subnautica below zero wiki story progression

However, what I particularly liked about Subnautica was that it still had just enough sharp edges to give it some bite. This was to be expected, as it had had the benefit of over two years in early access when I got around to playing it. So Subnautica already struck me as quite a streamlined, polished survival game. Subnautica bucks genre expectations yet again by actually having an ending to its story, and one which you won’t have to put dozens of hours into the game in order to see - I completed it in just over twenty hours, which is the perfect length for the sort of game Subnautica is. There is an excellent sense of progression through Subnautica, which is important because the existence of progression implies that you’re actually going somewhere. The way new technology unlocked the ability to survive in ever-deeper areas reminded me quite pleasantly of Metroid, and while the actual survival mechanics in game (food and water meters that slowly tick down) were totally bog-standard and uninteresting to manage, in terms of the exploration Subnautica did at least grasp a core tenet of the genre that I feel a lot of survival games miss: once mastery of a thing has been displayed the game should offer tools to make doing that thing much much easier - or even automate it away entirely - while introducing new challenges for the player to deal with. It almost exclusively focused on the exploration of underwater environments with technologically-advanced equipment, as opposed to having me punch trees to get wood to make a stone axe for the five millionth time and it also took the unusual decision to have that underwater environment be built by hand instead of procedurally generated, which gave the game some much-needed structure and let it tell a story.

In this review I am going to try and figure out if the words “streamlining” and “compromising” are inevitable synonyms of one another.Īs somebody who generally dislikes survival games, I found the first Subnautica to be a very refreshing departure from genre norms.

Subnautica below zero wiki story progression