-Quick Review-
What a delightful little game! This is exactly the type of game I want to add to my library, quickly install it, play it for a little bit, and move onto another game. Sheepy: A Short Adventure is a free little 2d platformer mini-Metroid game which will take about an hour to play through, has great pixel art, great music, doesn’t overstay its welcome, and leaves you wanting more. Sheepy: A Short Adventure was released in 2024, and was developed by Thomas Lean and MrSuicideSheep.

Review Video:
If you don't like reading, or are curious about watching gameplay check out my video here:
https://youtu.be/QsnvRdK7vCc

-Detailed breakdown review-
Story: The storytelling in Sheepy is done without any character’s talking to each other. There are optional recordings you can interact with and listen to the backstory of what happened to the world around you. There’s a dark undertone of something terrible which happened to the world due to a discovery made by the company “Belgin” deep underground.

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3421235022

Gameplay: Very important note: you can make Sheepy Jump while waiting for loading screens.
When you start out you only have one little hop, and directional movement, but as you play you get some new abilities, the music follows along with the gameplay and movement in such an amazing way. At the end of the game at the final run scene I stopped running to see what would happen and the music goes silent!
And of course I’m a sucker for pixel art, I was mesmerized by the small animations the developer did in the game, like spinning while on a swivel-chair… with pixel art! How do you even program that detail? There was so much attention to tiny details which really surprised me while playing!

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3421235209

Conclusion: I would love to play Sheepy: A Medium Adventure, Sheepy: A Long Adventure, and Sheepy: A Grand Journey. While I’m partial to loving a short, quaint gameplay experience and wouldn’t want to lose that in a longer game, but I think making a 4-7 hour full fleshed out length game with the same pacing would be AWESOME. But not required, as it is, Sheepy: A Short Adventure is great, you should install it and give it a play!

-Quick Review-
I’m freaked out by the ocean.

The Ocean is the perfect amalgamation of “Fear of the unknown”. I’m afraid because I don’t know how deep the water is, I’m afraid because I can’t see as far as I’d like or I can’t see the ground beneath me, I’m afraid because I don’t want to drown, I’m afraid because I can’t move fast in the water, I’m afraid because creatures in the sea are drastically different than those on the land, but I’m most afraid because in my mind I’m being watched by something with really REALLY big teeth just outside of my vision waiting for its chance to attack me.

Subnautica is an open-world action-adventure survival game, where you play as a survivor of a Spaceship crash on an unknown oceanic world. You’ll need to hunt, purify water, gather resources, craft tools, build shelters, and eventually/hopefully find a way off-world.

Here’s the kicker; Subnautica has made me face my fears repeatedly. My short description for playing Subnautica is whenever I enter a new area: “Ahhh! Scary! New things! I’m afraid.” Then I get used to the new area and realize the creatures aren’t as scary and surreal as I thought, sometimes I even start to like them! …But then I travel to a new biome and we’re right back at square one with “Ahhh! Scary! New things! I’m afraid.” In a strange way, my fear-to-understanding-cycle has galvanized Subnautica as one of my favorite video games I’ve ever played.

Review Video:
If you don't like reading, or are curious about watching gameplay check out my video here:
https://youtu.be/6nlaAiElhrY

-Detailed breakdown review-
Story: There’s a lot of small loose threads when you start playing Subnautica. Where are we? What are these creatures? Why did we crash in the first place? Did anyone else survive? Slowly but intentionally these questions will be answered as you play the game. Some answers will come from Scanning plants, animals, and equipment… and other answers will come in the form of recovered Audio logs. Then some new questions will arise from Radio messages and visiting new areas.

I refuse to say anything definitive about Subnautica's story, because the less you know, the better. Personally, I found the pay off towards the end of the game completely and totally satisfying, and moreover I’m rather proud of myself getting through the game!

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3399128086

Gameplay: Subnautica has some familiar gameplay mechanics, you can choose between: Survival, Freedom, Hardcore, and Creative mode. When you’re first dropped into the world you gather animals and resources for food, water and to craft equipment to further progress deeper underwater to retrieve new materials for still newer equipment and technology. One of the indicators of your progress was when you stop “finding new Blueprints”, and “Don’t see any new materials you haven’t encountered yet” for crafting stuff.

The Base building was pretty standard, select an area with a “ghost silhouette shape” of the tube or room you’re trying to build, then press and hold “build” to watch it automatically convert inventory materials to rooms, tubes, and furniture. You need to have more structural integrity to build a bigger base, you can increase structural integrity by building more base structures or reinforcing the inside with various building upgrades.

There was a learning curve for Subnautica, the default key bindings were a bit problematic for me: I regularly cursed when I would tap Esc on my keyboard to try to close out of a chest/locker only to have the game pop up the menu on top of the screen. And sometimes I click incorrectly when I’m trying to interact with a button or a chest. I had to re-binding my interact key to E because I’m set in my old man ways. But otherwise, your basic controls were still there, movement with WASD, Interact, Equip and unequip items with the number keys.

Another learning curve was repairing vehicles, I had a sad day pushing my Seamoth deeper than it could handle, and it just fell apart on me, and I had to craft a new one! I also didn’t realize you just use your “repair tool” to fix stuff too. I thought I was only fixing the escape pod in the first hour of learning the game, nope, hang onto that thing, you use it to fix EVERYTHING in Subnautica.

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3399127513

Conclusion: The average accepted time to beat Subnautica is somewhere between 30 to 50 hours, my playthrough took me roughly 40 hours, but to be fair I was also livestreaming the whole experience on my twitch channel so that might have extended how long I played.

You can easily sink so much more time into this game by replaying it, you’ll get dropped into the world at a different location, but Subnautica is not procedurally generated, once you know the key landmarks you can find your way around pretty easily.

I’ve absolutely loved playing Subnautica and will definitely need to check out Subnautica: Below Zero and Subnautica 2. Other than needing to get over a few control scheme quirks I don’t have anything bad to say about Subnautica. It’s not perfect - stuff glitched from time to time, my favorite glitch was when I would find fish swimming inside my house. But I haven’t played a pure exploration-creative-builder game like this in many years!

Thanks for taking the time to read my review! If you liked this review, I have an extended version on YouTube with way more talking and much less reading. You also get the added bonus of seeing gameplay… but you might prefer to not spoil anything else for Subnautica, I’ve tried to keep the footage to the starting areas.