Yase Plays: Subnautica (Mobile version)
- Yase Fuyunori
- Sep 1
- 4 min read
Subnautica is a 2018 survival action game released by Unknown Worlds Entertainment. As someone who was absolutely enarmored with playthroughs of Subnautica on YouTube but always a bit unsure if my gaming skills were proficient enough for to start my own journey within the game, I was beyond happy when I received an email inviting me to playtest it on mobile. I don't think I ever downloaded an app onto my phone so quick! It was clearly a sign to finally dive into it.
Subnautica really doesn't hesitate long to invite you right into the action. The player takes control of Ryley Robinson, who through a miracle survives his spaceship "The Aurora" unexpectedly crashing and finds himself lost on an oceanic planet with the designated name 4546B.
A tutorial immerses you and exploration of the foreign and aquatic world begins immediately.
Checking your location, the condition of your ship, wondering if anyone else is out there. Diving deep into the depths of an underwater world filled to the brim with beautiful marine life and endless
possibilities. You discover fauna and flora beyond your imagination and as you soon come to find out also: Aliens. Many of them.
Steer submarines into unexplored waters and complex cave systems, craft equipment and best the wildlife to venture across vibrant coral reefs and sandy ocean floors and island shores or even arctic deserts on land - all while trying to survive your stranding predicament.
A quick heads up, if you have any form of thalassophobia, this game is not for you. Because these oceans are as deep as they are wide and planet 4546B's fauna extends far beyond any creatures you have ever seen.
Containing both passive and aggressive animal life, carnivorous as well as herbivorous. Its denizens range from the tiny Rockgrubs and Penglings, who are very passive and honestly adorable to look at, all the way to the aggressive and less cute Rock Punchers or Squidsharks. (And yes, you CAN pet the cuddlefish!) I can reassure you it will be both fun and terrifying to discover them all
Now to my technical experience:
The mobile controls are easy and accessible enough from the get go.
The on-screen control scale being adjustable and being able to toggle the virtual joystick from fixed to movable helped a lot. The camera was already more than comfortable to operate and moved neither too fast nor too slow throughout my whole adventure, even without adjustments to the speed or other settings.
You would think a game like this would be hard to run on a tiny mobile device – at least I did – but for me personally, everything ran perfectly fine without me ever encountering any performance issues, even on my 5 year old phone.
No glitches, frame freezes nor frame drops for me, and no taking up lots of space in my storage either, I am beyond impressed.
All in all Subnautica on mobile is a highly qualitative exploration and survival game to have with you in your pocket, if you're like me and don't prefer to transport your consoles along with you everywhere.
As a first person action-adventure game with beautiful views of a vast ocean, the stunning yet dangerous life it inherits and limitless exploration, experiencing the game comfortably through your phone screen up close, makes it that much more immersive and realistic.
I can only begin to imagine how thrilling the gameplay would be through the lenses of a VR headset, but I myself would unfortunately be a bit too scared, to find out, so I will leave it up to the readers to find out for me, after my review hopefully makes you want to best the waters of Subnautica for yourselves.
Personally I rushed to add Subnautica: Below Zero - a Subnautica spin-off game - to my long list of games I need to play and afterwards checked for a release date for Subnautica 2 and unfortunately found out that – as the game industry does – there is currently a huge dispute between Unknown Worlds Entertainment and Krafton. I genuinely hope the people who made this game get all their due credit and fair treatment so that we can support them and enjoy all their future projects.
I want to take this moment to deeply thank Unknown Worlds Entertainment as well as Playdigious Press for the chance to test Subnautica on mobile, I still have a few weeks left on my Playtest time and will gladly fill my safe file with hours of exploration and combat.
It is a never before had experience I truly enjoyed and I would like to share it with everyone so especially now with the game industry being as hard to navigate as ever and all of us doing our best. Let me know if you have played or are (now) planning to play Subnautica and share your experience with the game! And always support the people who make the games we love.
Yase out.
Subnautica on Steam:
Subnautica on Apple Store:
Subnautica on Google Play:
Unknown Worlds Entertainment Homepage:
Check out the entire Unknown Worls collection on Steam:
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