Subnautica

Subnautica is a template for what open-world survival games should strive to be. It’s fantastical, fresh, and frightening from surface to seabed, with a story that kept on surprising me and a cast of sea monsters that quite literally haunted my dreams.

Subnautica is a terrifying, mystifying, massive, and brilliant survival game.

An oppressively beautiful portrayal of an undersea environment, and a well-wrought survival game with a vaguely eco-friendly message.

A smattering of technical issues keep Subnautica from true legendary status, but only just.

Performance problems aside, Subnautica will rekindle your faith in the overcrowded survival genre, and scare you senseless.

With a robust crafting system and several amazing secrets to find, Subnautica never ceases to entertain

So much of this world is best experienced via first-hand discovery.

Subnautica works brilliantly as a serene, lonely, contemplative adventure. It's one of those rare games I'd take to a desert island.

Subnautica sees you submerged in a vast and utterly breathtaking underwater world, teeming with secrets and polished off with an unsettling atmosphere that instigates a real sense of thrill as you play.

When Unknown Worlds announced they were bringing this one to Switch we were hugely excited, this is one of our all-time favourite games after all, but it was excitement tempered with a degree of scepticism as to how on earth they'd manage to cram the entire experience onto Switch in a properly playable manner. As it turns out, we needn't have worried as this is a super solid port that - besides a few loading stutters here and there and some scenery pop-in that's present in every other version of the game - successfully delivers one of the very best survival experiences on any platform to Nintendo's hybrid console.