Out of the water, you’ll encounter a communications tower on a not-too-distant island and a robotics facility within a frigid basin. I guess that’s what we get for keeping them in fish bowls for our own amusement. Underwater caverns and crevasses house all manner of plants and sea creatures, including mischievous sea monkeys who on multiple occasions snatched tools right out of my hands. Leading up to that point, expect to rinse and repeat regularly the cycle of hunting, scanning, and gathering.Įven though much of the experience does take place below sea level, there are a number of areas or biomes to encounter on solid, albeit frozen, ground. Through scanning vessel fragments, you’ll eventually be able to build a submarine so that you can travel faster and deeper underwater. The early game can feel a little more plodding before you upgrade your oxygen tank and craft equipment and tools to improve your mobility. Constructing a scanner early on allows Robin to gather info on the different objects and plants she encounters, and scanning certain structures and pieces yields blueprints that allow you to put together new items. Databank entries that unlock as you explore do fill in some of the background for Robin’s mission and Planet 4546B, but story beats largely arrive in fits and starts.įrom the first-person perspective, much of your time will be spent swimming under the ocean to discover materials, aquatic life, and the planet’s hidden secrets and stories. Besides sporadic voiced monologues from Robin and instructions and warnings from her PDA suit, there isn’t much in the way of direction or story early on. Upon retrieval, we learn that the drop pod will function as Robin’s home base, and from here she can begin searching for her sister, Amy. From there she can scrounge up some rations, water bottles, and flares before searching for her drop pod, whose location and distance are displayed on screen. The opening sees protagonist Robin undocking from just above the planet’s surface and crash landing into a snowy valley. While veterans of the expansive survival-adventure genre are well-served here, the gameplay elements that aim to heighten realism might be seen by newcomers as cold-blooded. A follow up to the original Subnautica, which left early access in 2018, Below Zero returns to the setting of Planet 4546B, but this time in a more noticeably frosty region, where players must monitor their core temperature, in addition to health, hunger, thirst, and oxygen levels. Subnautica: Below Zero is much smaller and tighter in scope, but the feeling of diving into the unknown, the necessity of scavenging to survive, and the loneliness of the imposed isolation are shared by both. One could argue that open-world adventure games reached their peak with No Man’s Sky, which continues to add content and features to its impossibly-grand universe.
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