![]() ![]() Luckily, it has only eaten part of me, and the remaining 41% of me is able to flap away and have a panic attack in the safety of the escape pod.īut I go back in. What I took to be a long noble neck is in fact a long toothy beak. Sinking slowly into a crevasse, I sight a majestic looking thing, with long and undulating equine neck, wafting amid the weeds. Green kelp-like vines rise from the sandy bed, while huge pinkish funnels lie in piles near the surface. Weird looking fish-analogues skitter from coral to coral, as schools of small fry whirl and sway in the open waters. What awaits is not the forbidding murk of the Medway’s shit-soup, however, but a surprisingly pleasant world of vibrant and eccentric topographies. At least on an alien planet you are unlikely to surface with a used diaper slicked to your head. So it is a profound act of will that forces me off the edge of my escape pod and into the waters of Subnautica’s alien world. I sort of wonder if it was in fact videogames, in the shape of No One Lives Forever’s sharks and Half-Life’s Ichthyosaur that have since trained me to fear the deep. Admittedly, only the first two contain anything that might try to eat you whole, but the Medway is nonetheless full of less immediately lethal, but much poopier, hazards. I’m not sure when exactly I became scared of deep water, or, more accurately, the things that might be in it - I happily scuba-dived in the Indian Ocean, rafted down the Nile and have been pitched into the Medway during multiple ill-fated father-son bonding efforts. And if, like me, your progress through life has been marked by the avid acquisition of new phobias, it’s probably quite terrifying. With Subnautica, exploration alone is made thrilling by the submarine world’s sheer oddity. That is not always the case with indie survival games, which often feel like they’ve been designed only for a number to go down and stop. When you silence the shrill, insistent carping for food and water, you can detect a more substantial game beneath. It’s actually rather lovely and I wish more survival games were like this: with a button to turn off the survival elements. Then you swim, explore and hunt, gathering resources to build contraptions that let you extend the reach of your survival efforts, charting ever greater depths of a strange and abyssal world, full of exotic - and sometimes hungry - creatures. Emerging from your escape pod, you find yourself bobbing over a vast reef, extending from horizon to horizon, the open sea only punctuated by the flaming husk of the crashed colonial mothership. Especially if you play something as beguiling as Subnautica, a game set on a beautiful oceanic alien world. Of course, it all seems so innocent now, here in 2015. Only then does it regret marooning Jon Blow and Stephen Lavelle on a spit of sand in the Pacific with only a snooker cue and a single sausage-roll between them. It’s only the devastating invasion of the Sokobeasts, a hyperintelligent alien race fixated on abstruse block-pushing puzzles, that forces the regime to see its terrible error. ![]() “To play is to die! To play is to die!” the regime’s fanatical adherents shriek from loudhailers as the speedrunners, twin-stick shootists and visual-novelists are forced into the re-education pens. In sick mimicry of the cabal’s evil creed, games can now only conclude with the player’s own expiration from starvation or hypothermia. Early Access devs planning coherent end-games are forced to fight each other to the death in a bleak, under-resourced wilderness with guns improvised from baked-bean tins. Within minutes of the first shot, indie game genres fall, devoured by the unstoppable tide of survival mechanics. ![]() ![]() 2016 is the year that the secret cabal of indie survival game developers finally steps from the shadows to unleash its terrible global coup. 2015 looks very much like it might be the year of the indie survival game as well. Snork snork!Ģ014 was the year of the indie survival game. This week he slaps on a snorkel and dives into alien aquatic survival game Subnautica. Each week Marsh Davies dips a toe into the unknown waters of Early Access and returns with any stories he can find and/or decompression sickness. ![]()
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