Subnautica

Submission 18,860

About

Subnautica is an action survival game developed by Unknown Worlds Entertainment in which the player explores an open ocean in an alien world, collecting resources to survive.

History

The game takes place in the late 22nd century. In the game, the player inhabits a ship called the Aurora which is gunned down early in the plot, forcing them to land on the oceaninc planet, Planet 4546B. There, the player explores the ocean to find out what gunned down their ship and what happened on Planet 4546B.

Subnautica was developed by Unknown Worlds Entertainment, who announced the game on December 17th, 2013.^[1] The game was released on Steam in early access on December 16th, 2014 and on Xbox One preview on May 17th, 2016. The finished game was released on January 23rd, 2018. The same day, a trailer for the game was posted to YouTube by the game's channel, gaining over 1.2 million views (shown below).

Online Presence

Online, the game has a fan-generated Wiki^[4] with 533 pages as of January 26th, 2018. On Twitter,^[5] the game's page has over 40,000 followers. On Facebook,^[6] the game has over 28,000 likes. A subreddit for the game^[7] has over 28,000 subscribers.

Controversies

On February 3rd, 2018, Twitter user @dijon_dujour quoted a tweet by Subnautica sound designer Simon Chylinski replying to Info Wars host Paul Joseph Watson regarding "Islamic no go zones" (shown below, left), adding "Lmao. This is the sound designer for subnautica.Cool employees u got there." The same day, Twitter user @RainBlackKat posted several screenshots in which Chylinski appears to mock identity politics and social justice activism (shown below, right).

On February 5th, Chylinski tweeted that he had been fired from the Subnautica team (shown below, left).^[9] The following day, Chylinski posted a tweet asking his followers to "plz stop targeting subnautica devs."^[10] On February 7th, the video game news blog GameRevolution^[8] reported that the Steam page for Subnautica was being "review bombed" by supporters of Chylinski, which included a graph illustrating the surge in bad reviews (shown below, right).

Reception

Subnautica was very well-received upon release. It received a 9.1/10 rating from IGN,^[2] where reviewer TJ Hafer praised the game's tension as provided by some of the monsters underwater, which he believed separated it from other open-world explore/craft games like Minecraft. On Steam,^[3] the game has a user score of "overwhelmingly positive" aggregated from over 40,000 users.