Subnautica — Green and Submarine

Backlog Review

Feb 22, 2022

iCastaway

You play as a human castaway on an alien ocean planet who must extract its resources to survive and find a way out of it. That’s the long and short of it. This is a vision of space exploration where a company called Alterra leads several motherships out into the known universe. Alterra’s streamlined, Apple-like devices were designed for many purposes and will eventually enable you to build a spacecraft and launching platform out of several rare and common resources and tools. It will take time and effort to find and gather those resources. The first few hours of Subnautica are the most compelling as you experience the first pangs of discovery.

Extractivism features as a gameplay loop in Subnautica through milestones of access to rarer resources and the tools or vehicle upgrades required to gain that access. Some resources lie deeper and deeper under the volcanic layers of the crater the Alterra ship Aurora crashed into. The submersible vehicles you will (eventually) build require upgrades to their depth capacities or ratings so you can get to those deeper layers.

I try to think of the environment as more than an aggregation of resources. I read texts, play games, watch movies and shows, observing how other species and nonhuman spaces are more than the range and scale of human experiences and representations. And I do this by reading and writing about some of those experiences and representations. Similarly, Subnautica can be experienced as one of those rare survival games where extractivism becomes a medium rather than the message. Through extractivist game mechanics, Subnautica enables you to see the planet as a living entity in itself, though not quite like the planet in Solaris.

Shallow Livin’

First, you’ll be stuck with a cosy lifeboat and you were lucky to land on the safe shallows area of this crater, unlike other crew members of the Aurora whom you will hear from through the radio. The mechanics right off the boat involve swimming around and collecting units of titanium, copper, gold, coral samples, mushrooms, etc, so you can use a fabricator in the lifeboat to craft a knife, a flashlight, a scanner, and a variety of tools that will make your long-term underwater survival possible. You can fabricate most of the early tools within a few hours by exploring the shallows area.

Some of the carnivorous species in this area can and will hurt you, but they won’t kill you if you stay away. However, as you venture deeper and further, you will soon run into one particular megafauna species that you should be wary of, especially if you play with headphones on. The first time you hear the growl of a Reaper Leviathan should make you at least a teensy bit apprehensive.

Here be Facehugging Mega Sharks

Subnautica never rushes you or railroads you into its storyline. The safe shallows area has more than enough to keep you going for hours if you just take the time to explore all its nooks and corners. The storyline is there and it stays there, but if you’d rather spend hours learning about each animal or plant species, or accumulating resources so you can build a bigger base, have at it. For many hours, I avoided the storyline and just explored carefully, taking the time to upgrade my tools and vehicles as much as possible. At this point, I also wished the game would never end. That’s a rare feeling.

Many games are something you want to ‘beat’ and wrap up so you can move on to another game in your backlog. Even if you love playing them, you want that feeling of completion, of having accomplished something. Not with Subnautica. It’s almost invasive in its immersion and how it keeps you going as you look for that one resource unit you need to upgrade this or fabricate that. As you venture deeper into its biomes to find the missing blueprints and ingredients, the more awe you will feel.

The fear of going deeper is your real enemy, not the leviathan class organisms, as your AI assistant calls them. They will eat you and destroy your vehicles, but that’s what any toothed predator would do in that situation. Soon you learn to play with them, even knife them to death if you want to, but why would you? It’s much more fun to use the stasis rifle to make it sit like a good boy.

A screenshot of the game Subnautica showing a Reaper Leviathan fossil lying 670m deep on oceanic rock floor of planet 4546B, seen through the inside of the Seamoth vehicle HUD. — Even their skulls look angry.

Survival, what is it good for?

Some survival games would have you hunting down bigger and bigger species to extract their resources. Think ARK: Survival Evolved and other survival games in that niche. That’s extractivism for its own sake. We also know that Unknown Worlds Entertainment made a point of not including guns in Subnautica. The knife can be used for both resource extraction and killing animals, but you don’t have ranged weapons or guns to kill them. That makes a world of difference in this genre.

To be clear, I have no problem with gamers enjoying ARK, shooters, guns, or any violent game. We can enjoy games despite the critical views we develop over the years. It’s no different than driving a car and eating meat while understanding the environmental cost. And we embrace the gaming medium fully aware that it comes from an industry rife with labour exploitation, sexual harassment and sexism, and a multitude of issues on top of its own environmental cost. Just to be clear.

Instead, Subnautica subtly asks the player: do you just want to kill things for resources… or do you want to know more about this planet? Some players probably abandon the game once they realize the mechanics are different from other survival games. Only those who stay learn the story of the advanced facilities left by the Precursor species. Few games match this combination of mystery and awe as you unravel the planet’s history in Subnautica.

A screenshot of the game Subnautica seen from the inside of the Cyclops submarine vehicle moving on dark oceanic rock floor of planet 4546B. — My first glimpse of the Primary Containment Facility.

Classic Castaway

The fragments and ruins left by other human survivors from the past took me back to reading and rereading an adaptation of Robinson Crusoe as a kid. It’s a novel that envisioned survival as a craft, as the gathering of tools and resources to guarantee not only long-term survival but comfort and peace away from civilization. If he is unable to find a way back to civilization, Crusoe aims to thrive in a civilization of his own. The sole survivor of the Aurora is free to stay and thrive by exploring and extracting. And once you build your spaceship, there is only a cutscene left in the game, so you might as well stay…

There is one story that stayed with me. The audio logs of Paul Torgal, his son Bart, and a mercenary, Marguerit Maida, all former employees of Alterra. They are the lone survivors of the Degasi, another ship that crashed on the planet. There are several logs by Torgal, his son, and Maida, but I want to go over Paul Torgal’s Log #3.

Came out of nowhere. An alien kraken, bigger than a Cyclops. Tore a hole clear through the reinforced hull. I barely got my breather in time. I told her. I said others would come.
The rupture threw me clear of the habitat, and the monster turned and bore down on me. Just as its tentacles came within reach, Maida appeared out of nowhere. She had a seaglide in one hand, a jagged piece of scrap metal in the other. She meant to butcher that beast, or die trying. The last I saw her she had the metal lodged in its neck as the monster did its best to shake her, contorting off into the darkness. I'm certain she got her wish, one way or another.
Then I thought I saw a light, deep below me. I hoped maybe Bart had swum clear. I followed it. Now I wonder whether I saw anything at all. My oxygen is low. The habitat is gone. I can't see the sky. Something surely has the scent of my blood.

Out of Time Capsules

Then there are the time capsules left by other players. Kojima claimed he invented the ‘stranding’ mechanic in Death Stranding where players can share or drop items or resources in a persistent game world. In Subnautica, players shoot time capsules as they leave the planet, and other players might find them while exploring the deepest nooks and corners of the planet. Some contain useful items, but I enjoy just reading their messages and thoughts, or the way they roleplay their characters.

A screenshot of the game Subnautica showing a time capsule designed by the company Alterra deep in the Grand Reef biome of planet 4546B, seen through the player's breathing suit. — “Hey dude, sorry I missed you on the planet while building my private spacecraft, see you back on earth!”

Subnautica absorbs the player even as its resource gathering and management often become drudgery, as it would be in reality. And there is something about running out of oxygen inside a structure in the depths of the ocean crater that gave me genuine despair. I ragequit on more than one occasion but kept coming back again and again.

Subnautica is a lot like life. You’re on your own, you have to get around and get things to make other things if you want to survive. No one will help you. You have to do so many annoying little tasks and chores just to stay alive. Many times, that’s what life is: one vile fucking task after another. And then you die. It’s all so frustrating and aggravating, it’s the source of all your problems—and you can’t get enough of it.

Disclosure: Subnautica was reviewed on PC with a Steam copy purchased by the reviewer over the course of hundreds of hours of play time. All screenshots attached were captured during the review process.

Rating: 10 / Masterpiece.

The Good