the demo:
the tutorial was great, it taught me all the basics, except for energy. the emergency generator also isnt explained and a bit confusing, but requires a,d mashing to use. funny that its a hamster wheel. Its also a pretty good idea.Although crafting the hull was a bit confusing, but i got through the tutorial pretty well with a good understanding of the game.
now i like some changes that were made and i dont like others:
- upgrades are great. base storage however has now been nerfed into the ground. Starting off with one slot that can hold one item is so painful. The best I got was four slots with a capacity of one. yeah they can be different items, but i honestly think one unlimited slot was better. i was hoping this game would have improvements for storage, but it looks like its just a downgrade in that regard. Now don’t get me wrong, upgradable cargo capacity isn’t a bad idea and one that I would welcome, if it wasn’t this bad. In my opinion a rust cargo should have 3 slots with a capacity of 2. An aluminum hull should have 5/5 capacity and the next upgrade 10/25. That would make it a lot better.
- also the going up and down no longer being tied to the wheel is a sad thing. the wheel was so unique and a fun way to control the submarine. why this was changed i dont know. the wheel added so much character and was fun to use. w,s works fine, but isnt as cool and fun as using the wheel.
- the in game index and transmutation log is great. i had made notes for myself for the jam version and now i dont have to. A bit annoying is that everything in the book is marked as new. Like whats the point? If its all marked as new then I cant find new discoveries any better. Also the books sorting is a bit strange. It sorts from oldest discovery to newest. Now for transmutation I have no problem there. For the compendium I very much have a problem with that. Sorting that alphabetically makes way more sense. Transmutation recipes you mostly receive in progression order. Compendium entries on the other hand are all over the place as they are discovered more chaotically. An alphabetical order makes more sense for them in my opinion.
- v to toggle the mission page is also a godsend.
- I also like the flashlight for night time and the depths. its pretty cool and helps keep the game visible. otherwise i would complain about the day night cycle. It does have one problem though. Your flashlight only reaches to your cursor. It isn’t always at max length. This just inhibits vision and doesn’t really do much else. Yeah it looks kinda cool, but its such a nuisance during gameplay. When mining you need to first scout out ore and then remember where it was and then mine it blindly as the flashlight will retract to the point that you cant see the ore that you are mining.
- Also holy the scanning sound is torture. It sounds like a drill drilling into your skull. I can not hold down scan for more than a few seconds and rarely used it because of this.
- Oxygen on the other hand is a system I grew to despise. Oxygen runs out so quickly. It cuts all exploration short. And there isn’t even a way to make the situation better. During my playthrough I got one reusable oxygen tank that took up 25% of my inventory for the entire playthrough and still didn’t allow me to go far without running out of oxygen. Now I don’t suggest getting rid of oxygen, I suggest upgrades to capacity and efficiency. Capacity upgrades could even be tied to hull upgrades. Either way, more capacity and efficiency would allow for longer and deeper exploration. Also the alarm sound is so annoying. A notification for low oxygen is ok, but it being an alarm is not great. I probably heard that alarm 30 times in my playthrough and it was driving me insane. You want to explore a little further? ALARM. You are transutating items? ALARM. You get the idea. All the time im getting an alarm, also because oxygen runs out so quickly. Energy does it better, as it just gives a little notification when low. That’s enough. I always understand when I hear it, that im low on energy. It doesn’t need an alarm to tell me that. Why does oxygen have to be different?
- The aggressive fish is annoying. The fish is unfun as there is no counter, at least not early game and they are super persistent and are really random on if they want to target you or not. Yeah I ran my engine on slow and so could barely outrun them, but I did that due to energy not being solved yet with the coal reactor, in a super inconvenient location, and the emergency generator being my only reliable regen methods. So I was conserving energy early game to hopefully get to a reliable energy source, like the coal generator that I could presumably put in a better location. In contrast the plant is funny and fair as it can be dealt with easily. It’s a better early game enemy. Now looking at the trailer there are a few tougher enemies. Do we ever get an attack option or what are we supposed to do about them? I petition for a torpedo upgrade that allows you to shoot a torpedo every 10 seconds. Give us a way to fight back.
- Also the reputation sysem im split on. Dying isn’t common and I only died once so far as tabing apparently doesn’t pause the game and is a terrible idea to do in combat. Also hits interrupt switching making it impossible to switch back if two fish are attacking you. That I don’t really understand as you would think the emergency engine mode should be able to be turned on in an emergency, but you cant. You need to change it proactively and cant use it reactively. Now the thing I don’t like is losing upgrades on death. Do you know how long it takes to make upgrades and how many resources it takes? Even with the full recipe, I used up most of my resources and a solid 10 minutes to make an aluminum hull. And you want me to do that again?? Also what happens at 0 reputation? Do you lose, or is it just the lowest it can go? Also losing upgrades can just softlock you. Like I don’t think I have enough resources for more than 2 more aluminum hulls above 300m. if I lose those, what then? I lose potentially hours of progress. Now this wouldn’t be terrible if there was a way to regain reputation. There seemingly isn’t. a delivery mission to regain reputation like 20 aluminum would be great. Death would still be punishing, but you could take some time to avoid its most severe consequences.
- Also what is the cargo receptical habitat1? It takes items, but how do I get them out? Cargo implies storage. It isn’t an item deleter, is it?
- Also a change I don’t like are to the laser and absorber. The laser now need line of sight to mine, which makes sense logically, but makes mining clunky in practice. Function over logic. Its better without needing line of sight. Blocks being undiscovered is pretty much the better solution. You don’t need both. Just don’t allow mining undiscovered blocks and remove line of sight from the laser and it will be great. The absorber has also been changed for the worse. It is now slow. It is a lot more accurate now and can get ores from below 20 others precisely, but it being slow makes it so bad. Due to the floaty movement you are rarely still, so you need to be accurate in clicking the tiny ore to pick it up. the best thing to do is to click multiple times to make sure you get it, but if you click it and click again you drop the ore. It just slows down the game even more. The new look is cool and there is now a towing function, but it should be an instant pickup as to be a lot more practical. I shouldn’t need an aim trainer to pick up ores, I should be able to spam click to get them.
- Also a manual save would be great. This is a pretty long game. There is no way to mute it and the game doesn’t pause when minimized or stop playing the ambient sounds. So if I want to do something else I need to close the game. But to do that I need to wait for the game to automatically save. Its just another inconvenience and the waiting around for an auto save just adds to the time you aren’t progressing in the game.
not even 1 minute out of the tutorial i managed to softlock myself. i managed to jump the submarine onto the pier and then lost all mobility. ngl i kinda did it as the people look like batteries and i didnt know how to fill my charge. so im gonna blame you for me beaching myself. Its not me failing to consider that submarines cant really move on land. so here i sit, at -8 meters contemplating what to do. and i decided to let the power run out. turns out that just affects visibility, nothing else. maybe it stops movement, i couldnt tell. so i tried to reset. there is also no r to reset, so i tried closing the game. now unfortunately the game had saved while i was on the pier and so i always loaded in stuck on the pier. now i was really i trouble. i tried to delete the game and re download it to clear my save file as there is zero softlock prevention. That also didn’t even work. Even the redownloaded files had my softlocked savefile on them. So I had to delete my save file, which isn’t a big loss as I hadn’t done anything outside of the tutorial, but should not be the only solution to a softlock.
Also I again managed to softlock myself later on because the doors in this game can easily softlock you if you are not careful, which I wasn’t. now I closed the game before it saved and it loaded a previous save, but I lost some progress and relying on autosaves without manual saves isn’t great. This game needs softlock prevention. It is a long game and it is so easy to get softlocked. Right now you either lose a few minutes of progress, or if you get unlucky with the autosave have to delete the save file. This cant be the only solutions. My suggestion would be an r to reset to base, at the cost of dropping all items in the storage and without regenerating stats. This would prevent an unintended advantage while not having us risk the save file every time we want to get through a door.
Also a frequent issue I encountered due to the games item loading system is items falling through the ground. Now they wouldn’t fall through the world, but would phase through undiscovered blocks, only coming to rest on a discovered block and clipping into them. Now this isn’t the worst issue as storage containers allow you to keep valuables safe (I think. Never seen it get clipped but it may be possible.) but it has such limited storage that I found myself leaving valuables on the ground. Those clipping away would be pain. It hasn’t happened to me yet as clipping is like a 1% chance, but there shouldn’t be a chance for my valuables to disappear. Especially since I dug out most of the surface, if my valuables clip, they clip under the infinitum and are lost for probably forever.
Also progression has me confused. Its clear that you need to make an aluminum hull. Now I have scowered all places to 300 meters, and even a bit deeper than the rust hull allows and I still cant make one. I just haven’t found out how to make a gold circuit for the aluminum deck and only have a single piece of gold ore anyways, which I also got from below 300m. in fact pretty much every blueprint to get me to the aluminum deck has been below 300m. like even getting to the coal generator takes you below 300m. it feels like you should quickly be in an aluminum hull as everything seems to be below 300m, but actually getting an aluminum hull seems pretty hard. Eventually I found all the recipes: gold ore+ aluminum plate= gold circuit. Gold circuit+ aluminum casing xl= aluminum deck. Its also very clear that I need to make the gold laser, as I have seemingly mined all minerals that I can. Getting the gold circuit has also opened that up. Gold circuit+zink= galvanized circuit. Galvanized circuit+ aluminum casing=gold laser housing. Gold laser housing+ purified gold=gold laser. I just cant purify gold yet.
The game itself also just leaves you. You don’t get much information and aren’t told to get anything. There is no send feature and mission control doesn’t want anything from you, nor wishes to give you any instructions. I spent most of the time bumbling around, due to oxygen and energy limiting how far and long I could be away from home base for. 4 inventory slots also cut most expeditions short. There is so little to do above 300m, but getting to below 300m takes a while and needs some preparation to get done. I do not like this. Progress is so slow as you are hampered by lacking resources and progression. A big factor of this is a lack of transmutations to get other ores and the ore scarcity. You have so little resources to work with, so little to do with those resources and getting more takes minutes of setup for a minute long exploration session. There is a distinct lack of fun in this gameplay. Im only having fun while exploring, but I don’t get to explore much. And each exploration only gets me a little bit closer to progressing. I have been playing for well over 5 hours and just now got an aluminum hull, only got 1 expedition down to 700m and got all but the bismuth to make a gold laser, the first laser upgrade. I have been playing for over 5 hours and I am just now getting my first upgrades. Yeah im not playing very efficient or fast, but still, im progressing at a snails pace. After about 7 hours I finally got the gold laser after getting my bismuth behind the monsters back. This opens up a lot of possibilities, but there is one problem: I don’t have a goal. I don’t know what im supposed to do. For the last 7 hours I have been working towards the hull and laser upgrades. Now I have nothing. Its very strange. I was expecting a hull or cargo blueprint to give me something to work towards, but I haven’t found any yet. I was able to mine iron, steel and diamond now, but there wasn’t really anything to do with them. I made carbonite, but that’s about it. And nothing had a use. Maybe something did, but I was never told that. So I am sending it all on one final expedition. On the right side there is a massive, deep ocean that stretches far till it reaches a wall of infinitum and marble and other ores. In the depths however is a big serpent fish. It laughs like the big monster fish. To have a chance of escaping it I need to be on emergency engine mode. That mode however chuggs battery and I cant switch while being chased or I die. So I took a coal generator over and a battery to send one final mission to see if I can find anything to do. I mean I found an obsidian cave in the other depths, but I cant mine obsidian yet. There is probably a drill upgrade to make, but I have literally no direction on how to make it right now. So here goes nothing. IT DID NOT GO WELL. first of all I quickly got to 900m and it still keep going down. So I decided to continue right at 900m. now fun fact, I thought there was 1 serpent, I encountered THREE before I died. Is this like the deadzone of subnautica? Am I not supposed to go there? I am left with questions, but more than that, I have no idea what to do now. I either need to test transmutations for an hour to maybe find an upgrade, or I leave it here. And im leaving it here. I haven’t been given anything to go for, so im not going for anything. That’s kinda disappointing. I know it’s a demo and not a finished game, but its still kinda sad to end, because I cant figure out what to do, or if there is even anything left to do. mission control should be used more to give us hints and directions. it shouldnt stop telling you anything after 10 minutes of gameplay.
So. All in all I had fun. Exploration was nice and the music in the depths send shivers down my spine. Exploration was a lot of fun. Transmutation too. The game just has so many issues that compound to making 80% of the game unfun. Now pretty much all of them can be addressed to make the game better. It has been a while, but if you plan on continuing development, I would love to see the game evolve into something better. Especially with how fun it can be. Like the jam version was a lot of fun, but it was very repetitive and without progression or exploration. This version expands the game in those areas, which is great. It just doesn’t do that good of a job in implementing those changes well. But it has great potential. My list of complaints may be long, but its mostly issues that can be resolved quickly(I think).