Summer Research Remnants: Subnautica
Total Play Time: 2 hrs 17 min
After enjoying success on the PC since its debut in 2014, Subnautica released on the Nintendo Switch a week prior to my beginning the research project, after a long and well-documented series of testing phases. As such, bugs were to be expected. There are four different playthrough modes depending on how many lives you want, whether you want to manage hunger and thirst, and whether you want to manage oxygen and health.
The basic premise of the game is that the player crash-lands and gets stranded on an alien island that is primarily underwater, and they must find a way to survive and escape using whatever they find. Other ships had already been stranded on the planet, so the player is also encouraged to explore the abandoned ships for hints and context.
Choosing Freedom mode so I would not have to monitor constantly depleting hunger and thirst bars, I dove into the game with absolutely no clue what the story was, what had been updated since they released the alpha version, and a vague idea of what the graphics would look like. After thirty minutes, I had made no progress—it took me five minutes to figure out how the controls worked and even then they didn’t handle as smoothly as I had hoped. Being a first-person game, the player controls a silent diver of relatively ambiguous positionality. I used the controller configuration for the Nintendo Switch (two Joy-Cons secured into the provided controller-shaped dock), and standard first-person game mechanics applied: I controlled the camera/direction the avatar looked in with the right analog stick, and moved forward, backward, left, and right with the left analog stick. There were designated buttons for resurfacing and diving, as well as an ‘Interact’ button, though these controls required an adjustment period. The directional pad was used to scroll through the six items that the player designated to be readily available, and the basic premise of the game was to scavenge materials from the alien planet to survive and eventually escape (a similar premise to Minecraft, but more disorienting due to being underwater). The traditional Joy-Con joystick (for controlling the camera’s direction) doesn’t have the same range of motion as a mouse or other controllers (it registers fewer directions), making the in-game movement much more abrupt/jerky (small movements cause larger directional shifts, less subtlety of movement in avatar handling).
The first thing I aimed to do was make a knife so I could collect the table coral that was directly outside of the escape pod, but I couldn’t find the needed supplies in the immediate vicinity. I staunchly refused to advance the plot/look at the burning wreckage of the Aurora as my virtual assistant was occasionally commanding me to do until I had made that knife. I think the game was trying to goad me into going there first, but the first thing the player can see/do is use the fire extinguisher before examining all of the machines in the escape pod that need the repair tool (...which i have to build...which requires table coral...which i need the knife for), so I was lacking significant motivation to leave those machines in disrepair.
There are no tangible goals right in your face and very loose tutorial sections that only appear as you approach an interactable area, so the game is very much player-driven. There are some story cutscenes and optional logs for the player to read through in order to get story and direction, but the only other hands-on interface is the fabricator, so you’re more likely to be in a Minecraft-esque completion-driven build quest than anything else. That being said, there’s nothing to ‘check off’ once you fabricate things either and very limited initial storage, so players are more building things for the intrinsic satisfaction of being prepared than anything else. There’s an orchestral swell and notification when you scan new things, so there’s the drive to explore the alien inhabitants IF players build the scanner tool, but there’s also a percentage out of 100% for completion of scans and repairs, so that also could drive the player. I mainly just want to repair the stuff so it stops being unusable/reminding me I need the scanner tool (more an annoyance than satisfaction—getting rid of negative reinforcer than yielding positive reinforcer). After an hour and 45 minutes, and dying on the way to get to the Aurora, I decided to take a break from gameplay.
On the second day of attempting to play the game, I made it 30 minutes (in which I finally explored some of the Aurora, but kept dying and being respawned 350 meters away from the Aurora and having to traverse its labyrinth-like pathways while looking for my dropped items. I even tried to start a new game in creative mode, but the lack of requirement to make storage and scavenge for materials/blueprints made the ability to build any structure I wanted more hollow—it wasn’t fun because there was no challenge.
Especially since I had to scan things to find blueprints for objects I could fabricate, I didn’t have tangible things to aspire towards or clear puzzles to solve like The Last Campfire did.
