Fish Are Friends AND Food

When I was a child the first video game I ever owned was Pokemon. I knew there were 150(+1) of the things, but that was about all I knew. Every new cave, every new bush was exciting; when the screen went black and that chipper chiptune started beeping out of my Game Boy, I never knew what I was going to see. That wonder, that sense of a surprise lurking around every corner, animated my journey and colored all of my subsequent adventures.

It’s been years since I’ve had that thrill. The Internet is full of spoilers. It lays everything out for you: every plot twist, every secret, every strategy meticulously dissected. Even if you don’t go looking for spoilers, the knowledge that they’re out there hangs over you, and it can be mightily tempting when you’re stuck to go looking.

I didn’t think I’d ever be able to recapture the sense of wonder and exploration Young Me felt during those idle hours wandering Kanto. I was pleasantly surprised, therefore, by Unknown Worlds’ excellent Subnautica.

Subnautica puts you in the swim fins of an unnamed passenger on the starship Aurora. The Aurora crashes in a vast, shallow ocean, and you manage to escape in a survival pod. You’re alive and unhurt, but your tiny home is bobbing in the middle of an enormous alien sea. You have little food, little water, and basically no tools bar one: a fabricator that can render down raw materials into supplies and machines.

So your journey begins. The sea is warm, the air breathable, the wildlife plentiful. There are no quests and no NPCs. There is no looming threat, aside from the possibility of starvation or thirst. The game drops you in the pool and says “have fun swimming!”

I picked some seeds from swaying fronds of kelp, rendered them down into rubber and made myself a pair of swim fins. I picked up metal scraps from the crash, turned them into titanium ingots and forged myself a survival knife and a scanner. Many hours later, I’m putting the finishing touches on my seabase and setting out for excursions in my personal submarine. That’s how these games go: hand-gathered materials turn into simple tools, simple tools craft complex tools, and with complex tools, you can do just about anything.

If that was all this was — another gathering-crafting game, in the vein of Minecraft or Terraria — it would be nothing to write home about. What sets Subnautica apart is, quite simply, its beauty. The ocean is divided into numerous distinct biomes, each with their own flora and fauna, their own threats and secrets and hidden islands of beauty. There’s terror, too; as you dive into the Stygian abyss, the hunting cries of leviathan predators echo all around you, and their vast shadows loom out of the clouds of silt and dust. It may be easier to stick to the shallows, but without delving into the caves and trenches on the seafloor you’ll never figure out how to get home.

What story there is unfolds gradually and organically as your exploration of wrecks and crash sites yields up PDAs. These voice records color the backstory of the Aurora, the other survivors, and those unlucky few who came before. The more you explore, the more strange and unexplained phenomena you find; there’s something going on here, something more than just an ocean planet with an unfortunate history of crashes, and until you figure out what, you’re stuck.

Subnautica has something for everyone. You can sit there building a sealab that would make Captain Murphy proud, filling it with water filtration machines and moonpools and bioreactors until you’ve got a self-sustaining ecosystem that could last forever. But who wants to sit on the ocean floor until you go mad with loneliness? You can putter around forever in your submarine or armored diving suit, exploring every last inch of the map. You can scan every lifeform you find and build up an exhaustive almanac. You can even actually try to get away. But where’s the fun in that?

I’ve always been a bit afraid of deep, dark water. I imagine the monstrous creatures swimming below me. All fanged mouths and luminous eyes, watching my tiny pink feet churn through the water… it gives me the heebie jeebies just thinking about it. Oddly, I loved Subnautica. Maybe that’s because you’re never helpless. You aren’t just paddling on the surface waiting to be eaten, you’re diving deep with your knife and your flashlight. You can’t really kill the sea monsters (and even if you could, there are always more of them), but you don’t have to. That’s not what the game is about. It’s about making your peace with the ocean and taking what you need. And turning it into a giant kickass submarine.

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