Recent reviews by YourDie

beautifully minimalist city-builder game. I've fallen in love with how Islanders takes one common mechanic from city-builder/tycoon games, placing buildings near other relevant buildings, and manage to build a complete game around it. I also particularly like that game forces you to move on to a new island to start over again, which I tend to do anyway in these kinds of games. The developer's choosing to make this an explicit constraint helped coerce me to just stick with an island to see where it goes, which usually lead to fun and interesting situations.

This also the first game that managed to motivate me to take screenshots, because it is very pretty, and because when you move to a new island you lose the old one forever, so screenshots are my only momento.

All in all, a lovely little game that is absolutely worth the price.

I'm usually not very interested in survival games, but constant recommendations from friends and press convinced me to give it a try, which I'm happy I did.

The game is very good in creating atmosphere. The starting area feels welcoming with it's bright colors, swarms of small fish and lush soundscape of fish sounds and the occasional music track. But as you venture further and deeper, the colors grow uncomfortable as the visibility decreases, the large amounts of small fish are replaced by small amounts of big (and dangerous) creatures, and the ambient sound grows more silent but hounting, interspersed with the occasional sound of one of the inhabitants of the deep. It all really made me feel a sense of dread and unwelcomeness.

The story and progression curve really drove me to explore the world and I loved gaining more equipment to help make traversing and surviving more managable. Food, water and oxygen are needs your character has, but it's never to hard to take care of them unless you traveled far to far, and satisfying them only becomes easier as the game progresses instead of growing harder as in alot of survival games.

I don't have a lot of things I didn't like about the game. My biggest peeve was that in some biomes the visibility distance was farther than the drawing distance of the assets, so I saw them load in as I approached them, which was a bit immersion breaking at times. I also had a few moments where I didn't really know how to progress.

All in all, I really loved Subnautica.

I liked this game main mechanic, and quickly got in the mindset of finding rules to solve to puzzles. However, I feel like I would have enjoyed the game alot more if I had the ability to undo previous moves instead of a full reset of the entire puzzle. When the ddifficulty started ramping up, I found it very hard to keep a mental model of the different blockades (hah!) some blocks posed on others, because I could only reset the entire puzzle. This made me stick to a repeat and adjust approach, where I just repeated the set of moves I thought worked and adjusted the last one, instead of a real puzle solving approach where I tried to solve the puzzles through understanding of their rules.