Subnautica

Playing Subnautica very late. It has that quality that makes you go “one more thing”…

Man am I ever going to finish this game. It tricks me to feeling I’ve made progress, but I’m past 30 hours now and not sure if I’m even halfway through. Last night I played to 2:30 AM (really wanted to get my first Cyclops built and tested), then finally when I went to bed I and couldn’t sleep anyway.

Playing Subnautica for the whole day. Man this game is one long struggle, but good in a way roguelikes were back when I still had the patience to play them.

Finally completed Subnautica, at slightly past 60 hours. What a game. Very solid experience involving planning and suspension. Interesting story and lore — I read all the text in the game. I even had nightmares about the deep sea. However I think the ending was a bit weak. I think a mystery game like this should pack some kind of a twist, and then the ending “chapter” should be about doing everything again different, or everything in reverse, something like that. Now it was just routine building, as I had saved the rocket construction completely to the end (probably shouldn’t, but luckily I had hoarded just enough of all the difficult ingredients).

I’m also interested in seeing a 3d map of the world. I made my own map on pen and paper and it came pretty handy. I loved the spatial visualization challenge.

Finished Subnautica Below Zero. It was fun enough to play for the mechanics again, but the writing was sadly very bad. Prime example why in mysteries you should withold information because of how sense of wonder gets lost when things turn out more normal than you expected. I also didn’t like how almost every character was female, but the voice acting wasn’t too bad. I liked the side characters the best, that is the voice messages they left behind.