[i] My Experience [/i]
On paper, Subterene "checks a lot of my boxes." I liked the game's unique aesthetic and interface, it's advertised short run-time, and the idea of slowly piecing together this mystery that has occurred beneath the floor of the ocean.
Unfortunately, playing Subterene is a slog. The game gives you very little direction while you stumble upon probes and bumble from one mining depot to the next. For some this may make the game a true "exploration" game, but not for me when the act of exploring itself is so tedious. The speed at which your mining vehicle drills, turns, and accelerates is just PAINFUL. This is only exacerbated when your vehicle becomes caught on some small piece of a block, which happens ALL THE TIME.
When you do stumble upon one of the game's subnautical creatures, they can swim circles around you. They swim through blocks that you have to drill through, as turn your unwieldy vessel at a snail's pace to get your drill in position to attack. You can also use explosive charges in combat, but these are much more trouble than they are worth.
If stumbling on a probe after all this painstaking exploration was rewarding, that would've been one thing, but the messages that you find on the probes are wildly inconsistent and generally not helpful for elucidating the mystery. Some logs are dialogues between two former employees at the mining company, while others are a single line, such as "I thought that was a rock."
I feel like developer Possmonaut had a neat idea here, but just fumbled the execution. Suggestions for improvement might be:
[list]
[*]Either make the mining vehicle more nimble in terms of drill/turning/movement speed, or give the player some sense of where they should be going.
[*]Re-write each of the drone logs to be more interesting and/or informative. Obviously, some drones wouldn't have encountered anything interesting on their patrols before being put out of commission, but...you know, this is a video game.
[/list]
Although it's clear that the developer wants to make a survival horror game, remember that this can be done while still having a playable character (or mining vehicle) that feels good to use. Although obviously these are AAA examples, just look to games like Dead Space or the Resident Evil 2 remake to see this done well.
