Subnautica does a lot of things right. It’s got a colourful and richly designed
world, some really streamlined, intuitive base building, but what I think is the best
bit of Subnautica is just how pants shittingly terrifying it is. From the leviathans, to these horrible monsters,
to this spooktacular nightmarescape, so much of subnautica is designed to creep you out
and keep you on edge. What I’m talking about isn’t horror, but
terror. It’s going to seem like I’m using two
different words to describe the same thing and I kind of am, but to someone like Gothic
pioneer Anne Radcliffe, horror and terror are actually very different. Radcliff says that terror “expands the soul
and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life” whereas horror “freezes and nearly
annihilates them”. I-I mean, what do you even need me for that
all seems pretty self explanatory. To translate into modern day english- Terror
is all about suspense and the threat of danger, horror is all about actually scaring you or
grossing you out. How does this manifest in videogames? Spotting horror in games is easy, there’s
a whole genre named after it. One of the most influential purely horror-based
games right now is infamously hacky game, five nights at freddy's and its million sequels. Animatronic things are creepy because of the
uncanny valley, and those same characters jumping out at you from nowhere and making
a loud noise is enough to get the likes of markiplier to lose his mind every time. Horror is primal and shocking, it plays on
our subconscious reactions to things we think are immediate threats. Concepts of horror have gone unchanged since
the days where early man was hunted by anthropomorphized animatronic mammoths and sabertooth tigers. Horror games are scary, and they provide a
brief endorphin thrill, but let’s be honest, they’re a bit cheap. Once the initial shock has worn off that’s
kind of it, and you’re unlikely to fall for the same thing twice. Terror on the other hand is much more insidious
in nature. When Radcliffe goes on about how it’s expanding
the soul and awakening the faculties, she’s talking about how terror is something conscious
that happens in our imaginations. It’s something uniquely human, terror happens
not when we see something scary, but when we imagine it. Terror is the dread that sets in as you cower
in a room in resident evil seven, your brain in overdrive trying to work out where the
crazy hillbilly psychos are and all the many ways they can kill you. Terror is that DAMN water bit in amnesia the
dark descent. The monster in this area will try to kill
you if you set foot in any of this water. You can’t even see it, and that’s what
makes it so terrifying, every splash, every noise, and every time you dip a toe into its
domain sends your mind reeling into a state of panic and paranoia far more effective than
simply showing you a spooky ghost. Terror is well suited for games because it
sticks with you, and imaginative human brains being what they are, will start to try and
comprehend or even to fight the source, which only makes it more terrifying, provided they
fail. This is one of the big things that sets Subnautica
up as different from a lot of other survival games. In minecraft, things like creepers and skeletons
and stuff are clear, understandable threats with very obvious behaviours and spawning
patterns, even a novice player will quickly work out that enemies spawn in the dark, and
will more often than not just make a beeline for you. Conversely, Subnautica is all about obfuscating
that same information. Nearly every hostile creature behaves like
a predator, they stalk you, they’ll gang up on you and more often than not they’ll
try to ambush you, even some herbivorus creatures like the crashfish or sea treader have unique
way of getting in your face that the game does not warn you about. What does this mean? By withholding information other games would
give freely, subnautica doubles down on the feeling of a hostile alien world that really
wants to kill you. If you’re not paying attention, crabsnakes-
these horrible wormy monsters are very dangerous, and are liable to attack you without warning. Once you understand that these creatures are
actually just highly territorial and will only attack if you get too close to them or
their designated home mushroom, they’re much easier to avoid, but crucially, they’re
no less scary. Now that you understand the fact that they
will hide in mushrooms and ambush you, this little panorama turns from zero crabsnakes,
to about 10 potential ones lying in wait. As you learn more about the world, the horror
shock of seeing these beasties try to eat you fades, but the terror remains. You know juuust enough about these creatures
to be worried about their existence and the telltale signs of their attack, but not quite
enough to be able to truly understand and overcome them. That hopelessness is key to what radcliffe
is going on about when she talks about awakening the faculties. By getting your brain to consider the real
depth of your depth of your situation rather than just reacting to scary things, the mind
goes beyond horror and into terror. Subnautica does its best to ensure that you
never get the chance to really analyse these creatures by ensuring you’ve got no real
offensive options. Every creature in the game *can* be killed,
but the game never tells you that. Instead, creatures can be scared off if you
do enough damage, and even if you do kill them, you’re never rewarded for doing so. Unlike most other survival games, fighting
enemies awards no materials or extra capabilities, so you learn to cut and run early on, ensuring
that these underwater beasties remain scary. Of course, the lack of weapons and focus on
defensive tools is all the consequence of the game making a deliberate statement about
gun control in the real world- It’d take a whole video to do it justice, so I’ve
put an interview in the description. In the early story of Subnautica, you’re
one of many crewmembers who survived in lifepods that got ejected from your crashing ship,
the Aurora. As you progress through the game, you’ll
get the occasional signal from the other lifepods for you to investigate. All of them, without fail are empty, punctured
by some sort of titanic creature, the bodies? Nowhere to be found. Wherever you go, there are no survivors except
you from the Aurora crash. When the crew of the sunbeam contact you,
it’s this ray of hope a chance at salvation that gets snatched away at the last moment. Even the spooky alien facilities are completely
devoid of life for the most part. If there’s one thing that Subnautica wants
you to feel, it is completely and utterly alone. Pretty terrifying, right? The mysterious deaths of everyone around you
poses questions, what the hell is killing everyone. Well some of it can be attributed to broken
lifepods, but that doesn’t explain the missing bodies. Something very big, and very strong is systematically
hunting down humans and devouring them. All the little clues and hints from the scuttled
lifepods to the vague warnings your AI helper and the audio logs you find give you about
Titanic creatures lurking in deeper waters paint a picture of a truly nasty monster. A Reaper leviathan. Chances are you won’t directly engage with
a leviathan until well into the game, but Subnautia is very eager to keep you on your
toes, from across entire biomes you can hear the telltale cry of the Reaper Leviathans,
and you might be unlucky enough to catch a glimpse of these serpentine monstrosities
from way off during your exploration. These guys are WAY bigger than any other fish
in the sea except the mighty reefback. Now Subnautica is actually quite clever here,
your effective visibility is quite low, especially in the more dangerous areas owing to darkness,
sand, radiation and the like, but the bioluminescence of nearly every creature can be seen at a
much greater distance. Giving you a few terrifying glimpses of especially
things like the ghost leviathans, just seeing a flash of their telltale bright blue glow
is enough to send the paranoid part of the human brain responsible for terror into overdrive
imagining what the hell that thing even is. My absolute favourite way the Subnautica devs
cultivate a feeling of terror is through the reaper’s roars. Have a listen to this. That is the sound of a reaper leviathan looking
for its next meal, you. These roars have a radius of about half a
kilometer, which translates into roughly a quarter of the map at any one time. You will be hearing these roars a lot. We’ve already talked about how the fear
of the partially known builds on pre-existing anxieties, but leviathans in particular have
a special layer on top of that. Not long after you hear the roar of a leviathan,
you’ll start spotting glimpses of one, even if you’re on the edge of their territory. That’s because the roar isn’t just for
show. If you can hear it, the leviathan knows where
you are, and will start to move towards you. They won’t actually attack until you get
within a much smaller radius, but this stealthy system guarantees that you’ll always have
the creeping fear of a reaper attack in the back of your mind, and in the more dangerous
areas, at least one will always be hunting you. The skeptics amongst you are thinking right
now: “well yeah, sure these monsters are scary when you start out, but you’ll get
sick of them once they’ve killed you a million times”. This is a common horror game problem, the
baddies in resi seven for example stops being scary once you get stuck on an area. That’s not just because the illusion of
real danger is broken, but also because losing in a video game actually gives your brain
some breathing room. You get a chance to respawn, recentre yourself
in a safe environment and think clearly for a change about where and how you died, what
caused it, and how you can prevent it, lessening the threat some of these big monsters, especially
the leviathans pose. That’s why subnautica pulls all of its punches,
it’s almost insultingly easy. Here’s a couple of examples. There’s a really generous window to running
out of oxygen, despite all of the anxiety inducing warnings. Ghost leviathans, yeah these big boys we saw
earlier, they’ve got an AI quirk that causes them to de-aggro once they land a charge attack
to freak you out but not actually kill you. Reaper leviathans have this awesomely brutal
grab attack they can do on seamoths and prawn suits. Guess what? This attack only does about fifty percent
of the seamoth’s health in damage and half that to suits. This means that unless you were already on
death's door, you’ve a pretty good shot at booking it out of there before they can
attack again. Hell, even if you’re completely unarmored
and not in a vehicle, they still can’t kill you in a single hit. All that goes without mentioning the fact
that pretty much every enemy in the game, with the partial exception of the humble crashfish
we mentioned earlier, is either way slower than you are, or is way less maneuverable. You can escape even leviathans by just running
away at a slight angle, putting you out of the range of their charge. Crucially though, they’ll still follow you
and roar, giving you a good scare and the feeling you only made it out by the skin of
your teeth. This is the real genius of subnautica. Unlike so many games with fear-based elements,
Subnautica commits to the idea of pure Terror, the kind of fear that’s pretty much all
in your head. By understanding how other mediums can convey
and control different kinds of emotional states, we can learn new techniques to put into videogames,
not only to increase the intensity of stuff like fear, but also to ensure that those emotions
don’t run out of steam. Of course, in telling you how Subnautica really
works, i’ve kinda spoiled the scares for you… Or did I?
Really great video. I loved his discussion about how, by actually making the game easier, it preserves the fear - die enough times to an enemy and you get bored, but barely survive and you become even more scared than ever.
They make a great explanation of the difference between horror and terror. I've tried to explain the difference to friends because I love terror but not horror but most didn't get it. I love Subnautica and now I can link these together!
Massive spoilers but well analyzed.
Found this video and thought I share it here.
I've always just played on creative, because even if the ocean were completely empty, it's still water and I would still constantly be crapping myself.
Could you link to the YouTube let who made this please
I dont know... but subnautica is terrifying
This is one of my favourite videos!