LAST EDITED ON Dec-31-16 AT 11:18 PM (EST)
 
So over on Steam, there are approximately 152 million games with the same basic premise: you're stranded on an alien planet with only your wits and some curiously-high-tech camping gear, with which you must a) survive and b) craft stuff. All of them seem to be in more-or-less-permanent early access. Generally they aren't very good, or at least very polished.

Subnautica is... well, one of those, although it adds an interesting twist in that the alien planet you're stranded on appears to be an ocean world. (Or maybe you just happened to come down in the middle of an ocean. It's hard to say.) So instead of roaming around the landscape on foot, plundering a variety of suspiciously compact biomes for their suspiciously specific resources, you're swimming around in an aquatic environment... plundering a variety of suspiciously compact biomes for their suspiciously specific resources.

I riff, but I rather like this game. It's better-realized than a lot of its land-based counterparts (I'm looking at you, StarsOne), the undersea theme gives it more distinction than my remarks above may suggest, and it's really pretty, particularly once you have a personal submersible* and can cruise to adjoining biomes without having to walk swim. It also seems still to be under active development, and not lost in the perpetual twilight of abandoned early access. Which is nice. And it's only 10 bucks, so hey.

Here are a few hours of Sips from the Yogscast fooling around with a couple of the earlier builds. (Caution: Sips is not very good at video games and has the attention span of a caffeinated hamster. It's part of his charm, but also very frustrating at times. :)

--G.
* © 2016 Sips
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.