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Luckily, you won’t be spending too much time on land in Subnautica, and their story focused purpose helps to make the excursions a little more palatable, especially as a breather from all the terrors beneath the sea. Subnautica’s terra firma looks a lot worse than its pelagic counterpart, too, where the flat, ungainly textures suddenly bring the game’s production values down almost to Steam shovelware quality. Swimming, aside from the fiddliness of trying to catch smaller fish, is a smooth and breezy joy, but things immediately regress above water, which controls more like a sluggish and substandard first-person exploration game. The ‘bad underwater level’ is an infamous cliche in video games, but the irony with Subnautica is that it does precisely the opposite. Trying to piece together Subnautica’s unfolding mystery (which, if you’ll pardon the pun, goes far deeper than you might think) has been a highlight of my time with the game so far, and only adds to its already rich atmosphere of intrigue and threat. Just when you might be lost for things to do, it’ll start pinging off with another message from a potential survivor of the crash, and you’ll jet off towards uncharted waters with renewed purpose. All of us have a touch of thalassophobia ingrained into our psyche, and Unknown Worlds heartily plays into that universal fear of not knowing what lurks beneath our feet when swimming in the great big blue. While Unknown Worlds has done a fabulous job capturing the bioluminescent beauty of life under the sea, that sense of marvel and curiosity will eventually devolve into abject fear as you begin to discover the monsters and cryptids that roam these very same waters.
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You’ll need to explore your surroundings, gather resources, upgrade and craft new gear, and ultimately try to learn what happened to your crew, while figuring out if there’s any way of escaping this subaquatic nightmare.Īnd, to be clear, Subnautica is very much a nightmare.
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Following the crash, players are free to dive into the depths beneath their floating, busted escape pod, which acts as an official base of operations in the game’s early hours. It’s a brilliant setup, executed with precision and zeal, but Subnautica’s sea legs extend well beyond its opening introduction.
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