Subnautica And The Terror Of Absolute Freedom

subnautica is a scary game it doesn't bill itself like that and it's not too obvious from the steam page either but everyone who's played it knows that it is a scary game in some ways it's inherent to its setting we rejected the ocean millions of years ago and adapted to life on dry land and now it rejects us if we try to return by slowing us down putting hard limits on what we can see and hear and making our fingers look really creepy and that's before even thinking about all the life lurking in that space below the waves life that doesn't have any of those same physical constraints as us sure you're more likely to be struck by lightning than you are to be bitten by a shark but when you're actually in the ocean and it's impossible not to notice just how helpless you are well it's a lot harder to wave away fears with facts and logic subnautica takes the way we experience the sea and makes a damn good game out of it but creating a sense of dread isn't its only goal you don't start out in the truly terrifying waters those parts where you look down and see nothing but darkness instead a spaceship crash leaves you in the equivalent of a coral reef where the water is that kind of nice and friendly shade of blue you see in holiday pictures and the sea floor is comfortingly never out of sight the place is brimming with life and colour of course it would suck to be stranded here but that doesn't mean it's devoid of beauty and sure there are some elements of danger but for the most part this bit of the alien ocean feels secure and welcoming subnautica is a survival game and at the beginning that translates to addressing those most basic needs of hunger and thirst which you can do without having to leave this little pocket of safety after that's handled you can go up the hierarchy of needs a bit and consider what tools might improve your chances of survival but the cosy reef might not have all the materials you need to make those and pretty soon you'll start hearing distress calls as other survivors from the crash call out to the waves and desperately try to find others like them and it dawns on you that you'll need to start travelling further and further from the safety of your home but you never actually have to subnautica is an open world game so you can go almost anywhere at any time and that freedom is never taken away from you at any point but because it's also a survival game it's very easy to resist those calls and stick to the areas you know and understand to more easily accomplish those survival mechanics instead of venturing out into the unknown because the unknown is scary it's one of the major reasons the ocean is scary i mean we know more about the moon than we do about the ocean we know more about a rock hurtling through space 384 000 kilometers away from us that we only managed to set foot on 59 years ago than we do about the oceans on earth where today there are about 2.4 billion people living within 100 kilometers of one and i myself used to be one of them i grew up on an island where the sea was never more than 20 minutes away from a given place i remember one day me and some friends decided to jump into the sea from the breakwater which is a really big stone wall built into the sea to block dangerous waves from getting into a harbour the first time i jumped i was really nervous so nervous in fact i don't think i really jumped off the edge i just kept running until there wasn't any ground below my feet anymore there was a couple of seconds of falling and then my friends talking and laughing the seagulls coined the wind all the noises were gone in an instant as i plunged into some place completely different it was a sunny warm day before but down here it was cold it was that time of year when summer had started but the sea hadn't actually had time to heat up yet i looked around but i couldn't see much although there wasn't much to see to be honest then i swung back to the stairs and re-entered my familiar world having learned something pretty unsettling that i think subnautica captures wonderfully there's this concept in psychology of intrusive thoughts which are basically unpleasant thoughts that sort of spring into your head unbidden the french came up with a great way of describing a certain set of these thoughts they call them lapil david or the call of the void have you ever been standing someplace high and had the sudden urge to jump even though you know you don't really want to that's the kind of thoughts and feelings that belong to the call of the void and while it might sound pretty strange it's actually way more common than you might think a study of 431 college students had half of them stating that they had experienced these kinds of thoughts before that study suggested that rather than the existence of these thoughts being suggestive of any inkling towards actually wanting to hurt yourself they're the result of a survival instinct sort of misfiring in our brains other common examples of the call of the void are to suddenly swerve your car into traffic to jump in front of a train or to jump from a boat into deep water and that last one is so interesting to me because it's the only one that if we really wanted to we could probably do you could never actually act on any of the other intrusive thoughts without serious consequences but jumping from a boat into the sea sure you'd get wet and have a bit of a shock but if there's no storm and you're not alone your boat's just going to turn back around and pick you up again in 20 minutes it will be like it never happened it's something potentially unnerving that we actually have the ability to go out and do and that's what i realized after jumping off the breakwater it made me realize that all the parts of the sea that are scary like the unknown potential it contains could be explored i realized i could go to pretty much any point on that island jump into the water and see what i could find the unknown would no longer be this nebulous thing that forever mutates from one terrible thing to another in all its endless possibilities i could go out and see it with my own eyes and permanently fix it to one form be that good or bad i only needed to make the conscious choice to go out and do it and i think fully comprehending that it's all down to you and you alone makes that decision much more terrifying than a base fear of the unknown and subnautica gives that same choice to you it builds an area you come to understand a place you come to see as safe then it draws you out a bit and hints at the world to be discovered if you just venture a bit further and go a little bit deeper but it's always you who has to decide to make that plunge into the deep you're never forced to make it horror games tend to be quite linear which is logical because that kind of structure gives the developers more control over how the scares work it's like walking down a corridor to a closed door in resident evil it's scary because you don't know what could be waiting on the other side of that door but unless you just stop moving completely or quit the game you'll always need to move towards it to progress subnautica takes that corridor expands it to the size of an ocean and fills it with doors holding potential mysteries all over the place you then have to actively decide which door you go towards and the fact that you have that freedom to go anywhere in any direction at any given time to approach any of these doors can just fill you with dread i don't think there's any other game that uses the freedom of how you want to play to create terror in such an effective way as subnautica and i think what makes it even more effective is that it's not just an experience filled with fear the reason it's not marketed as a horror game on the steam page is because it isn't or at least it's not always because the unknown doesn't always have to be a bad thing at the risk of sounding cheesy some of the most interesting parts of life are when we go out and experience something new something we've never experienced before subnautica understands that while the sea can be a scary place it's more than that yes it's home to dangerous wildlife but it's not all terrible and seeing how that life moves and behaves and just exists in this environment can bring such a sense of awe and wonder and joy that coral reef you call home at the beginning serves as proof right from the start of the game that while this world might be terrifying at times it also has the potential to hold a submerged eden and it's this duality between the potential for danger and the potential for joy that makes that decision to venture out into the unknown one that actually bears consideration in the first place it's structured around a simple premise any treasure or monsters here will remain where they lie and if you really want to see the first then you have to be prepared to also see the second and i think that makes for a truly great experience thanks for watching and i hope to see you in the next one

Channel: Tomkon

Views: 538,279

Keywords: subnautica, subnautica video essay, subnautica scary, how subnautica uses terror, subnautica thalassophobia, subnautica horror, subnautica leviathan, call of the void, why subnautica is scary

Id: wMjR7fkTYe0

Length: 8min 47sec (527 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 02 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Snorblatz]

It’s such a fun game

[u/greatestmidget]

Nice analysis. I think Adam Millard covered some of the same points in his video but I really liked your interpretation of the same.

[u/Allrayden]

I eat up this kind of content. It's always interesting how differently we all view games and why they work. Sometimes we get so caught up in playing them that we forget to ask why we're playing them and why they make us feel a certain way. I love the horror genre when they get creative, and a game not even marketed as horror but being so terrifying is really thought provoking. Great video!