Jogo bom demais, joguei no early access há muitos anos atrás, amei demais mas nunca voltei pra jogar o jogo completo. Resolvi pegar agora pra fazer 100% do zero e que experiência boa.
A história é bem legal, e a forma que você vai desenrolando ela é bem interessante, impressionante pra um jogo indie. Gameplay bem simples e funcional, e o jogo vai liberando aos poucos novas camadas de gameplay pro jogador. Gráfico é bom pra época, da pra ver que é antigo mas ainda é bem bonito. No geral um dos melhores jogos de sobrevivência até hoje, rumores que vão lançar um "Subnautica 3" ainda em 2025, quero só ver...

The survival parts (thirst/hunger) feel a bit tacked on. Pretty quickly that entire system transforms into occasionally hoarding a few resources and cooking now and then, and health/oxygen already felt like they were doing enough for the survival aspect.

Exploration is fun - but scavenging for materials quickly grows tedious. The scavenging is fine when entering a new biome, but on the 3rd or 4th trip to go find Silver to craft some thing or another it's not that interesting. I like the idea of base building, but when I know it's predicated by walking around the ocean floor for an hour picking up scrap metal, it's hard to want to engage with.

The game is kind of relaxing otherwise. I think when you strip away all the excess you have a creative take on the metroidvania, dividing up an open sea into biomes feels really organic and neat. The dangerous sea animals worked well for a more tense atmosphere.

Overall it feels kind of bloated. Which maybe makes sense if it's been having updates for almost 10 years..? I know Early Access is a great marketing move, but I can't help but feel like when you let players design games you end up with bloated experiences (as the game starts to become a container for multiple peoples' desires rather than just a few designers).

Subnautica is the second of two games I played in 2022 via Xbox Game Pass when it was gifted to me that holiday season (the first being Hades). My friend had played it long before I did, and spoke very highly of its ability to scare the living daylights out of him. Needless to say, I was interested. And boy, did this game deliver on that front. But aside from that, it was an incredibly beautiful game with ””relaxing”” gameplay (when massive sea monsters weren’t terrorizing me) and even a pretty solid narrative carried by its environmental storytelling. My most recent playthrough, I tried to do things a little differently to experience more of the game. It’s hard to top the feeling of your first playthrough of a game, but in some respects I had even more fun replaying this game the second time. It’s got a fair bit of jank, but overall it's a fantastic experience. Just don’t play if you have thalassophobia.

Pros:

- All of the biomes in Subnautica are just flat out amazing. Some of the most visually interesting and dynamic environments of any of the games I ever played. Every area has its own distinct atmosphere with different types of flora and fauna that all look variously comforting or disconcerting based on how deep you’ve descended. The designs and behavior of sea creatures are pretty interesting; I really like seeing Stalkers fight over metal scrap and Ampeels make electric drive-bys on unsuspecting fish.

- Speaking of “how deep”, while there are some issues with the progression I’ll mention in the cons section, I really enjoyed how Subnautica’s progression is directly tied to how deep you can dive into the ocean. Players unlock greater oxygen capacities, stronger dive suits, faster means of transportation, and eventually, vehicles that can resist the crushing pressure and horrific crimes against nature that exist in the depths.

- The sense of exploration is really strong with this game. Once you get the ability to move around faster and deeper, you really get the urge to push your limits in the hope of securing some valuable resource or exploring a new environment. I don’t play exploration games very often but Subnautica had me throwing caution to the wind just trying to see some new cool thing even if it meant drowning or dying horrifically.

- The vehicles in Subnautica are really fun to pilot. The Seamoth (nimble little craft) is super smooth and REALLY responsive to your controls, and the Cyclops submarine makes you feel utterly badass piloting your own gargantuan vessel (plus it has a lot of cool features). The Prawn suit feels a little weird to use with how awkward its movement is, but more utilitarian than anything so that’s not a big deal.

- The habitat construction in Subnautica is also insanely cool, although it has a few glaring flaws that I’ll mention later in my review. You can literally just plunk a base down wherever you want. You’ll have to contend with whatever conditions are down there though, which I also think is pretty cool. You might need lights to attract predators away from your base, or choose between solar or thermal power depending on how deep you’ve built. Interior customization is also pretty fun but a tad bit limited in scope. I really liked the alien containment, mostly because you can raise a Cuddlefish and that mf is adorable as HELL

- I’ve avoided talking about it long enough: Subnautica is scary as FUCK sometimes. The deeper you go, the scarier it gets. Everything gets more dangerous, from the biome to the creatures. The sound design is on POINT—Simon Chylinski (the soundtrack composer) needs a damn medal because Subnautica’s OST is super atmospheric and really conveys the utter isolation and hostility of the alien planet you’re on.

- The Leviathans are the obvious thing that comes to mind when I think about how scary Subnautica is. Encountering them for the first time was harrowing, but I actually think most of them were scarier the second time because I knew what was coming if I wasn’t careful. Swimming about in open water, its pitch black, and then your PDA assistant tells you “Multiple leviathan class lifeforms detected. Are you sure whatever you’re doing is worth it?” Like, excuse me PDA lady, I didn’t ask you. And then a Ghost Leviathan bullrushes you and you throw your controller into your TV screen. Amazing experience all around. Seeing the shadow of a Reaper Leviathan before I saw one was utterly horrifying and I wanted to pause the game and just curl up into a ball.

- The horror of this game coupled with the foreignness of some of the things you find makes Subnautica a great example of environmental storytelling done right. All of the “story” events are random triggers you get from just exploring and progressing, and each cutscene you experience and alien artifact you find just gets you deeper and deeper into the mystery of what exactly is going on in this planet. The resolution to the story (I won’t spoil) honestly got me a little emotional.

- Two more little pros before I get into the cons. First, I really appreciate whoever wrote the databank entries. They are really informative (as in, some of them will actually tell you information you can use to progress in the game) and I loved reading the entries on the flora and fauna. (bonus points for: “If you can hear it, the reaper can see you”) Second, I love the ability to make a time capsule when you [redacted for spoilers] that can then be found by other players. I put a nice message in mine with some resources I thought would be useful to other people that were once in my position. Very introspective. I still have a screenshot of my message.

Cons:

- At times, it can be very unclear what the player is meant to do to progress in Subnautica. I get that this was to encourage exploration, but the first time I played, there were a lot of times I had to ask a friend for help because I truly had no clue what was supposed to happen next. Going into the Aurora is a good example of this; while radio messages imply it, it’s never overtly stated. I think a good way to rectify this would be to have the PDA give occasional pushes in the right direction. My advice to anyone that struggles: go deeper.

- Habitat construction is very entertaining in this game but my god can it be so frustrating at times. Placement restrictions are really weird for some rooms. Sometimes you won’t be able to place a room just because it's too close to something else, even if the models don’t overlap at all. I had a lot of trouble with the “Large Room” piece and its dividers—you can’t place anything on a wall that also has a divider corner attached to it; sometimes picture frames clip into the wall and you can’t see them; doorways and dividers don’t match up—and that’s just scratching the surface. You can’t sit in chairs that clearly have enough space for a person, ladders in connectors block the walkway, vertical connectors just…don’t connect? There’s a lot of tiny annoyances that just built up as I played. Subnautica has a lot of great concepts for base building but I can’t lie, it’s far from perfect.

- This next con is definitely something that can be forgiven since it’s a swimming-based game, but movement on dry land (islands and in habitats) is super awkward. The sound effects grate on you since walk cycles repeat the same few sounds, jumping is super clunky, and the Prawn suit has the gravity of water on land. It just doesn’t feel nice at all.

- I also think the mid-game grind for blueprints and resources is a bit of a slog. There are some blueprints that are essential to completing the game (like the moonpool and Cyclops), and if you go into the game not knowing where to find them, it can take a long-ass time to locate them when you’d rather be exploring or progressing. Plus, that time between building a moonpool and building a Prawn suit is mostly just breaking limestone chunks hoping you’ll get copper and titanium. That part certainly isn’t fun either, but it doesn’t last long enough to completely kill your drive.

Objective rating: 4 stars
Subjective rating: 5 stars

Probably the best survival sandbox game I've played. Progression is perfect, and you really feel yourself conquering the ocean towards the end. In the beginning, everything is scary but once you find upgrades and vehicles, the ocean is your b*tch. The vehicles are so fun and immersive to use and each biome is a beauty to behold. The fauna is very realistic and fun to observe. All the leviathans are my friends now, towards the beginning I was too scared to even come close to them but in the end I found them fascinating.

In the mid to late 2010's, it felt like you couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting a survival, crafting, resource collecting game. There was Rust, The Forest, ARK, Raft, Don't Starve, and the king of them all, Terraria and Minecraft. After being sorely disappointed by The Forest and getting bored with its story and gameplay, I wrote off almost all survival, crafting games as both a waste of time and a derivative genre in general. This was a shame because around the same time I started seeing trailers and gameplay for Subnautica and had already made up my mind on what I thought about "those" games. I never gave it a chance after its initial release and moved onto other games and genres. How could this game be any better than the 100 other popular survival, crafting games?

Boy was I wrong. A couple years later and a few months into COVID, I gave Subnautica a playthrough and this game blew me away. From the addicting progression system to the interesting and fresh plot, Subnautica is an amazing game from the moment you step out of your crashed lifepod. The creatures are unique and the environments are so incredibly detailed that you can explore for hours and still have plenty to see. I love the fact that the game has a beginning, a middle, and an end. There is a cohesive plot through all of Subnautica that gives you motivation to keep playing. Resources feel fair and balanced and the game finds the perfect balance between giving you easier access and still having it feel substantial when you go out to collect things. For each benefit you get with the new things that you develop, there's two more mountains that stand in your way for you to tackle and the reward once you get there is incredibly satisfying.

If you haven't played this game or you are considering getting it, do it. However. you should be prepared not only to sink about 25 hours into the game per playthrough, but also how much of your life this game will consume for a brief period of time. You'll be at the grocery store and think that you could be playing Subnautica. You'll be at your girlfriends apartment and think that you could be collecting titanium to build your second outpost. You'll be at your uncle's funeral service and think about how close you are to unlocking the Cyclops.

I'm working on my second playthrough of this game and I love it. I think it's not only one of the best survival, crafting games that rivals the big boys of Minecraft and Terraria, but one of the best games of the 2010s alongside AAA titles like Skyrim, The Witcher 3, and Breath of the Wild. Yeah, it's that good. Just play it already.

To me this game has always been the quintessential "early access, survival, crafting" game that every other game was trying to copy. I think one of the reasons for this game success is its generally more accommodating than others of the genre. I personal put survival crafting games at the bottom of my interest lists, but knowing that I could turn off food and water needs along with the game having a campaign to help push me forwards was my motivation to try this one.

I'd seen plenty of youtube coverage of the game so i new the ins and out pretty well, but I still found it an enjoyable experience. I like ocean aesthetics so that was enough for me, even if the base building was a little clunky. The base building was at least forgiving so if you placed something wrong you could just refund your materials back.

This was a nice low energy game for me to play while hanging out with my friend in voice call and chat or for listening to youtube in the background. If you want to give a survival crafting game a shot, this is one of the betters to take a crack at.

Subnautica won't work for everyone. I think this is the one game that stresses how important having a certain niche as an audience is. Tiresome, tedious survival busywork and backtracking turn into nightmarish romps through the alien and the unknown as you plunge deeper into the abyss... but this relies on something, doesn't it? If someone playing Subnautica doesn't have thalassophobia (and it's not like it's marketed as a horror game) all they'll get is an extremely straightforward relaxed game with basically no real challenge to it. Hours I spent fighting against myself to go deeper into one of the richest video game ecosystems ever made just to find out what happened and get resources I needed to actually escape this planet would be meaningless without a pre-existing sense of horror, because Subnautica isn't hard. Even the funny face eels aren't programmed to wreck your shit, they're programmed to stalk and ambush at the most vulnerable moment. Perfectly serviceable and commendable AI as far as making a convincing alien creature that echolocates prey, and it's genius for creating an unending sense of pure terror without letting you get used to the games tricks, but that just goes back to the start, doesn't it? Subnautica, a game about diving into an alien ocean that doesn't market itself as horror, is a game I can only describe as "extremely fucking good" to people who really, really, really don't want to dive into an alien ocean.

This isn't addressing late-game issues like grinding, some poor storytelling choices and the actual instability of the game which all do come to actually bite it in the ass later on, especially when getting the resources for the biggest step of the journey involves going into safe, boring zones where my thalassophobia was quenched by how routine it became. In spite of all this negativity however, it's worth stating that I think if you're someone as scared shitless of both the sea and scary space things as I am, I think you could get endless worth out of Subnautica. It stands as one of the most interesting and memorable games I've ever played, where, to progress through extremely solid exploration infused with your bog-standard survival game elements, I'd have to regularly fight my fears and cartoonishly gulp as I found my way into new territory, daring not to look down. The dread and atmosphere of Subnautica is unmatched, but your enjoyment will lay squarely on if you think the premise is interesting, and if it scares you. I'm never going back to the ecological dead zone ever again personally.

Subnautica is a pretty amazing survival game built into some of the foundations of System Shock's immersive sim mechanics. It has a hauntingly beautiful world filled with plenty of biomes along with the creatures and flora that inhibit it. The story unfolds in the Metroid Prime/System Shock logbook system and the game lets you play at your own pace, never needing to rush. You can build your base, tend your garden, upgrade your equipment, and brace yourself to go deep in the very hostile ocean world.

There are some annoyances with how it handles the survival mechanics though. Finding resources to craft your equipment can get a little too grindy, and I also feel that the thirst meter drains far too quickly, giving me the notion that no one dies of thirst far quicker than the player character. Granted, the game does give you options on how to balance it out if you are able to find the blueprints for it.

It had a pretty drawn out end game as well. Without giving too much away, you are required to build something that requires a lot of resources and backtracking, some of which I think was pretty dumb with how it was handled. Throughout the game I chose to not build the Cyclops submarine because I felt I was getting through the game just fine without it, and I felt it was too big for many of the passageways and caves I came across.

However, It turns out the sub is a necessity for the endgame, because it has its own fabricator that crafts one of the ingredients needed to build the final part to get you home.

Despite this, the annoyances aren't enough to bring down such an amazing world to experience and explore. Sometimes I wish I could forget some of the areas in the game just to experience the dread and anxiety of coming across them again. The uncertainty of whether or not you should push further and then succeeding in doing so is super satisfying.

It took me awhile to finish this game, and it's kind of bittersweet that I did. There aren't many games of this genre that capture the feelings I've experienced playing this game. I'm sad that I won't be able to experience them again now that I know what to expect playing this in the future.

Pros:
+ the open world is handcrafted and intriguing from start to end
+ the map is large and much more intricate than expected at first
+ the sky box and day/night cycle are one of the best in gaming
+ feelings of discovery are persistent throughout the game
+ three different modes with plenty of anti-frustration features
+ PDAs are smartly used for creating story crumbs and guiding the player
+ incredible sound design that fits each situation perfectly
+ the visual design of the biomes is distinct and creative
+ great voice acting and good writing
+ movement in water feels smooth and responsive
+ the "gasping for air" mechanic when close to the surface is a great idea
+ scanning mechanic just works and rewards curiosity
+ discovery of new technologies always feels like a step forward
+ lack of lethal violence is a bold but compelling design decision
+ build sequences are mostly transparent and logical
+ not all technologies have to be found or created to finish the game
+ the final sequence of events feels like a true finale to the story

Cons:
- game is buggy: items get lost in the scenery, assets won't load etc.
- quitting and reloading from menu leads to a persistent game-breaking bug
- technical performance is choppy throughout
- enemy AI and animation are generally wonky
- no quick save or auto save option
- no quick reload option from the options menu
- walking on land is tediously slow and janky
- combat is unresponsive and lacks hit feedback
- dying deletes items from the inventory without notice
- reloading a game is usually preferable to dying and losing equipment
- item management is time consuming and generally cumbersome
- new equipment cannot be created with ingredients from storage
- base building is tedious and construction issues are not transparent
- finding blueprints for new items can get annoying
- endgame progression is not always clear

Magic Moments: Too many to count.
Seeing the double moons circling the planet at night for the first time. Following a certain signal to dry land and realising there is so much more to the story than is apparent at first. Entering a mech suit and punching space eels in the face.

Playtime: 30 hours in Freedom mode (without ever using the Cyclops). Platinum trophy unlocked.


Verdict:
Subnautica is more than just a great game: it is an important step in the history of its genre (and a perfect companion piece to one of the greatest games of its generation, Outer Wilds). It offers a unique setting, a rich atmosphere, and most importantly, a constant sense of discovery in a dangerous but beautiful world full of secrets and surprises. In addition to its satisfying gameplay loop and its great audio-visual design, it also tells a surprisingly complex story that slowly but effectively guides players throughout their journey, thereby vastly improving on the mostly bland and generic crop of similar survival games. Moreover, the option to eliminate tedious survival elements like gathering food and water is a welcome one, as is the bold design decision to eschew lethal violence against the animal population. Even though the technical limitations and issues are plentiful and tough to ignore, they are never grievious enough to give up the quest of surviving and ultimately overcoming the trials and tribulations of your temporary home.

So buy the game, strap in and get ready to crash on Planet 4546B, guided only by your own sense of discovery and willingness to explore. The depths are waiting.

Subnautica is one of those games.

A game that you think about even when you're not playing it. A game that takes over your brain and lives there for a bit. A game that makes you feel you're actually accomplishing something. A game with a purpose. A game that actually lets you discover things, wonderful things, terrifying things, all by yourself instead of forcing them on you like most other titles.

Subnautica is a game worthy of your time. It's a game that will last the ages. It's beautiful.

Play Subnautica.

Uma das experiências mais gratificantes que já tive com videogames e uma das poucas vezes que realmente me senti imerso em algo a ponto de mergulhar completamente em seu meio, pesquisá-lo, me aprofundar em seu conteúdo, tirar o máximo proveito possível do mundo da subnáutica e sua comunidade.

É incrível como todas as possibilidades que eu poderia pensar em como o jogo poderia ser melhor pouco a pouco foram surgindo na minha frente. Durante ele, não senti que estava fazendo coisas para ficar mais forte ou sobreviver, eu realmente senti que estava cada vez mais perto de desvendar o mistério de um planeta inteiro.