Recent reviews by OctetSlim

The game is pretty good - it's not great yet, but it seems to be getting better. I see fairly regular updates and there has been a good amount of content added since I started playing. The little planets are a specific aesthetic that may or may not appeal to you. I think they look cool with buildings in later stages but early stages the settlements are easily lost when you zoom back just a little.

By way of early access feedback, I've found it fairly difficult to find the right nuggets to apply god powers to in order to complete some of the missions. Children aren't listed in your list of nuggets and there's no way to change jobs within the larger nugget list. This game needs some quality of life and mass management tools (better ones at least) but it's not terrible. Mostly your civilization just runs itself without much intervention (at least before the stone age).

I never write reviews, but I really felt this game deserved one.

Beautiful and challenging, Subnautica is the best of the survival/crafting games I have played so far.

I started during the 2017 steam sale and began my game pretty much blind - after playing for a while and reading back through previous wikis or watching a few let's play's - it seems that the devs have pretty recently added a lot of content to the game that really puts it over the top in my opinion.

This game is masterful at progressive disclosure - slowly the game pushes you into new crafting recipes and you learn new ways to survive and advance by simply exploring the world around your crashed pod.

As you get better tech, the game pushes you further and further out of your starting place through the use of signals - and getting to some signals requires that better tech, creating a meaningful feedback loop as you learn new things and figure out what to prioritize building. I've played a lot of open world survival/crafting games and I have never seen this kind of 'mission' and 'exploration' based progression done so well.

Another thing that sets this game apart - quick progression without a grind. This game wants you to explore more than it wants you to mine/grind. It equips you with new tools to explore faster and deeper and the exploration is super rewarding. The planet is beautiful, the creatures are interesting and 'realistic'. The ocean is completely ALIVE - never did I feel that it was barren or lacking content - it feels very real.

I've found this game to be extremely immersive - I get nervous moving through deep water, scared and curious when finding new alien fish, and elated and surprised when discovering wreckage or habitats or technology.

On top of everything, this game has Vive and Oculus support. I've been so sucked into the normal game that I haven't even tried pulling out the Vive yet to experience it in that way.

The biggest CON in my opinion is the lack of multiplayer or co-op. I understand that multiplayer wouldn't fit into this carefully crafted world as it stands today, but I want to see Subnautica 2 or an expansion that's bigger and let's you team up. There are just no other challengers in the market right now on the level of this game and I would absoutely love to experience it with my friends.