To assemble these things you'll also need blueprints, collected by hand-scanning scattered pieces of wreckage from the Aurora, with more advanced blueprints and valuable resources naturally found a long way from your starting location. You gather resources from the sea to fashion into supplies, tool, structures and ultimately, vessels using a nigh-magical 3D printer, one of the few surviving instruments aboard your escape pod. The game's survival and construction systems are well-wrought, and on paper, a little humdrum. In this regard, it is both an absorbing, mesmerising survival game and a melancholy commentary on our attitudes towards the environments that have inspired it. It's about turning the ocean we know and marvel at into something manageable, a harrowing yet pliant entity, rich with carefully graded threat and opportunity. The phrase 'alien ocean' is, of course, something of a tautology - what more alien a place than the ocean? - and Subnautica's Spaceman Crusoe setup isn't really about transporting you to the seas of another world. Regaining consciousness, you find yourself adrift in a damaged escape pod, the Aurora's enormous, burning carcass the only thing visible on a balmy blue horizon.īeneath lies an alien ocean two kilometres across and one-and-a-half deep, writhing with undiscovered species and the materials you'll need to make a home on this planet and perhaps, solve the riddle of the Aurora's crash while you wait for rescue.

As it begins the Aurora crash-lands on a remote waterworld following a mysterious explosion. Available in feature-complete form this week after three years on Steam Early Access, Unknown Worlds' impressive survival sim casts you as a lowly but very able crewman aboard the starship Aurora, sometime in the late 23rd century. Terror, wonder, and a generous whack of underwater DIY.

By day Subnautica's marine creatures can look goofy (it runs on the Unity engine, and is prone to conspicuous pop-in when you move across the terrain at a decent clip). All the same, I decide to head back to the shallows before attempting further repairs. Scrambling inside with my heart in my teeth, I hastily switch off the lights and check the sub's hull strength. Swimming over to it takes approximately ten seconds and thirty million years.

There's another horrible metallic screech and the Seamoth is released, to dangle sadly in a halo of debris and spurting gas a hundred metres off. Whatever it is, it's so big that I can't see all of it. Turning, I glimpse the vessel's headlights spinning wildly through the blackness, and in the glare from those headlights, a corkscrew motion and the flash of dense, milky-white flesh. I've barely aimed my repair gun at the sub when there is an almighty crunch and it vanishes. Besides, I've got two health packs left, and a fancy thermo survival knife that cooks anything you hit with it. In hindsight, the absence of larger fauna really ought to have set a few alarm bells ringing, but all I can think of are the scratches on my Seamoth's lovely yellow finish. The sea floor ahead is thick with towering ferns that provide cover for a species of coyote-like predator, whereas right here I can see nothing save schools of fish the size of my thumb, twisting in the dark like flurries of snow. The sub - a chubby, whirring frisbee with a bubble cockpit - has taken a few knocks while rooting through the trenches, and in a moment of great wisdom, I hop out to perform some repairs. I'm on my way back to base from a salvaging trip, hold packed with lithium from shale deposits on the edge of the reef. 'Not unless you're going all the way.' It turns out this is just as true of a submarine, and especially at night, 300 metres below the surface. 'Never get out of the boat,' says Captain Marlowe in Apocalypse Now. An oppressively beautiful portrayal of an undersea environment, and a well-wrought survival game with a vaguely eco-friendly message.

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