The latter, it’s worth noting, makes me feel the smallest I’ve felt in a video game since 2019’s Outer Wilds pitted me against the massive cyclones and waves of its most terrifying alien planet, Giant’s Deep. Despite this evolutionary nature and my own familiarity with the original, surveying its alien planet still frequently leaves me breathless, from the teeming shallows I arrive in and the deep groans of leviathans to the cataclysmic eruptions of bedrock. Subnautica: Below Zero began life as a DLC expansion for the 2018 original Subnautica before becoming a stand-alone title. The pressure, so to speak, never lets up. As the waters become stranger and more ominous, the game’s finite oxygen supply imbues its ecological exploration with a striking sense of tension. But in Subnautica: Below Zero, the limitations of lung capacity fuel its moments of contrasting wonder precisely because the player is required to momentarily ascend for air. Often the genre’s physiological abstractions, numbers which slowly drain towards death, feel like chores to deal with. In this aquatic adventure, oxygen enters the equation too. Developed by San Francisco studio Unknown Worlds, it’s a survival video game that, like others, tasks players with managing various life bars such as health, hunger, and thirst. This juxtaposition between watery calm and bruising surface is common in the opening hours of Subnautica: Below Zero. I get my bearings before ascending for a breath-the wind still howls-so I submerge again, back into the turquoise blue. Light shimmers in the currents, shoals of fish sway gently, and “pengwings,” which seem to be penguinlike creatures, dart effortlessly by.

Without a second’s thought, I dive in, and as my virtual body makes contact with the surface, the violence above is swapped for the serene oceanic below. My body temperature plummeting, I race across the land mass, eventually spotting water. I escape from the wreckage, nearly blinded by white snow and battered by gale-force winds.

A spacecraft hurtles towards an inhospitable alien planet, crash-landing on a freezing tundra.

Will there be a 3rd subnautica game