That combination — predators that hunt rather than wander, plus a permanent oxygen clock — is something only this series really commits to, and the sequel does not soften it. Even with a crafting-survival muscle memory built over years, the first dive produced the familiar tightening that the original game weaponized so well: a so-called thalassophobia and megalophobia inducer.
Full disclosure: this reviewer never finished the 2018 original, having played it in patches and watched the rest as YouTube playthroughs. That made "Subnautica 2" one of the more anticipated titles on the personal calendar — and, after about five hours of solo play, one of the more interesting to write about.
Developed by Krafton-owned Unknown Worlds Entertainment, the sequel drops players onto an unfamiliar alien ocean world aboard a doomed Alterra colony ship called the Cicada. It ditches the first game's planet 4546B entirely and, for the first time in the series, supports up to four-player co-op alongside solo. The franchise has sold more than 18.5 million copies to date, per Unknown Worlds, and the sequel topped Steam's global wishlist for nine straight months, crossing five million wishlists before launch.
Story, lightly told
The structural pitch differs from the first game in one key way: this is not an escape story. Players are not trying to leave. The Cicada's AI is barking objectives, the planet is hostile, and the goal is to adapt to it — to stay.
Adaptation is also a mechanic. A new system called BioMod lets the player splice alien genes into their body to unlock new traits — bio-orb cave markers, faster swim speed, surfacing the planet's biology through one's own skin. The longer the player runs, the further from human baseline they drift.
There is no protagonist voice-over and very little hand-holding. Skip the AI dialogue and the logs from earlier visitors, and early objectives become genuinely opaque. Several hours in, this reviewer was still freediving for blueprints like a checklist-bound pearl diver, scanner in hand, oxygen ticking.
The loop lands somewhere between meditative and slightly panicked. Without an extra tank, the player surfaces about every 30 seconds or sprints to a bubble-emitting plant to top off. Movement, health and inventory size all expand by finding hidden biopods across the map — a soft, exploration-rewarding progression that worked on this reviewer more than the standard XP bar would.
This reviewer's usual survival-game default is "fisherman and forager" — let someone else fight, let the snacks pile up. "Subnautica 2" is the rare entry where collecting fish is also collecting predators, since plenty of them bite back. Less Stardew Valley, more Jeju haenyeo (women divers) in a horror cut: the diver goes down, the diver comes up with whatever did not get her. It is a strangely compelling pitch.
Hostile life is otherwise thin in the early game. Nibblers dart in for a single chomp and flee. Larger pursuers can be peeled off with a sonic resonator or a flare — though firing the resonator near a wall produced a reliable bug in which the pursuing creature simply embedded itself in the geometry.
Death is gentler than it sounds. A "Reprint" mechanic revives the player from stored memory — think the recent film "Mickey 17" — at the cost of two or three items rather than the full inventory. A quiet kindness in a game that otherwise enjoys making the player suffer.
The new flagship vehicle, the TadPole, is a glass-fronted, winged sub that can carry up to three players hanging from a top rail, with a smaller drone that detaches to thread tight caves. Base-building has loosened considerably, though the early-access blueprint pool is narrow: this reviewer spent the first stretch living in a hamster-tube of corridors before stumbling on an abandoned habitat that unlocked proper rooms. Solar panels cover the early game but tank hard at night.
Inventory management is the most frustrating area. There is no stacking, no drag-to-discard, only five hotkey slots, and the hand-held field container does not auto-collect. One container this reviewer set down on the seabed re-spawned, apparently floating, in a completely different biome on the next load — the first major bug in roughly four hours of play.
The jump from Unity to Unreal Engine 5 is doing real work. Light falls through the water column with a softness the first game never had, and at about 200 meters down the sun simply gives up. On a system with an RTX 5070, 32GB of RAM and an AMD Ryzen AI 7 350, the game held up at maximum settings with motion blur off, with occasional hitches — most reliably when climbing a ladder into a vehicle pod. Krafton has said the game targets 4K at 60 fps on an RTX 5070 Ti or Radeon RX 7900 XTX, a softer ask than most UE5 releases.
The early-access map is also visibly fenced in. Swim too far toward the giant central tree on the horizon and the world simply tells you it has not been built yet — usually by spawning three leviathan-class predators that kill the player on contact. An honest map border, at least.
The road to launch was unusually loud. Krafton and the studio's three co-founders — Charlie Cleveland, Max McGuire and former CEO Ted Gill — spent much of 2025 in court over a $250 million earnout tied to the sequel's release. A Delaware Chancery judge in March 2026 ruled Krafton had wrongfully terminated the trio and reinstated Gill as CEO, pushing early access into this year.
Four-player co-op was not testable during this review window — multiplayer did not return for press play after an earlier closed beta. The setup is straightforward enough on the menu: one player hosts in survival or creative mode (a third slot is marked "Coming Soon"), and the rest join through a Steam friends list or a short friend code. Character customization is thinner than pre-launch chatter suggested — players pick one of four pre-set survivors, and that is it for now.
Lead designer Anthony Gallegos has said co-op tuning will follow player feedback after launch. The hooks are there on paper — three-seat TadPole rides, two-player lever puzzles, bio-orb breadcrumb trails. Whether they land is something this reviewer will have to come back to once there is a full team in the water.
After four hours, "Subnautica 2" feels recognizably Subnautica — slower, prettier, more legally complicated, and built around evolving into the planet rather than escaping from it. The horror still works in the specific way only this series does. The inventory does not. The map is small, the bugs are real, and a lot of the promised content is on a roadmap rather than in the build.
For someone who came in as a fan-by-osmosis rather than a finisher of the first game, the early hours felt less like clearing a tutorial and more like learning to be a different kind of animal in a place that is actively trying to digest you. For a survival game that lets the player literally adapt into the ecosystem, that seems to be the entire point.
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