Pooka's Tl;Dr : Subnautica

SUBNAUTICA

     I'll be the first to admit that I can be difficult to please. I have a slavish devotion to games that have wholly captured my imagination, and to be honest, I'd rather spend quite a bit of time on a few genuinely great games than only spend enough time to get a surface level understanding of a game. My trust is hard to earn, easy to lose, and I sour quickly to concepts that aren't realized well on its early iterations.
I tell you all of this, dear reader, because despite the fact that the concepts of both early access and the survival/crafting genre as a whole have both yielded more colossal disappointments than success stories, I am about to strongly recommend a survival/crafting game that hit early access three years ago, and is only being released in its complete retail 1.0 form in a week. 

   
    To be fair, I've only been watching Subnautica since early 2017. One of the few friends I trust well enough to listen to their game recommendations let me play his copy, an ancient build that hadn't been updated since the year previous. Even then, I could already see the potential in what had made its way into my hands. The game began rather abruptly, and could be summed up thusly: "You've crashed on an alien planet that's pretty much all ocean. You have no idea where you are, if anyone else is alive, or how to get help. Oh, and your escape pod's on fire. Aaaaaaaand, go."
...
...It was everything I could have hoped for. But let's back up a second and talk about WHY Subnautica can get away with throwing you directly into the fire.
     We've grown used to the idea of tutorials and intro-stages that are essentially little boot camps that teach you how the game's various systems and mechanics work, before thrusting you into the game proper. How intrusive and boring these tutorials can be varies from developer to developer and from game to game, but in the case of Subnautica, what we have is a game that gives you a gentle nudge at the outset, and pretty much nothing else. To quote Westworld: "Figuring out how it works is half the fun!"
   Before we go on I should mention that Subnautica's treacherous sandbox is, notably, not procedurally generated. While this does mean that, no, you won't be exploring an infinite sandbox that changes from one playthrough to another, what you gain in exchange is a beautifully crafted, complex, densely populated game world that is fill-packed with content for you to discover. You're not going to get wrecked by bad RNG, and if your survival tactics and long-term strategies aren't paying off, you can relax and be confident that the problem is with your approach, not with the game arbitrarily screwing you over. What's more, as a consequence, when you finally gear up and push into new depths and discover a new biome, you'll know it's because of the effort you put in, not because of some random stroke of luck. And those biomes, by the way? Some of them are flat-out breathtaking. I ended up building an extra Forward Operating Base in the Mushroom forest, just because I could.

     This brings me into what might be my favorite part of the experience, which is just how incredibly well realized the entire experience is. The game gives you no overt objectives, and yet you almost always understand what you're supposed to be working towards, and why. Your character may ostensibly want to pursue the next goal out of a  desire to survive and escape this watery planet, but what that entails is going and doing exactly the things you, as a player, *bought this game* to do: explore this incredible world. If it feels like you're stuck, it's probably because you haven't explored the places you're capable of reaching, or playing a little too safe when your survival is dependent on your willingness to take calculated risks. You kind of have to channel your inner Matt Damon (The Martian) and Tom Hanks (Castaway) and accept that to survive, you're probably going to have to take a few chances. Luckily, there's so much to discover, that your efforts are nearly always rewarded, either by finding hidden goodies, new upgrade blueprints, abandoned bases, or whole new biomes to explore, filled with interesting new terrain, features, and life-forms, which, cross my heart, I swear, are not all trying to kill you.
    The process feels almost seamless in its satisfying gameplay loop: Exploration yields new crafting blueprints and resources to stockpile, stockpiling resources yields new crafting potential, and crafting increases your survivability, and opens up new potential for exploration. Then, every so often throughout your loop, you'll stumble across (or be forced into) plot-advancing events or information that can force you to rapidly adapt to a suddenly more urgent or desperate scenario, which isn't even taking into account the numerous organic ways by which emergent gameplay can create those desperate "Will I make it out of this alive?" moments that drag you out of your comfort zone and stick you in a situation where you can either adapt, or die. Those moments are made all the more effective juxtaposed with the deceptively calm hours you'll spend gathering resources and improving your bases and equipment.

     Despite the fact that the game is ostensibly about escaping the planet, everything about the game's mechanics is ingeniously designed to extend the time you'll spend plunging its abyssal depths. You can't clear out dangerous biomes of all of their massive predators, because the game provides an in-universe, in-context reason for never giving you weapons that can permanently kill the creatures lurking in its waters. This drastically shifts the focus away from any kind of real combat, instead making you focus on evading and outsmarting the alien wildlife, and defending yourself when  you get busted. This has the effect of keeping you feeling vulnerable and on your toes, right where the game wants you, for maximum effect.

     Given that I've already gushed about the brilliance of the game design for literally the entirety of this essay, it may seem like a formality to discuss how beautiful this game's art direction and graphical presentation are, but there it is. This alien world bursts with color and light, luring you into its black depths slowly and seductively, until you're surrounded with nothing but the inky black and silence of the deepest, most treacherous depths. The sound design is pitch-perfect, and since threats can come at you from literally any angle, you'll want to be playing this with a good set of headphones, with good directional sound. Audio cues clue you into the presence of predators, you'll often swim past pods of whales singing deep, beautiful songs, and your AI companion is never short of one more quip about your chances of survival. Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful.

Tl;Dr : Subnautica is lightning in a bottle. It is perhaps the greatest iteration to come out of the survival genre, in a wholly original setting, beautifully realized, well supported, and whose gameplay will grab hold of your sense of wonder and ride it all the way through to your escape. There are mysteries to solve, wonders to behold, and challenges that will test your survival instincts to the limit. Good luck!

-Pooka

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