Scavenge. Research. Craft. Survive.
Subterrain is a survival horror game with a top down point of view. In quite a complicated game to fathom at the beginning, it starts with your character Dr. West imprisoned (probably innocently, that’s the way these things go in games) in a cell on a research facility on Mars. Security is breached and you get out of your cell to find out everyone has be brutally murdered. Its up to you to find out what the hell has happened and get out of there without dying. Surviving the combat with the violent mutants is not your main threat to your life in this game though as you spend a lot of your time managing elements such as oxygen, infection level, hunger, fatigue and even when to go to the toilet. Ignore any of these elements and its soon Goodnight Vienna for Dr West!
The look of the game is dark and menacing, with areas only coming into view as you enter them and shine a light to uncover their often gory contents. It gives a very claustrophobic and tense feeling to the action which works well to keep you on edge. Although it purveys the mood well, we’re not talking ground breaking graphics here, its more of what you’d generously call ‘retro’. Its obvious that the control system has been designed originally for a PC game and more could’ve been done to tailor it for console players. It got very frustrating when the menu kept popping up when I wanted to interact with an object just because they are mapped to the same button and my character was a few pixels out of place.
The combat isn’t as big a part of the game as you’d expect or maybe want, but it works quite well, as you start off with a baton, then upgrade to any other melee weapons or guns that you find lying around. I found melee weapons easier to handle as with guns you needed to get the line of fire matched up properly and that took a lot of moving about. A factor that made it a little more difficult to move your character around is that he doesn’t automatically correct to the position he is moving in, and it got irritating to keep having to correct this, especially in dark areas.
The learning curve is massive at the start of the game, with so many factors to juggle in order to survive, and I can see this putting off a great many players from progressing further, and even the tutorial text boxes tell you what you need to do at the start, its very daunting trying to take it all in.
As you discover more of the base, you can set off exploring in different directions but always having to come back to a central hub to keep the life support systems functioning. This makes the game play as a series of little adventures which some players might prefer, but I found it very frustrating to keep coming back to the same area time and time again. The longer you survive is all down to how well you juggle the various factors keeping you alive, and more importantly how well you scavenge items so you can research, learn and craft better equipment.
Subterrain is pretty much an open world experience even if you are restricted to staying inside the buildings at all times, and this freedom is something that makes the game last longer but on the downside, it makes the story feel directionless and you just feel like your only aim is to see how long you can cheat death.
Fans of survival games may love Subterrain with all its depth, gore, and scares, but only after getting to grips with the complicated game mechanics, which need a lot of time and concentration to get the most out of.
Huge Thanks to XCN for the review copy.
Game: Subterrain
Developer: PixelLore
Publisher: PixelLore
Genre: Top-down Survival
Price: £13.59