It does an excellent job, better than most horror games on the market, of instilling fear in the player. There's crafting, but it's not a bad system and still helps move the game along. You will find unique materials as you progress.

The game is also about exploration, both for fun and to progress in the game. The story is told through audio transmissions, which are worth listening to and actually interesting. It's not like NMS in it's launch or current iteration. The downward design of the handcrafted world provides an instantly understandable and ever-present goal: to go down, to go deeper, ever deeper into the dark crushing depths. Whereas other survival games feel loose and aimless, Subnautica presents you with cyclic progression, where you want to go deeper and explore more, and exploring more and going deeper reward you for doing so with better equipment and new discoveries. This allows the mechanics and regions and crafting and everything else to suit the one particular concept of exploring an alien ocean. One of the main reasons Subnautica works so well is that it’s not unfocused survival but a very specific survival scenario that the game's design is completely focused on realizing.

It's also nearly unparalleled in its sense of exploration and discovery, encouraged by game design. But Subnautica is more than just the best survival game in the genre. It's safe to say that the survival genre has a bad rap, and it's not quite undeserved.

It’s just one of the games to release this year, it’s arguably the best game in its genre.

Subnautica game for sell