I’ve had Subnautica [official site] for a while now, but only got around to installing it this weekend. As it continues to ascend out of Steam Early Access, the undersea explore ‘em up has spat out a big update with a few things that made me want to dive in. For starters, undersea bases can now have all the cool glass corridors and viewing domes that really set off a seahome look. On top of that, it’s got an eerie new reef biome hundreds of metres down, and I do dig unearthly dark waters.

Best of all: you can put a little fish tank in your base to keep pet fish.

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Explore-o-survive ‘em up Subnautica [official site] might not have yet left Early Access, but it has now entered my cool books. Docking ships in video games is pretty great in general, a small moment hinting at the grand scale of a world, and even better is docking inside a larger vessel you can also control. Subnautica has that now. An update yesterday added a big new multi-level submarine you can dock smaller subs with and clamber around inside of.

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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. This week he slaps on a snorkel and dives into alien aquatic survival game Subnautica. Snorkel is a great word. Snork snork!>

2014 was the year of the indie survival game. 2015 looks very much like it might be the year of the indie survival game as well. 2016 is the year that the secret cabal of indie survival game developers finally steps from the shadows to unleash its terrible global coup. Within minutes of the first shot, indie game genres fall, devoured by the unstoppable tide of survival mechanics. 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. In sick mimicry of the cabal s evil creed, games can now only conclude with the player s own expiration from starvation or hypothermia. 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. No one misses the Dota players. 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. 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. How the regime had laughed at that. Well, they re not laughing now. Because they re dead.

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Much like the above “screenshot” the first of Subnautica‘s released builds are not going to be representative. The second project from Natural Selection devs Unknown Worlds will enter what they’re calling “Earliest Access” on October 31st. It’s called that because they feel the game “isn’t ready” for Early Access – far too much unfinished and in flux. They’re leaving it up to you whether you’re desperate enough for underwater survivalising to support development. Those who go for it will also be given code for a few of the team’s prototype builds, released over the next few days. More details below.

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