After all that drama, Subnautica 2 is good

Gathering metals and minerals and other crafting materials in Subnautica 2 got me thinking about how weird it is that so many useful things exist in the real world. Like, isn’t it odd that something as good as metal exists? And fiber! Where would we be without rope? Certainly not playing Subnautica 2 on a computer. If rope weren’t possible, I can’t imagine we’d have gotten anywhere as a species.

Half-baked thoughts that make me sound like a high creationist (I’ve only ever been one of those things, for the record) are to me a sign of a good survival game—or at least the kind that I like, in which I’m relaxed enough for my mind to wander, but entertained enough that it wanders to matters of material science and not, say, doing something else.

Subnautica 2 is a decidedly well-balanced survival game. In a handful of hours of pre-release play, I’ve never found the scavenging and crafting grueling, but neither have I found it so easy that the expansion of my underwater base feels unearned.

It’s generous with intrinsic rewards, namely underwater caves to explore, glowing alien sea creatures to discover, and pretty extrasolar sunsets, and the survival and crafting systems are refined. This is a mature genre, and outside of explicitly hardcore survival games, I think it’s OK if the basic crafting station can automatically pull resources out of storage containers, and if I don’t have to punch trees (or fish) for five hours just to build a hut and a bedroll. You can get to the fun of undersea base building pretty quickly here.

When it’s out of early access in a couple years or so, Subnautica 2 might be a great survival game. It’s at the very least a far cry from the reputational disaster its publisher, Krafton, painted it as last summer when it tried and failed to remove the CEO of developer Unknown Worlds. I imagine they are tired of people bringing that drama up, but one last time before I move on: That was really weird.

The well-balanced survival game

Without much preamble, Subnautica 2 releases you on an oceanic planet and lets you get to work collecting metals and minerals and fibers, outfitting yourself with aquatic survival gear, and figuring out what happened to some of your settler cohorts, who seem to have all died or swam off to a mountainous “tree” in the distance. To my surprise, the light storytelling has been a highlight of the game for me.

Subnautica 2 is a combat-free survival game, where death is something to avoid, but not the worst of fates: Your AI boss even encourages you to die on purpose at one point, and instantly reprints your body whenever you perish. Absorbing alien DNA, which is required to adapt to new biomes, may be a way out of that contractual immortality.

In the meantime, aliens have also absorbed me a couple times—I was once lured into a giant clam by a nodule of lithium I needed for a crafting project—but the friction mostly comes from Subnautica 2’s relatively chill approach to player guidance. If you don’t notice the habitat building tool you need to scan and reproduce, well, you’ll just have to spend a couple of confused hours stuffing your starting lifepod with resources there’s nothing for you to do with. Couldn’t be me!

In some cases it feels obvious that Subnautica 2 just needs to explain itself a little more, like when the batteries in my tools started running out before I even knew that tools had batteries. But in general, I approve of the figure-it-out-yourself approach. Absentmindedly swimming around and scanning whatever I find eventually gets me going in the right direction, and is fun for its own sake. The dash ability you collect early on could be more generous, but using air bladders to launch myself to the surface like a breaching dolphin doesn’t get old.

I especially like that what might at first appear to be absent quality-of-life features sometimes turn out to be in-fiction crafting projects. If you’re having trouble finding certain resources, for instance, you can build a scanner in your base that pings deposits of what you’re looking for on your HUD, as in the first game. Dipping out of the main survival mode and into the creative mode, I saw that farming is also in my future, with laboratory growbeds that can house useful flora.

Synchronized swimming

Co-op is new to the series, and it worked well in a test with another PC Gamer editor. It’s possible to convert saves from singleplayer to multiplayer and back again, as well as to share them with friends so that they can continue building out a communal base on their own, and then host the next game or send the save back. It’s not ultra-elegant, but it works.

My main complaint, really, is that Subnautica 2 is not done. It seems large enough to spend many hours in—Unknown Worlds says it’s “bigger and more polished” than the studio’s previous early access releases—but it certainly isn’t fully formed. According to the Steam page, Unknown Worlds plans to keep Subnautica 2 in early access for as long as three years, during which time it will add “more biomes, creatures, craftables, features, and narratives.”

The developer has included a base refund tool you can use in case map updates break your build and you need to move it, which suggests it hopes to avoid ever making us throw out our progress during Subnautica 2’s continued development. Given that, perhaps we can reframe its early access period as a slow-burn, episodic rollout of the completed story—the same thing many games do even if not labeled as early access. Its unfinished state certainly hasn’t turned many away so far: Subnautica 2 has already sold extraordinarily well.