Subnautica: Have You Ever Been Afraid of Going into the Deep-end of the Pool?

I wouldn't call my self much of a "gamer." I'm actually pretty terrible at video games. Everyone else is just too good. It took me roughly two hours of playing for five straight nights before I actually got one single kill online in Call of Duty II: Modern Warfare. Most of the time I was just being blown away, and/or stabbed... 

Lake Michigan

But I recently got a small reasonably-priced Nintendo Switch. And, I was SO happy to find that Subnautica, the classic PC game is now available on this little device. The only reason I tried it out was because it got such great reviews in the gaming community, and was said to be terrifying, like, nightmarish and frightening. (Who's up for a good thriller or horror movie, am I right?) 

Anyway, the game starts with you crash-landing, alone, on an alien world -but, get this, it's a world that is almost all oceans. Therefore, survival depends not on walking around land and picking up vegetables and bugs to eat, you have to SWIM into the DEEP. As you may imagine, there are lots of scary things down there, not the least of which is running out of air and drowning before you have time to get to the the surface. 

Believe me, there are tons of huge, horrible, creatures down there that can swallow you whole -but there's nothing more terrifying than swimming down into a reef or a cave from which you may not have enough oxygen to emerge from safely. 

The key aspect of this game that I enjoyed was that it forces you to go down rather than up. We talk so much about space and air travel, but no one mentions the secrets of the depths of the oceans. As a kid, I learned how to swim but I was desperately afraid of the deep-end of the pool. For some reason, when I went down there I panicked. Thankfully, my dad was there to fish me out! But, there are secrets down there if you look.

Photo of the Subnautica Game

Subnautica is a wonderful and beautifully crafted game. The game, published by Unknown Worlds Entertainment and created by Charlie Cleveland and countless others, is a masterpiece. Playing it is like reading a sci-fi novel on-par with Dune or The The Expanse, by "James S.A Corey". Believe me, if your kid is playing Subnautica, they're probably smarter than you are ;)

Subnautica: A video game by Charlie Cleveland, Hugh Jeremy et al. was published by Unknown Worlds Entertainment in 2018.