Did you just use a mining drill on Cthulhu?

Finished a play-through of the Subnautica sequel, Sub Zero. Based on my previous experience, I used the play mode where you don't starve to death if you don't eat every five minutes. Not because it makes the game easier, per se. Because it makes the game less frustrating.

Games are always a balance between things things that are hard enough to give you a feeling of accomplishment, and things you have to do over and over again either because you keep failing and dying, or because of a game mechanic designed to make it actually feel like a task.

The Subnautica universe is on the cusp of a post-scarcity economy. Raw materials are one coinage, and the particular watery planet both games take place on is attractive because of the materials there. The other is intellectual property, of a kind. Power, and manufacturing, are non-issues.

Of course this is more-or-less so in any game with crafting. Give Lara Croft some metal scrap and a few sticks and she'll make hunting arrows...while running through a jungle! Subnautica just moves it into justified world-building. The "intellectual property" is a bit of a hand-wave. In the original game, your survival lifepod goes right out and tells you that it will provide the minimum blueprints for you to make a crude shelter. And it won't let you build weapons, not after a certain incident on a colony world a few years ago...

So a big part of the game is going around finding chunks of broken machinery to scan in order to be able to eventually duplicate slightly more useful stuff. Like the world's cutest mini-sub:

That hand-wave is a little harder to take in the sequel, because there is no good reason why Robin wouldn't have all the blueprints she needed.

The other legs of the gameplay loop are finding ever more difficult to find materials (usually difficult not because they are particularly rare, but because they are found in more remote, almost inevitably deeper, and more dangerous parts of the map.)

And finding secrets to progress through the plot (and eventually get off the world again.) And here is where the game makes an interesting choice. It is a hard game -- both hard because some of the steps take skill and luck to complete without getting killed, and frustrating because there is way too much searching every nook and cranny of a complex, twisty landscape looking for one tiny PDA entry or whatever.)

Yeah, that's the kind of stuff you are trying to search. You can't even map it (not that there is a map). And while you are spending hours swimming around lost in the weeds, at any point you might run out of oxygen, water, food (or in Sub Zero, freeze to death)... Or a Ghost Leviathan might find you.

It is hard, and frustrating, and takes about 40-50 hours to complete the story (for Sub Zero) -- with the help of guides.

Because as designed, there is no map, no waypoints, no objective markers, no render effects around quest items to help you pick them out, no quest objectives in your log. There are nothing but oblique hints as to what or where.

In Subnautica, as a for-instance, on one quest you only know that the aliens were working on a cure to the planetary plague and they have three facilities in various locations, the last known only to be near a thermal vent. 

Turns out...you go down to depths that take every upgrade of the Seamoth to reach and get past a bunch of Leviathans and Warpers in order to find a river of brine, follow that river below the depths the Seamoth can handle (I skipped the Cyclops, which handles like a garbage scow the size of a luxury liner and explodes into flames if you as much as brush against a bit of seaweed, and took the Prawn Suit instead), drop down a second tiny, almost invisible crevasse into a river of lava, follow the river of lava through a maze of flaming rocks patrolled by a Sea Dragon Leviathan...

Even with YouTube videos it took three tries. The ground was covered in chewed-up Prawn Suits by the time I was done. (On death, you are teleported all the way back to your starting base in the shallows, ship left deep underwater in a wreck and half your stuff gone missing. Talk about frustration!)

I had a plan to finish Sub Zero. I knew I had to get to another ultra-deep cavern, and there are two of the big blue dudes patrolling them. By that time I'd built a personal rescue teleport, though. So I parked the Sea Truck over the vent, dropped down in a Prawn Suit, managed to mostly avoid the Leviathans, found the facility, rescued the alien, stripped all the useful parts of my Prawn Suit prior to abandoning it...and it turned out the teleport receive chamber doesn't work when unhooked from the Sea Truck.

And the Prawn Suit doesn't swim. It only walks. I suppose I could have suicided at that point, but I managed to climb high enough to where I could make a desperate swim to the surface as the last of my batteries gave out.

And spent way too much time looking at the jaws of a Leviathan. Eventually when one got close I just used the grapple gun to yank the Prawn Suit into its mouth with Drill Arm whirring. It chewed on me until the pain of me chewing on him was too much. Find a corner to hide in while I ran the Repair Tool off my battered Prawn Suit. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Oh, yeah. The basic Reaper Leviathans from Subnautica? I started to Magritte Maida the things. The combo is a stasis gun and a dive knife. Takes 100-200 swings to kill it and the stasis effect only lasts thirty seconds but if you stay calm you can do it. Also helps to have really, really good oxygen tanks because you will be underwater for a while.

Killed five of the things. Some of the fear is definitely gone. But then, the last game with a survival horror element to it that I played was this one: