I think Subnautica was the first crafting game I ever played, and I didn’t really understand the genre, so I found it frustrating and slow. I prefer my games to have an ongoing story, and this… didn’t. Not to say there isn’t a story here, it just takes a backseat to the gameplay, which is exploring and crafting.
The game opens with you jumping into an escape pod. Something’s wrong with your spaceship, the Aurora, so you’re abandoning ship. As you fly away, you watch a massive explosion erupt from your former ship. The blast damages your escape pod and you’re hit in the face with a metal panel. When you come to, your escape pod is on fire!
You jump up from your seat and grab a nearby fire extinguisher. Putting out the flames, you realize your secondary life support system and radio are both broken. You need parts to build a repair tool. You climb out of your escape pod to find yourself floating on a water planet, with the wreckage of the Aurora nearby.
In desperate need of resources, you dive into the ocean and start exploring. At first, all you can do is pick up a few resources found on the shallow ocean bed. But with the right kind of components, you can craft a scanner at the fabricator on your escape pod.
The scanner allows you to scan almost everything in your environment, collecting data from this strange alien world. It may also help you to unlock new crafting recipes. You find scattered wreckage all over the ocean floor, and scanning broken components will help you to reassemble their recipes so you can craft them yourself.
Once you’ve found the necessary resources, you can build a repair tool, which you can then use to repair your secondary life support system and radio.
Almost immediately, your radio picks up a message. Listening to it, you hear survivors of another escape pod. They’re nearby, and under attack from a giant sea snake of some sort.
You swim out to their location, only to find the remains of their escape pod. You pick up a PDA left behind in the wreckage and download its data, which will give you the crew’s log.
Your own PDA has been communicating vital information to you throughout your journey so far. Around this time, you may hear her say that the Aurora’s drive core is going critical and is about to explode. You can actually watch the explosion from the surface, just make sure you’re not swimming anywhere near it at the time.
From here, you’re just responding to radio signals, exploring and collecting resources to build more and more advanced technologies, and eventually, you can build an entire underwater base to live in.
I didn’t get much further than this, because this game is so incredibly slow for me. I enjoy the crafting game Satisfactory because all the resources I need to get started are right nearby, almost within eyesight of my landing pod, and I can scan for the location of more resources as I start to branch out. Plus, your hub gives you instructions on what to build, so you have some direction to progress toward.
Subnautica, on the other hand, just dumps you in the water with no explanation and expects you to just swim around and collect stuff until you figure out what to do with it. The first time I played this game, several years ago, I spent maybe 2 hours swimming in circles, unsure what I was supposed to do. Eventually, I realized that I needed to repair my escape pod, and then I started getting radio broadcasts.
But even then, every escape pod I tracked down was wrecked with no survivors. It was just demoralizing for me. I was hoping for some sort of plot, or an eventual rescue or something. But instead, I found myself just floundering about in the water for hours, not really sure what I’m doing or if this gameplay is going anywhere.
Not to mention, this is a survival game, so on top of trying to figure out what I’m doing, I was also trying to figure out how to find food and water to stay alive. And despite being a game about exploring an alien ocean, I could barely be under water for 30 seconds before I was drowning. It took an exceptionally long time for me to find appropriate resources to build more advanced oxygen tanks so I could stay underwater for longer. I couldn’t ping for resources, I kept getting lost or turned around under water, and I could never find exactly what I needed to progress in the game.
I know this game is exceptionally popular and I rarely ever hear a bad thing about it. But I personally just can’t get into it. I gave it a second chance last night, and I progressed much faster than I did my first time playing, but it was such a slog. I have no idea if it gets better later, but it’s frustratingly slow and I just can’t enjoy it.
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This is ironically what I loved about Subnautica. The game does not hold your hand throughout. You don’t have a map, you don’t mindlessly follow waypoints, you are not being given a guided tour through the story like some ride at Disneyland. You have to learn to navigate the area yourself, memorize landmarks, and figure out what you have to do yourself with the clues around you. It is a bit of a whiplash at first when you are so used to being babysitted and guided throughout a game but I’ve found it to be the unbelievably rewarding once the “click” happens. You can absolutely miss important (and dope AF) events if you miss the timings that the game gives you. You are treated like an adult by the game. You really get the feeling of being a lone explorer, planning and going on expeditions to gather what you need whether it is resources or blueprints and it will all be you.
The risk-reward situation of exploring increasingly complex and disorienting ship fragments, slowly cutting through blocked doors with a laser while seeing your oxygen levels dwindle and hoping you can find your way back out in time were absolutely fantastic to me. The way the gameplay and the way you travel through the world entirely changes the moment you unlock the PRAWN suit, and one again with the Cyclops are absolutely amazing.
I wish this game clicked with everyone the way it did for me. It is easily my top 5 best single player experiences ever and I only wish I could forget it so I could discover everything again. But The Outer Wilds never clicked for me like that so I can understand why some people might not like it.
For me, games are strictly a form of entertainment. I play to escape reality and do something fun for a while. So when a game “treats you like an adult,” I feel like the fun is gone and now I’m stuck working just to gain a little bit of progress. I don’t get a sense of reward from that, I just get frustrated.
Especially if there are important events that you can miss. I used to be a completionist with my games (I still am, to a degree) and I wanted to explore every nook and cranny of a game to really enjoy every bit of effort the developers put into creating this world. But finding out a game takes 50+ hours to beat, and then realizing that I may have missed important details and that I’ll need to replay that lengthy game to find them again… no way. That’s too much effort. I mentally check out really quick.
I agree with you about The Outer Wilds. I think I’ve played about an hour of that game and I had no idea what I was doing or what the plot was about. Everyone kept saying it’s better if you go into it blind, so I didn’t read anything before playing and, well… I don’t know what I was playing. That’s another game on my list to give a second chance before I give up on it completely.
Your comparison to Satisfactory makes me think you’re approaching the game with a completely wrong mindset. It’s not supposed to be a chill sandbox playground with no difficulty where you rapidly conquer the planet and build cool stuff. It’s intended to be an engaging survival game with a horror aspect of diving into dark depths and hoping that whatever lurks there doesn’t notice you. It’s meant to be atmospheric, with the threat of starvation, predators and later on some story aspects pushing you to explore further and deeper for materials and tech.
I hope you give the game anoher chance at some point because it really is a one of a kind experience. There’s two things you should be aware of: First, in regards to another comment: there’s no events for you to miss, IDK what that person is saying. There’s two big plot points that happen in a playthrough regardless of your presence. Both of them give you a timer well in advance so you can show up to / observe the place when it happens. Everything else, like all the distress signals or abandoned bases? They’re empty from the start of the game, even if you go there immediatelly nothing will change. You aren’t missing out on anything.
Second, don’t feel bad about missing out on upgrades or whatver. The vast majority of them are sidegrades. The important stuff that you need to progress both spawns much more often than the sidegrades, and you will often find it at the distress signal locations.
You’re absolutely correct, I am approaching it from the wrong mindset. The thing is, I like my crafting games to be chill sandbox games. I have ADHD and am easily distracted, so being dumped into a world where I’m struggling just to survive, and then finding threats everywhere while I’m trying to progress on a build or something… I find myself stressed and unable to focus on progression. So I prefer games that let me go at my own pace, without distractions from the task I’m focusing on.
With Subnautica, I don’t know where to go to progress without spending time exploring and getting distracted along the way. So it will take me hundreds of hours to actually complete the game; time that I rarely dedicate to any single game. And too much time if I’m not having fun along the way.
I’m the same way (also have ADHD). I love Subnautica*'s underwater gameplay and alien moon aesthetic, but I can only really play it in Creative Mode since I really like building bases and exploring without worrying about resources and dying.
(* I have Below Zero instead because I like the snowy aesthetic and playing as a girl 😅)
If you feel like you need more guidance, don’t hesitate to look up a guide or for tips on how to get the most out of the game. If you’re willing, of course.
Subnautica is one of those games where it needs to “click”, and this moment is different for a lot of people. For some it never happens. I will say there is a scanner room you can get to scan for resources, but that will probably not sway you.
I’m not gonna tell you to keep playing because it will get better or something, but I want to address one thing: Subnautica is a game about exploration and discovery. If you do not enjoy these elements in a game, or get motivated by it, then you will probably miss the complex lore hidden in the logs or you will not value it as much as you could have.
Satisfactory is less of a crafting game and more of a factory automation game, so this might be another reason.
Might I suggest trying out Techtonica? It’s like a mix of Factorio and Satisfactory in the sense that you build factories, but it’s more on a grid and stuff is a lot smaller than in Satisfactory. I mention this game because some elements reminded me of Subnautica (like distress signals to find) but it doesn’t have the survival element to it.
Speaking of survival: you can turn that off in Subnautica. You could try that. But again, if discovery and exploration isn’t your thing, it would just put more focus on the feeling of aimlessly wandering.
I’ve been meaning to give Techtonica another chance. I was enjoying it, but I tried to play it with a friend and he checked out early because the build menus and crafting mechanics were too complicated for him. Because of that, we switched to another game to play regularly and I never really got back to Techtonica. I agree with my friend that it was a bit complex at first, but I was enjoying figuring it out.
Replaying it now myself. Need to find some more cyclops fragments. Great game overall.
Subnautica’s out of bounds always fascinated me, both with how creepy it is and way it works. The lore telling us that there’s bigger things out there too makes it even better
