Subnautica: A fun justification for fearing the ocean

Remember – when you gaze long into the sushi, the sushi also gazes into you. — SHAUN A. NOORDIN

When I was younger, I wanted to be a marine biologist because I thought sea animals were cool and neat. As I grew older, I realised that, actually, sea life can be kinda gross and scary. But now that I'm even older, I realised one more truth about marine life: that they can also be delicious when stir-fried with some soy sauce and ginger.

No game has ever quite captured these three aspects of sea life – beautiful, terrifying, and tantalising – quite like Subnautica. And now that its second(?) sequel Subnautica 2 is available in Early Access, I wanted to take a look at the Subnautica series: why the original worked so well, what the sequels improved on (or in some cases, failed to), and how the games handle Early Access.

Let's dive right in!

Subnautica

The first Subnautica – which I'll call SN1 for simplicity – is an open-world survival crafting game set on an alien ocean world. The game starts very abruptly and very awesomely with your silent player character running to an escape pod as you watch your starship explode above you. One crash landing later and next thing you know, you're swimming around with extraterrestrial fish, scavenging resources to survive, and, hopefully, figuring out the mysteries lying submerged across Planet 4546b so you can escape back to the stars.

Whether it's Subnautica 1, or 2, or Below Zero, the underwater landscape (seascape?) is always beautiful and compelling to explore.

To appreciate SN1's place in the gaming landscape, we need to understand when it came out. Unknown Worlds Entertainment released SN1 in Early Access for the PC in 2014, with a full release in 2018.

The mid-2010s was essentially the gold rush era for open-world survival crafting games, kicked off not only by the wild success of Minecraft the game, but the success of Minecraft's business model, in which a game can be sold to players while still being "in development". (Minecraft's first "proper" release was in 2009, and the full version came in 2011. Meanwhile, Steam Early Access became a thing in 2013.)

Some of my fave games of this era, like Terraria (2011) and Don't Starve (2013), knew how to balance the allure and danger of heading into the wilds to gather resources, and the comfort and relative safety of returning to a home base to craft better survival gear. Like those games, SN1 had this familiar, almost cosy (if you ignore the killer monsters) gameplay loop that sent you between these two states.

The wreck of the spaceship Aurora serves as a familiar landmark in Subnautica 1 that helps you from getting lost. Just try not to be nearby when the drive core inevitably explodes.

SN1's amazing success in telling a compelling story with a faceless, silent protagonist (his name is actually Ryley Robinson, but you'll only find that out in the sequels) makes it rather... interesting... how its first sequel (technically, a spinoff) Below Zero decided to go with the "chatty protagonist plus sidekick" route.

Zero dialogue

Subnautica: Below Zero (aka BZ for this article) was released in Early Access in 2019 and had a full release in 2021. Taking place two years after SN1 in a frozen (Arctic) region of Planet 4546b, you play as Robin Ayou, who's trying to find out what happened to her sister Sam, but you quickly end up with an incorporeal alien buddy called Al-An.

One of the things that fascinates me about video game sequels is how each tries to answer the question, "what's the point of this sequel? What do we improve on – or change, or remove, or keep – from the original?"

Below Zero's biggest weakness is that the player character talks; I'm trying to admire the alien flora and the PC goes ‘golly gee willikers, I can't believe I survived that space ship crash!’

BZ clearly realised that SN1's story was a core factor to its success, so it doubled down on narrative. Unfortunately, BZ may have overlooked that SN1's story largely worked through an atmosphere of contemplative loneliness and a very light touch.

In SN1, you might (say) discover a strange apparatus with three holes in the ruins of an extinct xenoculture, and you'll spend the rest of your adventure piecing the clues to what it is, and perhaps never get a full answer. In BZ, Al-An could chime in and explain, "oh, that's a space toilet."

That's not the only place where BZ tries to improve on something, but doesn't quite succeed. The spinoff also introduced a cold weather mechanic, which is a theoretically interesting new survival challenge where Robin will freeze to death if she doesn't manage her temperature... while exploring land.

Thalassophobia: Fear of oceans

That last bit made me raise an eyebrow when I was playing. SN1 had islands, sure, but they were rare exceptions because Subnautica's key strength is in its ocean setting – in a game about survival, being underwater is a great way to amp up the danger.

Swimming lets you explore in three dimensions, but that means it's easier to get lost. And you'd better not get lost exploring those intriguing caves and (space)shipwrecks, because you only have so much oxygen in your tanks. And nothing's quite as exciting or scary as nothing itself – the vast black empty nothing as you stare into the depths of the open ocean, which promises either new adventures, or terminal encounters with carnivorous leviathans the size of railway trains.

(To be fair, the Subnautica games have various difficulty modes including a low-stress Creative Mode where you're functionally immortal and can hang out indefinitely under the sea with Ariel and Cthulhu for all it cares; I just focus on the "default" Survival Mode which has health, hunger, thirst, and oxygen meters to manage.)

Land exploration is one of the less interesting bits of Below Zero, but by golly that stark white arctic landscape looks really nice. Photos: Unknown Worlds Entertainment

BZ's land exploration essentially removed the freedom and danger of being underwater, and swapped out the oxygen meter for the equivalent temperature meter. The next sequel, Subnautica 2, recognised this made things less interesting, and (so far, in early Early Access) instead focused on the whole lonely, underwater exploration thing.

More Subnautica

Subnautica 2 (hereby dubbed SN2) was released in Early Access last month, in May 2026. The story's incomplete, there are still missing features, but man oh man am I enjoying throwing myself into the merciless abyss of the new ocean planet of Proteus – because it feels like more of Subnautica.

The whole "lonely exploration" vibe is back, except this time instead of waking up after a crash landing, your unnamed (but semi-customisable) blank slate of a character wakes up in what feels like a near-apocalypse scenario.

Subnautica 2 very early on establishes its post-apocalyptic tone, making you feel like you arrived a few minutes late for the end of the world.

(Note: SN2 has an optional online co-op mode that I'm not able to comment on yet. That's quite a game changer, but I haven't been able to convince any meat shields – sorry, I meant shark bait – sorry, I meant friends to join me in SN2 yet. Can't imagine why.)

SN2 is technically a technical improvement over the first two games – it runs on Unreal Engine 5 instead of Unity; inventory and resources are better balanced; etc – but, as far as the (single player) survival experience goes, SN2 is just more of SN1, just on another planet, with another plot.

So I ask that question again: "what's the point of this sequel?" If the answer is "more of the same", is that enough to justify a new work of art? I dunno.

Intellectually, I respect BZ more because it actually tried something new. But emotionally, I'm enjoying SN2 waaay more simply because it has the same spirit of the original, pacifist horror subtheme and all.

Creative visions and player feedback

Sorry, I should explain the pacifist horror thing: Subnautica games love to throw players into an underwater ecosystem full of alien predators (not to be confused with the alien, Predator) and proceeds to give you, uh, zero weapons to fight back. Because you're not supposed to feel empowered while stranded in an alien ocean.

(Disclaimer: players can and have killed titanic Reaper leviathans with tiny survival knives, because gamers are as persistent as they're insane, but the game wasn't designed for violence.)

The developers of SN2 appear to have a very specific idea of the kind of game they want to make, the story they want to tell, and the experience they want players to feel. As such, so far as I can tell, the devs are smartly using their Early Access period to tune the plans they already have, instead of pivoting at the slightest pushback, or creating roadmaps as they go along.

(I mean, I assume the devs have SN2's narrative end point already planned out, based on how tightly everything is written.)

When some players on the interwebs started clamouring for actual weapons, Unknown Worlds stuck to their "no killing the killer fish killing players" rule, and instead identified that fauna behaviour had to be tweaked to be less irritating.

As someone interested in game development, I think that's a neat way to balance player feedback with creative vision. I'm genuinely curious to see if they'll continue to stick to their guns (or, er, lack of guns) moving forward.

The seaweed is always greener

In 1989's The Little Mermaid, Sebastian the crab sang the words: "darling it's better, down where it's wetter, take it from mee~"

Having played Subnautica, I realise now that this little red bugger was just trying to lure me into a false sense of security. My thalassophobia is entirely justified! There are things in the oceanic abyss that man was not meant to know!!

And yet, Subnautica and its sequels have shown that I really can't keep myself from diving in to see all the horrors and wonders these alien worlds have to offer.

I'm looking forward to playing more Subnautica 2 as it develops into a full game. And if I get eaten by more killer fish in the process then, well... I guess it's only fair that I get my turn to be seafood? I'll get the soy sauce and ginger.