Some games are over before the official ending(s). Sometimes it feels like the developers ran out of ideas or perhaps they never planned to go byond a certain point, but whatever it is, it feels cheap: You reach a certain point and there are endless hordes of enemies who just keep coming to make things harder, or a final boss who has an unfair advantage for no real reason, or the end of the story seems rushed and out of nowhere. It’s particularly disappointing when it happens to a good game, one that you’ve enjoyed for weeks and spent time on. For me, that happens in Subnautica.

Before I go on, two disclaimers:

  1. I’m going to vent about the final stages of the game, so if you’re playing it or want to play it, there are spoilers ahead, so keep this in mind. This brings me to:

  2. Subnautica is still a very good game. I loved playing it and enjoyed it in a way unique to this game. If you haven’t played it, stop reading this post, go play it, then come back.

OK then! Let’s dive in.

If you follow the plot, you arrive at the Lava Lakes (the last and deepest biome in the game) in search of the Primary Containment Facility. This is where you find the Sea Emperor Leviathan, which, as you learned, is connected to the cure for the disease that plagues you and the rest of the planet.

You find the Sea Emperor in this facility soon enough, as well as several portals that can transport you instantly to several locations in the world. It’s a sort of fast travel, something that Subnautica doesn’t have besides one very special connection that happens early on between the two islands. To me, these portals were the first warning sign that the developers wanted to hurry things up and go home.

These portals (which can be hard to find and are part of the exploration part of the game) cannot be activated up to this point, at the end. Instead, you have to use whatever means of transport you have, which is usually the Cyclops at this point. It is a huge sub, acting as your portal base; it’s loud and slow, much like an alarm bell screaming your location to any nearby scary leviathan on the way and inviting them to take a bite. Sure, you can choose to take the fast and sneaky Seamoth, but if one of those guys catches you along the way, it can merely crush it in one bite and grant you a jump scare that will make you yelp loud enough that your partner comes to check on you.

It’s one of those core elements of the game that you learn to be better at. Going from point A to point B is usually risky, no matter how you do it. It’s also why the game is frustrating in a way: you almost always miss one important piece of something you need to craft the next important gizmo, which means you have to go back into the darkness to hunt for precious shiny stuff.

The portals basically eliminate this problem. They send you to different locations around the world that either have what you need or are close enough to it. Suddenly, after 95% of the game behind you, there’s finally fast travel. And you need this fast travel, because the next part is pretty much grocery shopping for Enzyme 42, AKA the cure.

To craft it, you need components from the four corners of the world, conveniently located at the destinations of these portals. And when I say convenient, I mean literally as soon as you exit the tunnel where the portal is - It’s right there in front of your face. So my question is, why bother at all? What’s the point of getting these components if traveling to them takes mere seconds?

There’s another phase of more tedious grocery shopping that has started to feel like a struggle for purpose. At some point I even wanted to put the game away and be doen with it. The Neptune Escape Rocket.

This one is also a bit my fault: I didn’t have to wait until this point in the game to start building the rocket; I could have started much earlier. The game prevents you from launching the rocket until you get the cure, so building the rocket alongside the story, as you get access to more minerals, makes sense - and in retrospect, this is what I would recommend to people new to the game. Since I knew the rocket meant the end of the game, I left it alone until I had found the cure. That was a mistake.

If getting the ingredients for the cure was an annoyance, building the rocket felt like a chore. Each of the five parts of this big rocket requires unique materials found in specific biomes, and while, yes, I had the portals at this point, the game does not tell you which components you need for each part until you build the one before it.

This means that you go grocery shopping five times, each time for the next part once you learn what you need. This is the only blueprint in the game that is handled this way. For some reason, with the rocket, you just “know” how to build each part after you build the part before it, which effectively prevents you from planning and gathering everything you need at one go. Why? What’s the point of this? And how do you know to just keep building this Rocket?

Luckily for me, there’s the wiki that I used in my links here. It gave me the list of ingredients for each part. I mentioned it in my previous post about this game - a little cheating here and there improves the gaming experience.

The way the rocket building is handled goes against what you’ve learned playing Subnatica up to this point - that is, you get blueprints is as part of exploration and dealing with your fears. I couldn’t find any in-game reference that explains the rocket is different. In other words, you can spend hours going crazy trying to find the next parts of the rocket’s blueprints, which is exactly what the game has trained you to do up to this point, before you finally give up and just build the first part. In my opinion, this is lazy end-game design.

Lastly, there’s the story. This is more forgivable and can pass as a cliche or a plot hole, but it’s worth pointing out because the story thus far was interesting. It’s the fact that the adult Sea Emperor dies at the end game, mere minutes once you get the cure. This is bullcrap.

The parent (I think they are supposed to be sexless creatures in this game, but they gave the Sea Emperor a woman’s voice, and it lays eggs and needs them to hatch - they make it pretty obvious, contradicting themselves, but moving on) has been living in captivity, in that aquarium you find, for thousands of years. It got whatever it needs to survive all this time, just for the chance that one day someone will show up and concoct the enzyme that would hatch its eggs. Then, once the “younglings” hatch, the parent claims that it’s time for it to die, and basically does exactly that. Why can’t it live another thousand years? Or, more logically, why can’t it be dead already when you get there (the game tells you previous attempts to grow these creatures in captivity didn’t work), so you have to figure out how to hatch the eggs yourself? I don’t know. This whole part of the game just made me roll my eyes with the Lion King’s “circle of life” stuck on repeat in my head.

There are games that make me annoyed enough to just quit because of things like that. But with Subnautica, I just wanted to see if the ending was as bad as I thought. And yeah, in my opinion, it pretty much was.

As I said though, Subnautica is still awesome. I still love it enough to jump right into Below-Zero. It feels like it could use a message from the developers when you meet the Sea Emperor: “Congrats, you pretty much finished the game. The next parts are grocery shopping and a cliche ending. Continue at your own risk,” or something of the sort.