Subnautica is perhaps the best survival game I have played, but in the process I’ve come to believe a lot of the things I dislike about survival games are intractable problems with the genre. You play as the sole survivor of a starship that crash-landed on an alien ocean planet. You start with nothing but a crafting bench, and eventually work your way up to elaborate vehicles and bases, including, ultimately, an escape rocket. In the process you have to manage hunger, thirst, and, of course, oxygen as you must dive deeper and deeper to gather better materials.

If you enjoy survival games you’ll enjoy this, but I have a few nuances to discuss.

So on the one hand, there’s a lot I like about this game. The survival mechanics are genuinely pressing, and I would frequently use up even basic resources I thought I had more of than I would ever need. The environments and creature designs are also lovely, with lots of strange alien biology all accompanied by lovely flavor text. There is also a surprisingly elaborate plot about the history of the planet and some ecological problems you have to solve before you can leave.

Unfortunately, the actual gameplay loop is a slog. At first, the survival mechanics make you feel vulnerable and desperate to scrounge any food you can from the environment… but once you have that down, it really only serves to limit how long you can play the actual game before you have to return to base. The first time you get a new resource, it’s exciting to see what you can do with it, but after that it’s just a tedious grind every time you find out you’re missing just a few pieces for the thing you need to build. So much of the game is swimming out on an expedition you don’t even know will bear fruit, and then having to swim all the way back to base as soon as you run low on food or water. The only way to actually progress in the game is to go on long expeditions, which requires you to either turn your submarine into a self-sufficient farm (at which point you never have to worry about hunger or thirst again) or stock up on tons of supplies beforehand (which is a tedious grind and takes up valuable inventory space). And while the environments are cool and varied, it’s hard to appreciate all the details when oxygen makes every dive a time crunch. (The vehicles help with this, but the best one simply can’t be used at all for the deeper areas.)

This is “realistic” I guess, but as we’re increasingly discovering as games become increasingly good at modeling reality, realism rarely equals fun. The game even understands this, because it does elide a lot of real-life mechanics like sleep and decompression sickness because they would only be tedious and unfun. I think I probably would have enjoyed the game more if I had turned off the hunger and thirst mechanics — which is an included difficulty setting, but what’s the point of turning off survival in a survival game?

I’m not sure what the solution is. Survival games are inherently about injecting realism back into a fantasy, but how much is too much? How much is too little? Is there even an answer that can satisfy the majority of people? Maybe the genre mechanics just don’t gel with me. I don’t know. Some way to automate resource gathering would definitely be nice, though. I do think that cutting the round-trip element would help — if, say, your base was separate from the game world and more of a menu screen, and you set out on discrete expeditions that ended with a fade-to-black teleport back to base. That would preserve the fun parts (exploring new areas and scavenging materials) while removing the unfun parts (retreading the same ground but now you can’t interact with anything because your pack is full). But I’m sure lots of people would argue that managing the return trip is a crucial part of the experience, and allows for all sorts of complications like getting lost or stumbling on something you didn’t notice on the first trip.

And, this is unrelated to everything else, but if you actually dive to the bottom of the crater edge you will find it just cuts off abruptly and you can actually go underneath the rest of the game world, which has a perfectly flat base floating atop an endless void. Not dealbreaking, but kinda weird! I was hoping for something more interesting than “Oops, we didn’t expect anyone to actually come down here.” Apparently earlier versions of the game did have an actual floor, and I can’t imagine why that was removed.

Also peepers are cuter than cuddlefish, fite me

I guess try the game out and decide for yourself. Just remember to always pack a beacon.