Early Access review updated post-release


Your ship, the Aurora, is shot down by a mysterious entity on your way to Planet 4546B. Yourself and your crewmates evacuate in the Aurora’s escape pods, but the damage to the ship is immense, and your pod is flung from the ship by a massive explosion. Once you awake from your concussive landing, you find yourself alone, stranded in the middle of an alien ocean. This is the beginning of a dangerous mission - find out what happened to the Aurora while surviving until rescue arrives.

Surviving in the ocean landscape will not be easy. Depending on what difficulty you choose, you’ll be tasked with managing different resources, including health, oxygen, hydration and food intake. Your survival hinges on your ability to keep these in check while collecting materials to build a sea base and vehicles that will help you explore your new home.

At first, your resources are limited, with you only having access to a few blueprints and the fabricator machine aboard your escape pod. But, soon enough, you’ll be crafting tools and equipment such as survival knives, repair tools, better diving suits, larger oxygen tanks, the scanner, which allows you to collect data about the flora and fauna as well as new blueprints; and the habitat builder, which allows you to construct pieces of your undersea base.

Collecting the materials you need to build all of these things will be the bulk of your early game - and it’s what introduces the danger. Various metals and other types of materials such as quartz and salt are easy enough to find, but more advanced materials will require you to expose yourself to more danger. You’ll encounter Bleeders, tiny leech-like creatures that attach to your arm and drain your health; Stalkers, large shark-like creatures that will chase you from their habitats in the Kelp Forests; Sandsharks, carnivorous predators that hide beneath the sand; and the dangerous and terrifying Leviathans.

Not all of the marine life is aggressive, though - there are plenty of fish such as Peepers, Bladderfish, Garryfish, and Holefish that can easily be caught and cooked into rations that you’ll need to stay alive. There is also plenty of interesting flora, such as Table Coral, Creepvines, Lantern Fruit, and more.

Once you’ve crafted a base and developed a system of keeping yourself fed and hydrated, the real exploration begins. The world of Subnautica is massive, with incredibly diverse biomes. Rarer materials that you need to build more advanced vehicles and equipment will have you travelling further and further from the comforts of your home base, and more and more dangerous creatures will become more common in these areas.

You'll also be searching the wreckage of the Aurora for blueprints so that you can craft vehicles. Blueprints will also allow you to craft things like battery chargers, the Moon Pool vehicle station, and the Modification Station, which allows you to upgrade your tools and equipment.

Aside from collecting materials, crafting, and defending yourself against the local wildlife, you have an important mission that will reveal the planet’s strange history - find out who, or what, shot down the Aurora. Soon after landing, you’ll start to receive distress signals that lead you to the wrecks of your shipmates' escape pods. PDAs scattered around the wreckage of the Aurora as well as the other escape pods will slowly reveal the story to you, all culminating when you discover a terrible secret buried deep beneath the waves. I won’t spoil anything, but the revelations you’ll find along the way will raise as many new questions as they answer.

The biggest flaw of Subnautica, and the one that shows the developer's relative inexperience, is the bugs. What bugs you'll encounter vary wildly depending on your PC hardware (or console). The most common one is things clipping through walls, which can lead to some terrifying (and sometimes run-ending, if you're playing on Hardcore difficulty) surprises. Sometimes fragments of blueprints will not spawn in wrecks where they should be, sometimes terrain in entire areas won't load, and the pop-in and framerate stuttering can be really bad sometimes. Save OFTEN in case one of these bugs screws up your game.

Overall, Subnautica is an amazing and terrifying journey through the beauty and horror of an expansive underwater world. Despite its bugs, it’s been a fantastic experience and I have enjoyed the discovery and challenge in equal measure. As