t come close to scratching the surface of this game. The game begins with you scrambling into a lifepod and ejecting from a spaceship in orbit around an oceanic planet. As your lifepod descends, you can see explosions on the ship and pieces flying off. After briefly losing consciousness, you wake up to find a fire inside the lifepod.
Having dealt with that, you clamber out of the lifepod to see unbroken water in every (well, almost every) direction. Something that’s immediately noticeable is how little Subnautica gives you in the way of information at the beginning - you don’t know what happened to the ship, you don’t know if anyone else ejected successfully, you don’t even know your character’s name or anything about them. Lots of games are sparing with details at the beginning, but it really does bring home the sense of isolation that Subnautica wants you to feel.
Then you dive into the water, and the game truly begins. Subnautica’s underwater environments may be one of the most spectacular gaming worlds out there - the detail is magnificent, the flora and the fauna are beautifully characterised and you, floating in the middle of it all, feel that magnetic pull to explore, to see more of this underwater realm. Then your PDA starts beeping and points out that you’ll run out of oxygen in a few seconds and you frantically hurtle for the surface. At this point, I should say that you can play Subnautica in multiple modes. Survival, which can be thought of as the default mode, has you take care of your character’s health, oxygen, hunger and thirst.
If that sounds like a little too much of a headache, Freedom Mode eliminates hunger and thirst from the game and Creative Mode essentially removes all requirements, unlocks everything and lets you loose in this sandbox. There’s also Hardcore Mode, where your save file is deleted as soon as you die. I think Survival is probably the best one to play on, striking a balance between the extremes of the others while still retaining all the systems that were developed for the game; however, it is really nice to see that the developers have provided simpler options for people who just want to immerse themselves in this world and explore the story at leisure.
That brings us to the next point, which is that there is actually a story and, in my opinion, a pretty good one. It’s sparse, certainly, and it does need you to go hunting for information through various data downloads and the like; but, at the end, there was both a sense of fulfillment and of loss, which is not usually the case for this sort of game. Subnautica’s been called ‘underwater Minecraft’, for example, but you wouldn’t hear those words associated with the latter, for example.When you start off in Subnautica, your lifepod and the wreck of your former spaceship are literally the only things in the world that you can navigate by. From those beginnings, you’ll slowly broaden your understanding of the environment - you’ll first survive, then you’ll progress, until finally you’ll thrive. That journey is still as compelling as ever, and that’s why Subnautica is a must-play.