Your foundational resource is not wood, but titanium, found by breaking outcrops of rock hidden in the twisting coral reef where the game starts. There is no wood to chop, no deer to hunt, and no land to walk on as far as the eye can see.Ĭonsequently, you can’t rely on assumed knowledge from other survival games to progress, and so both your expectations and your experiences are completely refreshed. However, Subnautica‘s alien world has a completely different ruleset to Earth-bound survival games. You need to eat food and drink water to stay alive, and harvest resources to craft useful items and build structures. Mechanically, Subnautica features all the elements you would expect in a survival game. Your character escapes the fireball via a life-pod, awakening after the descent in some shallow waters near the Aurora’s crash site. It’s onto this planet that your space-cruiser, the Aurora, crash-lands after suffering colossal, unexplained damage. Subnautica whisks its survival story away from deciduous forests to planet 4546-B, an uncharted, presumed uninhabited world covered almost entirely by ocean. Those expectations then fell back into the water and never re-emerged, sinking irretrievably into the abyss of Subnautica‘s unparalleled survival simulation. Then along came Unknown Worlds and blew my expectations of what a survival game could be out of the water.

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The game might have a quirky art-style like Don’t Starve, or a horror emphasis like The Forest, but they were all based upon the same basic principles establish by Minecraft. Before Subnautica, survival games were all about braving the elements in Speedtree-powered forests, chopping down trees to make campfires and lean-tos, hunting animals with flint-tipped spears. That’s what happened to me when I first played Subnauticain 2018. Sometimes a game comes along that’s so good it ruins an entire genre for you.

Subnautica cyclops mobile base