It’s no secret that Subnautica is one of the most successful survival games of all time. It absolutely dominated even in the days when the game was just in early access, and did even more so when it was fully released. The developers took so much consideration into every facet of the game, and they were able to create a survival game that rivals the success of other big ones like Terraria.
The biggest thing in a survival game that is required to make it successful is making it feel like a survival game (obviously.) Some succeed more than others at this, but almost no game is better at this than Subnautica because of how much it focuses on how the player will feel playing the game.
When I say this, I don’t mean “will they have fun?” I mean what emotion they’ll feel at any specific moment. The most prominent that Subnautica uses to its advantage is fear.
Many agree that Subnautica is easily the scariest survival game to ever be made, and even rivals actual horror games (albeit in that regard, subnautica is more of a terror focused game), and it’s not just because they throw a scary creature at you (although, the creatures are indeed scary), nor do they just play 1 million jumpscares every second. Instead, they put an extraordinary amount of focus on atmosphere and tension.
Many sections of the game require you to travel deep in, open, murky, and hard to see in water that often have some sort of large creatures located in them, with the only way for you to know their location being their roars across the ocean. This isn’t a coincidence, but instead an intentional use of atmosphere to make the creatures even scarier than they already are.
You may not be scared of these creatures if you just looked them up and saw them on a whim (albeit, that’s debatable), but you will be scared of them when you’re in open water and they’re pursuing you. Then add onto the fact that you are completely alone in the game with nothing helping you aside from your AI assistant, and that creates a survival game that feels so much like a survival game just because of how much fear the game instills into the player.
Even the developers agree with this, because in a presentation done by Charlie Cleveland, the director of Subnautica, he talks about “Pillar emotions” and how they fine tuned them to make subnautica better. However, if there was one portion of the game where this isn’t as applicable, it’s definitely in the cave sections near the end of the game that remove the “open, dark, murky, and deep” aspects of the game. However, that’s exactly where the problem lies, because this type of water is almost 50% of the gameplay of Subnautica below Zero.
Let me presurface this by saying that Below Zero is not a Bad game. It’s drastically worse than the original, but if the original is a 10/10, Below Zero is a 6/10. However, the reason why it’s this drastic of a drop in quality is because the two principles they originally followed (terror and immersion) were completely sidelined. Instead, the game frontloads its storytelling to replace these, and unfortunately it isn’t nearly interesting enough to compensate for this.
The creatures were designed to be less scary, the water isn’t as deep, open, and murky, cave sections make up an overwhelming amount of the game, and the character played in the game has dialogue along with an actual creature to communicate with named ALAN, which kills the “you’re alone in this open world” immersiveness the first game had.
Whether this was intentional or not isn’t exactly clear, but it could easily be due to a lot of the developers of the first game being fired/leaving the team after the development of the first game and during the development of Below Zero. Whether it is intentional or not though, it’s easy to feel this lack of immersion and atmosphere when you play the game, and we have to hope they don’t keep this trend going in the actual sequel, Subnautica 2, although from what the trailers look like, they probably are unfortunately.
Subnautica Presentation: https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1025745/The-Design-of-Subnautica