Game Review – Subnautica

This week I will be looking over a game that has a motivational drive for the player throughout the game while not being too overbearing. When I was thinking about this prompt, I almost immediately thought of Subnautica, which goes through a very unique style of a drive through the story for the player. Ahead in the article contains spoilers, which I very much incline you not to read if you plan on playing Subnautica, as it has a very wonderful story you can only really experience the first time through.

The Storyline

Subnautica takes place on an alien planet, starting as your ship is going through a catastrophic failure and crashing onto the surface below. The planet is almost entirely water-based, supporting a vast range of flora and fauna. Your life pod lands in a safe space, a small reef with mostly passive creatures and plenty of food and water to drink. Before long, the radio in your pod starts to blink as communications come in from other life pods, gps trackers showing up on your hud to send you further out of your reef and safety. As you keep getting more prompts, you go out to explore different regions like the Kelp Forest, Grassy Plateaus, and The Dunes. Soon enough the Aurora, the ship you crash landed in, detonates and you have to go repair the drive core to stop radiation from spreading across the world and killing you. You explore that whole distance and find new creatures and large, dangerous Leviathans. Many such examples continue to rise throughout the game as you explore the dozen of regions from 0-1,700 meters under the ocean surface to face darker depths and scarier feats.

A Winding Road

One of the best parts of these points above is that they are not necessary to do. Subnautica is an open world sandbox game, there is no sharp tug from the game to force you into anything. Even if the game makes it appear like something is bad, it isn’t ever forcing you to do anything other than play. When the Aurora explodes, it gives you a blueprint for a radiation suit so you can play the game the same as before while disregarding the radiation until you get around to repairing the engine on your own time. Later in the game when you discover you have a fatal disease that impacted the entire planet and watch as it slowly consumes and kills your body, that is all just a part of the storyline to give you the idea of being pushed along and give you motivation to continue to explore. The game never pigeonholes you into a direct path, instead giving you the story and an entire world to explore, then letting you decide which one you want to look at first.

In Conclusion

Subnautica does a very good job at keeping a game feeling free while also putting a grip on the storyline and promoting it in a way to not impede on your sandbox fun. Even after the story is complete, it allows you to finish the very end of the game, escaping from the planet, all on your own time frame, or never if you wish to stay in the same game forever until resources slowly run out, however unlikely that would be. All in all, another amazing Indie game I would recommend playing if you haven’t already.