Game Studies

Too Afraid to Go Deeper: Creating Pervasive Dread Through Blended Design Structures in Subnautica and Subnautica: Below Zero

Abstract

Horror in digital games is both widespread and difficult to master. Numerous games include horrific imagery, narrative and context, but far fewer are genuinely scary to play. Subnautica (Unknown Worlds, 2018) and its sequel Subnautica: Below Zero (Unknown Worlds, 2021) are not explicitly labeled as horror games, but are notable for providing some of the most intense, visceral scares in modern games -- particularly a long lasting, pervasive dread that lingers after the game is completed. This article argues that the Subnautica games successfully create pervasive dread by blending aspects of three design structures that exist in parallel to modern game genres: the unsettling atmosphere and environmental design of traditional horror games, the exploratory freedom of open world games and the extreme vulnerability and weighted choice of survival games. By merging the emotional impacts of horror games, open world games and survival games, Subnautica and Subnautica: Below Zero achieve what few traditional horror games ever do: they make players fear death in a medium in which death is both impermanent and expected. This blended design structure makes the Subnautica games exemplars of interactive horror, as well as valuable examples of how game genres and design structures can be combined, subverted and refashioned to create specific emotional states in digital game players.

Keywords: fear, dread, horror games, freedom, open world, survival, game design, agency, Subnautica, Subnautica: Below Zero

Introduction

Among Subnautica players, there is a running joke that if you don’t already have thalassophobia, or an intense fear of deep water, the game will give it to you. At first glance, Subnautica (Unknown Worlds Entertainment, 2018) and its sequel Subnautica: Below Zero (Unknown Worlds Entertainment, 2021) seem like benign exploration games, promising base building and resource gathering in a variety of intricately crafted underwater biomes, all while uncovering a thoughtful science fiction story. Yet articles and reviews of Subnautica consistently focus on terror. The game fuels “a new breed of underwater nightmares” (Todd, 2018), has “moments of tension that rival any first-person jumpscarer” (Caldwell, 2018) and keeps players “constantly on edge as the consuming fear of the unknown eats away at you” (Hall, 2018). Creature encounters are “traumatic,” and a low oxygen gauge causes a “terror filled drive to claw for the sky above” (McCaskill, 2018). A self-described “masochist when it comes to horror” describes the game as “legitimately terrifying… [it] quite literally haunted my dreams” (Hafer, 2018). For a game with few obvious commonalities with the Resident Evil, Silent Hill, or Amnesia series, Subnautica has a surprisingly intense effect on players in terms of visceral, long-lasting horror; whether those players are already afraid of the ocean or not.

In considering how Subnautica terrorizes its players, many writers point to the game’s underwater environment, which naturally presents players with unusual and potentially frightening challenges (Menart, 2021; Moss, 2021). But Subnautica and its sequel inspire an unusual quality of fear that is only partially explained by their setting: not the short-lived startle of the jumpscare or the fear of failure that exists in most digital games, but true pervasive dread. A growing, gnawing anxiety that increases as the player proceeds through the game. In short, the Subnautica games make players fear death in a medium in which death is not only impermanent but expected. I argue that Subnautica and its sequel create pervasive dread by successfully merging the scariest aspects of three increasingly common design structures: the unsettling atmosphere and environmental design of traditional horror games, the exploratory freedom of open world games and the extreme vulnerability and weighted choice of survival games. Ultimately, the Subnautica games are exemplars of horror in digital games, and well worth examining for how they create interactive horror experiences that are pervasive, visceral and affecting long after the game has been completed.

Horror as a Design Construct in Digital Games

Like many speculative genres, horror is notoriously difficult to define. Most scholars agree that literary horror is best understood as an affect: a successful horror story makes its readers feel fear (Wolfe, 1979; Clute and Grant, 1997; Joshi, 2014). Editor Douglas Winter argues that horror isn’t a genre at all, unlike “the mystery or science fiction or the western. It is not a kind of fiction… Horror is an emotion” (Winter, 1988, p. 12). Historically, horror has clear roots in the Gothic (Punter, 1996; Bloom, 2010); strong ties to science fiction, supernatural fiction, and the literature of the fantastic (Todorov, 1973; Therrien, 2009; Joshi, 2014) and its own distinct cinematic traditions (Prince, 2004; Hutchings, 2017; Clasen, 2017).

Horror is a potent genre, one that invites the question: why do so many readers, players, and audiences seek out terrifying experiences in fiction? Stephen King argues that the compulsion is a healthy one, and functions as a safety valve for our fears: “We take refuge in make-believe terrors so the real ones don’t overwhelm us” (King, 2010, p. xii). Likewise, novelist Peter Straub notes that horror helps us engage with our fears in safety, which allows for “deepening and widening one’s emotional experience by that means” (Clasen, 2009). Horror scholar Mathias Clasen argues that horror is both biocultural and adaptive: it encompasses the desire to experience “rich emotion in safe spaces,” but also builds coping skills and lets us “rehearse for the nastier side of life” (Clasen, 2017, p. 59). Literary and cinematic horror is appealing for multiple reasons: to experience strong emotions, to be reminded of one’s mortality and to feel prepared for the worst things that could possibly happen. Interactive horror has a similar appeal but also gives its audience simulated control over the experience, as well as the ability to experience horrific experiences multiple times, often with various outcomes. Jan-Noël Thon notes that in interactive horror a “significant part of the emotional experience… [is] directly connected to the player’s potential for action” (2020, p. 201), differentiating between fear as a fiction emotion in which horror elements are “audiovisually represented and/or narratively framed as a threat,” and fear as a gameplay or ludic emotion in which horror elements terrify because they “are perceived as a threat to the player reaching the game goals” (Thon, 2020, p. 202). Both fictional and ludic horror elements are potentially present in interactive horror media, particularly games.

As with other horror media, defining horror in games is difficult due to the messiness and instability of game genres (Apperley, 2006; Therrien, 2009), not to mention how genres evolve, transform and reinvent themselves to reflect new gameplay experiences (Arsenault, 2009). Regardless of genre, horror elements are present in the medium’s earliest games. Frederick Raynal’s Alone in the Dark (Infogrames, 1992) is the clear forerunner of the modern survival horror game, primarily for how it uses the anticipation of death to instill fear and anxiety in players (Donovan, 2010). Earlier horror-focused titles include The Rats (Five Ways Software, 1985), a gory text adventure about a plague of mutant rats terrorizing London; and Haunted House (Atari, 1982), in which the player must survive a barely lit monster-infested mansion. Even earlier games included numerous moments of horror, such as being eaten by a Grue in Zork (Infocom, 1980), multiple grisly deaths in Colossal Cave Adventure (Crowther & Woods, 1977) and the implication of explosive death in Spacewar! (Russell, 1962), arguably one of the first digital games -- to the point that early developers quipped that games could only create two emotions: adrenaline and fear (Donovan, 2010).

Horror games, as well as games with horrific context, are pervasive if not dominant in the modern medium. Game designer Richard Rouse notes that “the goals of videogames and the goals of horror fiction directly overlap, making them ideal bedfellows” (Rouse, 2009, p. 15), an overlap made particularly clear with games whose pacing, narrative, or environments are directly inspired by cinematic horror tradition (Therrien, 2009). Additionally, horror can be particularly intense in an interactive medium, such as the claustrophobic moment in Dead Space 2 (Visceral Games, 2011) in which players must successfully jam a diagnostic needle into their own eye, or the drawn-out sequence in Heavy Rain (Quantic Dream, 2010) where the player meticulously amputates their own finger with their choice of kitchen implements.

Unusually, there is less academic work on horror games than other genres, and far less than existing studies on horror literature or film (Clasen, 2017; Therrien, 2009), as well as comparatively little work on the specific ways in which horror games instill fear, anxiety, and dread in the player (Dudek, 2021). Academic works dealing with emotion, player agency, and affect theory rarely discuss fear or terror in depth, or as distinct from other emotions (Isbister, 2016; Anable, 2018; Nguyen, 2020; Bódi, 2023). Likewise, works that deal with failure and loss often focus on the negative emotions surrounding a player’s in-game death, rather than the fear of dying inspired by a game’s aesthetics or design (Juul, 2013; Anable, 2018; Engelstein, 2020). The most comprehensive exploration of fear in horror games is Bernard Perron’s The World of Scary Video Games: A Study in Videoludic Horror, which notes that labeling a game as horror tells us very little about its genre or mechanics, and that games associated with the horror genre might not be scary at all (Perron, 2018, p. 96). Perron distinguishes between games in which horror is “only expressed at a contextual level,” such as in iconography or theme; games of “sporadic fear and horror effects,” in which fear is presented through a game’s aesthetics or narrative rather than through horror techniques; and true “scary games,” in which fear is an implicit and deliberate goal, and where fear generated by gameplay takes precedence over fear engendered by narrative, environment, or atmosphere (Perron, 2018, pp. 117-122). Of this highest tier of “scary games,” exemplars include titles in the long running Resident Evil and Silent Hill franchises, as well as Amnesia: The Dark Descent (Frictional Games, 2010), Dead Space (EA Redwood, 2008) and its sequels, Outlast (Red Barrels, 2013), Alien: Isolation (Creative Assembly, 2014), Five Nights at Freddy’s (Cawthon, 2014) and its numerous sequels, Slender the Eight Pages (Parsec Productions, 2012), Pathologic 2 (Ice-Pick Lodge, 2019), and the technically unreleased “playable teaser” P.T. (Kojima Productions, 2014).

In considering Subnautica and its sequel, the distinction between games in the horror idiom and games that are intentionally scary is useful, particularly in comparison with Amnesia or Silent Hill. By Perron’s categorization, the Subnautica games are games of “sporadic fear and horror effect,” in which direct scares are infrequent. Yet the game’s pervasive sense of dread and the intensity of its most terrifying moments suggest Subnautica is best categorized as truly scary, even if its mechanics and content are less contextually horrific than most games in that tier. It is also worth noting that Perron’s pyramid is cumulative: games in the top tier must incorporate everything from the lower levels, including the traditional horror iconography that Subnautica lacks, which would seemingly disqualify it as a scary game at all despite the frequency and intensity of its scares. Ultimately, Perron argues that evaluating a game’s scariness depends on “scope, density, resonance, and frequency,” and that different accounts of game experiences “can certainly offer competing accounts of the level where it should be located” (Perron, 2018, p. 125), which allows for flexibility in categorizing games with unusual scare tactics, as well as those that may not fit as neatly into the pyramid structure.

Determining whether Subnautica and its sequel qualify as “scary” games is less important than examining how they create such intense, effective dread in the first place, especially as neither game appears particularly frightening on the surface. In examining another unusually scary game, Bartosz Dudek notes that Slender: The Eight Pages (Parsec Productions, 2012) heightens both fear and anxiety in players through multiple techniques, including maze-like environments, limited player vision through mist or darkness, deliberately unclear game objectives, a defenseless player character, and a visually unsettling villain (Dudek, 2021). Likewise, Perron divides techniques for creating horror into four major categories, focusing on a game’s visuals, audio, environmental structure, and character-based obstacles, particularly monsters (Perron, 2018). Both Perron and Dudek distinguish between fear, anxiety and dread, separating the immediacy of jumpscares and unsettling visuals from the long term, gradually intensifying anticipation that something terrible will happen. This visceral foreboding, or pervasive dread, is where Subnautica excels. Individual moments of horror -- such as being devoured by a Reaper Leviathan [1] -- rarely occur, but the fear that they will occur is omnipresent.

To create this sense of pervasive dread, the Subnautica games merge the scariest aspects of three disparate game design philosophies, each focused on inducing specific emotional states in the player: fear and anxiety, but also the freedom of exploration, the vulnerability of being alone in a hostile environment, and the heavy responsibility of making difficult choices. Subnautica blends the horrific context and aesthetic strangeness of a hostile ocean environment with the structures of open world design and the mechanics of survival games to induce a state of fear as intense and effective as those found in games with more traditional horror design.

The Ocean is Scary: Underwater Environments as Horrific Places

As a potential interactive environment, the ocean evokes two of humanity’s most primal fears: the unknown and the dark. Melody Jue notes that ocean environments challenge our fundamental assumptions about surface, depth, and gravity (2014), and by their very nature test “the limitations of a human point of view” (2020, p. xi). Additionally, oceans are simultaneously alien and familiar, a powerful combination that naturally creates feelings of terror (Clute & Grant, 1997). As Subnautica’s technical director Max McGuire notes, “There's really nothing more alien on Earth than the ocean” (Cameron, 2016).

That said, underwater environments are not automatically horrific. In digital games, water is often considered a graphical benchmark, proof of a development studio’s technical prowess. Water also has narrative or mechanical functions, such as providing “natural boundaries to exploration and progression, as a test of endurance, or as a means of concealment” (Chang, 2019, p. 142). Underwater games like Aquaria (Bit Blot, 2007), Song of the Deep (Insomniac Games, 2016), and Abzu (Giant Squid Studios, 2016) use their ocean environments to inspire wonder and whimsy rather than fear in the player. Meanwhile, We Need To Go Deeper (Deli Interactive, 2019) and Depth (Digital Confectioners, 2014) emphasize multiplayer antics over experiential fear. Two of the most explicitly horrific underwater games, Bioshock (2K Boston, 2007) and SOMA (Frictional Games, 2015), barely let the player interact with the ocean at all, instead trapping them in space-station-like underwater facilities that emphasize isolation and claustrophobia. By contrast, Subnautica submerges the player in the entire ocean within the first few minutes of gameplay, immediately using the environment’s vastness and strangeness to set the player on the path toward pervasive dread.

Using openness to evoke fear is unusual in digital games. Interactive horror environments are more commonly “reduced and designed with the clear goal of scaring the player” (Perron, 2018, p. 319) and use maze-like layouts that restrict the player’s vision and movement. Horror games often include traditionally Gothic locations like “haunted houses, spooky woods, crypts and graveyards, derelict buildings, attics, and cellars” (Krzywinska, 2015, pp. 59-60) as well as modern environments like shopping malls, prisons, hospitals and asylums, spaceships, amusement parks, and research facilities (Perron, 2018). Often these are previously inhabited spaces that are now derelict, haunted, or abandoned, increasing the player’s sense of isolation and estrangement through “the domestic space made uncanny” (Kirkland, 2009, p. 117). Subnautica, on the other hand, divides its environments into two categories. First, the base you build yourself, which can include small compartments connected by short, maze-like tunnels, but stays clean, bright and operational for the majority of the game. Second, the various wide open ocean biomes, which have visual analogies to coral reefs, kelp groves and other terrestrial aquaria but are otherwise utterly alien -- and increasingly strange the farther down you go. Subnautica’s layout pulls from traditional horror tropes in that the most important direction is down: players must constantly descend to new, more terrifying depths, and choosing when and how to dive is a major component of the game’s scariness. Additionally, the game environment reinforces the sense that the player is trespassing. Unlike the abandoned hospital or derelict shopping mall, places that used to be visitor friendly, Subnautica’s biomes emphasize that humans shouldn’t be present there at all. In other words, “every aspect of the game is intentionally designed to make players feel as though they do not belong” (Moss, 2021), all of which exacerbates players’ fear of the unknown.

On a technical level, Subnautica’s environments use the same strategies as traditional horror games to create fear, especially with lighting, layout, and creature placement. But four aspects of Subnautica’s environments are particularly frightening because they are underwater: environmental dangers can come from any direction, can appear shockingly fast, are constantly heard but not seen, and -- as humans can’t breathe underwater -- the environment is deadly by default. These aspects aren’t necessarily designed to scare players but are byproducts of creating a realistic underwater ecology.

First, dangers in Subnautica can come from any direction, including behind, above and below. Most games expect players to focus on what’s in front of them, and few include consistent danger from offscreen angles. Players expect “a least a few directions of safety… Subnautica, by contrast, imposes an all-encompassing sense of dread by opening up the possibility of threats from all directions” (Moss, 2021). Outside of the player’s base, the environment has virtually no safe areas: “Swimming atop the surface completely hides what could be lurking below. Similarly, sticking close to the seabed restricts your maneuverability should something attack from above” (Moss, 2021). Additionally, as the game’s ecosystem simulates a living ecology, creature encounters are not prescripted, nor are they necessarily fair, and survival isn’t always possible: the player that wanders into a Reaper’s path is almost certainly dead, almost certainly immediately [2]. In the Subnautica games, the tradeoff for complete 360-degree freedom of exploration is the near constant dread that something you can’t see will come for you, making the game environment particularly challenging in terms of spotting and responding to constant potential threats.

Second, the game’s openness and depth of field means that dangers can approach at surprisingly high speed. Traditional horror games often limit the player’s visual range, such that “the anticipation associated with fear is constantly triggered due to the represented space never being seen at once in its entirety” (Perron, 2018, p. 305). Paradoxically, Subnautica’s wide blue expanses trigger the same fears, as the game’s huge leviathan-class creatures can appear shockingly quickly even in an apparently empty ocean. According to the game’s technical director, special care was taken so that underwater visuals would appear as realistically as possible, with the understanding that “in the real world, it's actually pretty hard to see underwater” (Cameron, 2016). Individual level designers could tweak everything from bioluminescence to light scattering, allowing environments to change the deeper the player goes, especially at night (Cameron, 2016). As a result, Subnautica’s waters are often deceptively opaque, particularly in lower biomes in which any amount of darkness “obscures threats, while every light source is a potential trap” (Moss, 2021). Both Subnautica games are also played entirely in first-person mode, which limits the player’s visual range and makes “every threat feel just outside of the camera’s periphery” (Moss, 2021). In the Subnautica games, openness doesn’t mean safety, and players can’t trust that they are seeing the environment as accurately as they think.

Third, Subnautica’s sound design constantly reminds players of unseen threats. Sound is a particularly effective way to generate tension, as humans have difficulty pinpointing the direction and location of a given sound with accuracy (Perron, 2018). This tension is useful for creating anticipation and anxiety, as combat is often “not as scary as the implied threat of combat. The biggest scares result from moments… in which players anticipate or fear they are about to fight, but do not actually end up doing so” (Windels, 2011). Subnautica’s sound design lends credence to its believable underwater ecosystem, but also “continuously reminds players of nearby threats, as the sounds of cries and roars are almost constant” (Moss, 2021) -- especially as players often hear creatures long before they see them for the first time (Menart, 2021). One example is the Cryptosuchus: a spiky, armor-plated predator with a terrifying roar that turns out to be relatively harmless, by Subnautica: Below Zero’s standards, as it “is more roar than bite [and] tends to retreat from combat after being attacked” (Unknown Worlds, 2021). In traditional horror games, it is often scarier “to have information about an upcoming event than to have none” (Perron, 2018, p. 305), and the sounds of the Subnautica games’ various underwater ecologies emphasize the strangeness and constant danger of their deceptively open environments.

Fourth, the environment itself can and will kill you. Numerous games include areas that cause environmental damage to players, such as the hot and cold biomes of various Metroid titles, but a game’s entire playable environment rarely kills the player by default. Drowning is a pervasive threat in the Subnautica games: even without twisty sea caves or aggressive predators, diving is dangerous, and Subnautica starts the player with a paltry forty-five seconds of oxygen. Gradually that number can be increased, but players are always aware that breathing is a luxury, one that can quickly vanish. Even when traveling in a submersible, players must constantly exit their vehicle to gather resources or explore small, tight areas, and vehicles can be crushed or damaged at lower depths, stranding players far from the surface. The game’s deepest areas are “especially horrifying… as you are so far from any safety or respite. Running out of food, water or even battery power, with no spare provisions, makes you feel truly doomed” (Moss, 2021). Additionally, a wide range of creatures can damage and destroy vehicles, scramble the player’s compass and suit HUD, and even teleport players out of their vehicles, making oxygen an even harder resource to maintain. Even the best prepared players will eventually find themselves stranded with little air and little time to recover, underscoring the deadliness of Subnautica’s base environment.

While the Subnautica games’ underwater setting is clearly scary, the environment alone isn’t enough. Instead, pervasive dread is created through the knowledge that players must continually leave the safety of their base to brave the games’ environmental dangers: you have to go down there, you can’t tell if you’re prepared, and there’s no guarantee you’ll make it back. Unlike more traditional horror titles, the Subnautica games don’t expect players to survive every encounter, and the world is open and unforgiving right from the start. That openness, particularly the freedom to explore in any direction, is a critical factor in how the Subnautica games create pervasive dread in players.

Freedom Is Scary: The Implicit Horror of Open Worlds

“Open world” is a frequently used descriptor for modern digital games, one for which the generally accepted definitions have changed over time. There is no consensus on the first true open world game: candidates range from Colossal Cave Adventure in 1977 to Novagen’s Mercenary: Escape from Targ in 1985 (Goodwin, 2014). Historically, The Legend of Zelda (Nintendo, 1986) is an important early benchmark, as it was designed to capture the excitement and awe of childhood exploration by giving players “a garden in a desk drawer” (Stanton, 2015). Grand Theft Auto III (Rockstar North, 2001) represents a major technological milestone, as the game’s expansive Liberty City “teemed with life and offered a sense of freedom, openness, and possibility that no other game had achieved before” (Donovan, 2010). After more than a decade of technological improvements, large scale open worlds can be developed by a wide range of studios, and open worlds are increasingly common among digital games of all sizes, allowing players “to explore what amounts to an enormous sandbox with no boundaries and few rules” for dozens or hundreds of hours, regardless of mechanics or genre (Muncy, 2015).

This mechanical agnosticism means that “open world” is less a game genre than a design structure, adaptable to any number of existing genres in order to create particular kinds of emotion in players. Where horror games create fear, anxiety and dread in players, open world games create feelings of freedom and exploration. This distinction is particularly clear in academic work involving open world games, where the specific qualities of a given game are critical to research design. One study of player personality projection used The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Bethesda, 2011) because its “open-world, non-linear game dynamic” granted players exploratory freedom while “refraining from actively prompting them toward or away from any particular morality” (Hart, 2017). Another scholar studying colonial ideology in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Nintendo, 2017) noted that “strictly following instructions in the open world environment was quite difficult… The player’s own will to observe becomes important -- when their interest is piqued by something in the environment, their attention shifts” (Hutchinson, 2021). More critically, Paul Martin uses The Elder Scrolls V: Oblivion to address the concept of the sublime in video games, particularly how the game’s open world structure suggests an “incomprehensible largeness and expanse” by introducing the player to an unfamiliar, “terrifyingly vast landscape” (2011) -- an idea later expanded by Daniel Vella into the “ludic sublime,” which depends on the “impossibility of obtaining complete, direct knowledge of the underlying system” of a given game, particularly those with the vast scope and scale of open world games (Vella, 2015).

Freedom in open world games can be expressed in various ways, often simultaneously. The developers of The Witcher III: Wild Hunt (CD Projekt Red, 2015) focused on exploration through scale, aiming for a world “far larger than anything else out there” with the self-described “absurd” length of more than a hundred hours of game content (Schreier, 2017, p. 229). Eiji Aonuma, the producer of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, notes that their world design focused on surprise, in that “being able to go anywhere meant that players might get lost” and find something unexpected (Thorpe, 2017, p. 423). Additionally, every player decision or side quest in Breath of the Wild is optional, and gaining skill in the game is focused on “learning the environment and growing to understand and respect it… As a result, you make the game what you want it to be” (Burch, 2017). Julie Muncy argues that successful open world games are best experienced as “long-term occupancies… Instead of rushing through them or viewing them as content generators, I abide in them” (Muncy, 2015). This sense of freedom, both in terms of exploration and decision making, is fundamental to an open world game, regardless of the mechanical, environmental, and design choices that support it.

While an open world structure can be applied to numerous game genres and types, the modern games most commonly described as open world share some mechanical commonalities. These games tend to be digital, singleplayer, and at least somewhat narratively focused, and players are free to explore an expansive world in any direction from the game’s beginning, usually after a brief, more straightforward tutorial section. Character leveling is fluid and involves acquiring character abilities and upgrades, improving the player’s innate skill over time, or both. Game mechanics are complex and multifaceted, including combat but also non-combat systems focused on crafting, cooking, fishing, homesteading, relationship development with non-player characters, and the ability to tame and ride a mount. Narrative often centers on a rich but relatively linear main plot and a high number of optional side quests that can be completed at any time and in any order. The world is painstakingly crafted, full of elements that make it feel both living and lived in, and big enough that players can spend hours investigating its nooks and crannies, such that there is always something new to discover. While much of the above is true of the original The Legend of Zelda and Grand Theft Auto III, exemplars of this modern open world style are numerous, including but not limited to The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Bethesda, 2011), The Witcher III: Wild Hunt (CD Projekt Red, 2015), The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Nintendo, 2017), Horizon Zero Dawn (Guerrilla Games, 2017) and its sequel Horizon Forbidden West (Guerrilla Games, 2022), Red Dead Redemption 2 (Rockstar Studios, 2018), Ghost of Tsushima (Sucker Punch Productions, 2020), and Elden Ring (FromSoftware, 2022).

By many of the above standards, Subnautica qualifies as an open world game. Players are free to explore nearly everywhere from the start, although limited oxygen and vehicle crush depth provide early barriers to deeper areas. Players “level up” by crafting more complex technology and improving their skill at navigating the environment, and the game’s main story can be followed at the player’s discretion or ignored in favor of base building and crafting. The gameworld is painstakingly crafted, teeming with alien life, and full of secrets that reward attentive players. But Subnautica also has substantial differences from traditional open world games, not least of which is the lack of combat: the game’s creatures aren’t challenges to be faced but overwhelming obstacles to be avoided. The world is exquisitely crafted but comparatively small, made up of a dozen or so microbiomes in a dormant volcanic crater. The game’s narrative is streamlined: there are no non-player characters in Subnautica (with the arguable exception of a late game sentient creature), only two of note in Subnautica: Below Zero, and no side quests in either game. The introductory section, often over an hour long in traditional open world games, takes less than ninety seconds in Subnautica and under three minutes in Subnautica: Below Zero, and players are left to figure out most of the game’s mechanics on their own, with minimal guidance from the game’s in-world PDA. Most importantly, Subnautica’s feeling of freedom is balanced less towards the wonder of discovery and more towards terror and anticipation. According to game director Charlie Cleveland, Subnautica is focused on the “Thrill of the Unknown: [the] excitement, dread, and tension of exploring” when the player has “no idea what dangers/rewards are down there” (Cleveland, 2021). This idea ties back to Vella’s concept of the ludic sublime, in which the player’s drive toward mastery of the game system comes face-to-face with mystery and the permanent “possibility of surprise and further revelation” (2015), meaning that Subnautica players can never be entirely sure that they have discovered all of the game world’s possible scares.

Notably, few games qualify as both “horror” and “open world.” Encountering a Thunderjaw, best described as a heavily armed robotic Tyrannosaurus Rex, in Horizon Zero Dawn, or a botchling, the deformed angry spirit of an aborted child, in The Witcher III: Wild Hunt can be genuinely terrifying, but it’s difficult to argue that either game’s core experience is primarily centered on scaring the player. Like Subnautica, most games labeled as “open world horror” are amalgamations of various genres that take place in horrific environments, such as the radiation soaked, reality warping Zone of S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow of Chernobyl (GSC Game World, 2007) or the plagueridden town of Pathologic 2 (Ice-Pick Lodge, 2019). This lack of open world horror games may stem from a mismatch in desired emotional outcomes: the demands of horror and the demands of open world games rarely match up, and wanting to abide in the world and wanting to be scared by it may be mutually exclusive desires. Additionally, the length and structure of open world games do not lend themselves to the tightly balanced, often cinematic nature of horror games, especially those that borrow their tension-and-release arcs from cinema. As Stephen King notes, good horror is “in many ways like a good joke: revisit the punch line too many times, and it wears out” (2010, pp. xv). The heart-stopping jumpscare of a Necromorph encounter is terrifying in the first hour of Dead Space but routine by hour fifteen, and scares of this type would have even less impact in the eightieth hour of a game like Elden Ring or Red Dead Redemption 2.

Ultimately, Subnautica successfully blends open world and horror game structures by being both wondrous and terrifying: it presents a glittering alien world that is punishing, hostile, and designed to kill you by default, but that players still want to abide in, particularly given the near sacrosanct safety of their central base. The game creates pervasive dread by putting players in constant anticipation of danger. It keeps immediate scares, like drowning or creature encounters, relatively low in frequency, and balances the safety of bases with the ceaseless peril of every other game environment. For Subnautica to be functionally horrifying, players need a set of mechanics that emphasize freedom of choice, relative powerlessness, and high anticipation of danger -- all of which are found in the structure of survival games.

Vulnerability is Scary: The Visceral Horror of Survival Games

Like horror and open world games, survival games are defiant of genre. The concept of survival has been present in games since Spacewar! (Russell, 1962) and Pong (Atari, 1972), and is fundamental to nearly every game genre, including not only first-person shooters and survival horror games but also strategy games, roleplaying games, racing games, and platformers (Lane, 2021). The past decade has seen a dramatic rise among games that emphasize survival, in that players aren’t expected to conquer or heroically explore a world, but to endure it as long as possible. Like open world games, survival games share design aspects with sandbox games, in which gameplay is focused on “the actions of crafting and building, with the aim to survive and reach whatever goal, if any, provided by the game” (Bódi, 2023, p. 173). That said, survival games are laser-focused on the hostility of the environment and the vulnerability of the player, and often have a higher level of difficulty and more frequent player deaths than games in the sandbox genre. Minecraft (Mojang Studios, 2011) is arguably the best known and most influential survival game; other notable titles include Don’t Starve (Klei Entertainment, 2013), Starbound (Chucklefish, 2016), The Long Dark (Hinterland Studio, 2017), Ark: Survival Evolved (Studio Wildcard, 2017), Rust (Facepunch Studios, 2018), DayZ (Bohemia Interactive, 2018), The Forest (Endnight Games, 2018), Astroneer (System Era Softworks, 2019), and Raft (Redbeet Interactive, 2022), as well as the long-running early access games Escape from Tarkov (Battlestate Games, 2017) and Valheim (Iron Gate Studios, 2021).

As with horror and open world games, survival games are most easily defined by the emotions they inspire in players: the feeling of powerlessness. Journalist Rich Lane calls them “games about being vulnerable,” and notes that surviving against the odds through persistence and ingenuity is a deeply human experience: “Survival games condense aeons of human achievement into a few hours’ play, allowing you to progress upward from the default human status of bald, clumsy monkey… The survival game provides an animal problem with a human solution” (Lane, 2021). Raphael van Leirop, designer of The Long Dark, reiterates that survival games are about cleverness rather than strength, and are built around players making “good choices that help them stay alive another day … A survival game gives the player a unique relationship with the gameworld, one where even simple movement carries a cost” (Stuart, 2021). Unlike games in which players gradually accrue powers and skills inherent to their character, survival games focus on building up external resources like a self-sufficient farm or well protected base. Even more than open world games, survival games are a natural extension and evolution of games as a medium, and are “post-genre in the best possible way: they borrow from everything and so are strictly defined by very little” (Smith, 2014). As with open world games, titles most often described as survival games share mechanical commonalities: deep systems for crafting and base building, massive procedurally generated worlds, and little to no story. Survival games also often have a harsh if not downright hostile environment and are intended to challenge the player’s ability to survive individually, which separates them from management games in which the player develops and maintains a community like Banished (Shining Rock Software, 2014) or Rimworld (Ludeon Studios, 2018), or relaxing farming simulation games such as Stardew Valley (ConcernedApe, 2016).

Survival games create vulnerability in players by mechanically disempowering them and placing them in environments that are extremely challenging to survive, focusing play on the basics of finding food, warmth, and shelter. Game journalist Graham Smith notes that these games have a naturalistic design, one in which players are fundamentally engaged with a game’s landscape: “The need to eat -- to find some life-giving berries -- binds you to a place, pulls you from A to B more purposefully than a fetch quest, makes your decisions meaningful, and makes a single bush as exciting a discovery as any unique, handcrafted art asset” (Smith, 2014). Benjamin Abraham, writing on ecological games, makes a similar point in that survival games “often feature dynamic, even lush natural landscapes, as well as mechanics that emphasize the player’s precarious existence within and dependence upon the natural world,” which leads to the “seeming paradox of an avatar with fairly banal capacities” that nevertheless holds deep meaning for the player (Abraham 2022, p. 68). Most game developers are familiar with Sid Meier’s 1989 definition of a game as “a series of interesting decisions” (Alexander, 2012), but survival games put extraordinarily heavy weight on each single choice a player makes, as they are often so close to failure or death. Regardless of mechanics, good choices in survival games are not about achieving a high score or improving a skill, but about the player’s ability to keep playing at all.

Without delving into the complexities of choice making in digital games, we can agree that interactive games give players agency, often defined in game studies as “the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices” (Murray, 1997, p. 126) and that many digital games are designed to give players as much agency as possible within the constraints of the gameworld and its systems. How much agency a given game can provide, and how much that matters during play, is debatable. Sarah Stang argues that agency as traditionally understood is completely illusory in games, but also notes that interactivity “is something we feel rather than something we can observe” in the moment of play (Stang, 2019). The emotional impact of a given choice can be particularly strong in survival games, especially in moments where the player feels they have chosen poorly. Journalist Graham Smith recalls a moment in DayZ where, after a series of bad decisions, his starving character ended up shot to death by another player within sight of a power station: “That moment of slow expiration on a cold hillside belonged to me because it wasn't scripted by a designer… I made a meaningful decision and was met by meaningful consequences” (Smith, 2014).

Both horror games and survival games put players in hostile and unforgiving environments, but survival games have a stronger focus on realistic threats. Unlike mutated zombies or supernatural entities, death by starvation or exposure is not only possible but plausible in many real world scenarios; and choosing to, for example, go on a long solo hike with little-to-no experience and without the necessary preparations involves a series of bad choices, unlike other real world dangers like a sudden car crash or cancer diagnosis. This emphasis on player choice accounts for a great deal of the Subnautica games’ pervasive dread: choosing to leave the safety of your base for dangerous, unexplored depths, when drowning is eminently possible and preparation is unreliable, is hard. As Chris Menart notes: “at its best, Subnautica makes you genuinely uncertain about when you should dive… it’s your decision to swim down, not that of a script, and that makes it infinitely more terrifying” (Menart, 2021). Additionally, leaving the base and progressing to a deeper biome are two separate choices. As players become accustomed to the gameworld and gain familiarity with the starter biomes, they also have an easier time avoiding persistent dangers. Subnautica can be played entirely as a base building game in the relatively safe shallows, and players can spend their time subsisting on arctic peepers and bladderfish, reorganizing their seabase modules, and refusing to brave the deeper waters at all. But both the promise of additional materials and blueprints, as well as the game’s narrative mysteries, requires players to dive, all but guaranteeing that the majority will eventually do so.

By one reading, survival games are encouraging and creating new kinds of storytelling focused on the survival experience. In her criticism of player agency, Stang notes that games like Bioshock and The Walking Dead are entirely focused on following someone else’s story: “Much of the promised agency with which scholars, players and developers concern themselves takes the form of choices offered to the player within the game’s narrative,” reducing players to “merely agents… following the path set out for them by another” (Stang, 2019). While there will always be a place for well crafted linear game narrative, survival games substantially wider the player’s experiential path by focusing on realistic environments and unscripted events. Raphael van Lierop, designer of The Long Dark, notes that survival game developers must learn “how to wrap interesting narratives around these vulnerability simulators…I think we have an opportunity to really change the way our players think about their relationship with a game, and likewise with the real world” (Stuart, 2021). Subnautica and its sequel follow a similar structure: their overarching plots involve civilization-destroying plagues, telepathic sea monsters, alien AI and a missing sister, but the player’s story is focused on the horrifying unscripted events that occur every day and the slowly building sense of dread those events create. Ultimately, the Subnautica games’ survival mechanics, when blended with their environment and open world design, give the player a true, visceral fear of death: staying alive is hard, and the player’s vulnerability and heavily weighted choices have a substantial effect on the game’s overall terrifying nature.

Conclusion: Scary Is As Scary Does

When examining horror games, open world games, survival games, or even games set underwater, traditional game genres are rarely the most important marker of how a game experience affects players, and an ineffective way to determine a game’s intended emotional experience. Rather than fitting neatly into a particular genre, the Subnautica games use the most salient elements of existing genres and design structures to create a visceral, deeply affecting experience much scarier than any of either game’s individual parts. Through environmental storytelling, ecological world design and aesthetics, naturally hostile gamespaces, heavily weighted choice and a free and open world to explore at will, both Subnautica and Subnautica: Below Zero subvert player expectations. They do so by hiding a genuinely terrifying experience under the apparent simplicity of a benign exploratory base-building and resource-gathering game.

It follows that pervasive dread and true lasting fear, both desirable emotional outcomes of well-made horror games, are not necessarily the direct result of horror-specific content, such as a certain amount of gore, the presence of jumpscares, a particularly challenging difficulty, traditional horror iconography, or even the context of a horrific narrative. Subnautica and Subnautica: Below Zero eschew the common trappings of all three design structures they pull from, keeping only the most critical mechanics and systems in order to focus entirely on a player experience that can be narrowed to “the thrill of the unknown” -- the blend of excitement, dread, and tension that serves as one of the games’ core pillars of design (Cleveland, 2021), and that positions the player experience as permanently in a state of mystery (Vella, 2015). The Subnautica games serve as clear examples to game developers and players alike that effective horror can eschew the expected, at times cliché structures of traditional horror games to draw on the most terrifying aspects of non-traditional horror content.

Subnautica’s blended design structure serves as a useful tool for interrogating horror in digital games as a whole: not as context or conceit but as an engine for the creation of fear, terror and dread. The findings of this article are of use in designing fresh horror experiences in interactive game systems, but also point to necessary further research in how modern games approach genre, particularly those that blend design structures to interactively explore themes and narratives that are currently genre-agnostic -- such as themes of loss and grief in Gris (Nomada Studio, 2018) and Spiritfarer (Thunder Lotus Games, 2020); empathy and emotional growth in Hades (Supergiant, 2020); parent-child relationships in It Takes Two (Hazelight Studios, 2021) and God of War: Ragnarok (Santa Monica Studio, 2022); and existential dread in Outer Wilds (2019). Ultimately, the Subnautica games both subvert and fulfill the expectations of horror, creating pervasive dread in players by blending the aesthetics of traditional horror games, the freedom of open world games and the vulnerability of survival games. Subnautica and Subnautica: Below Zero are exemplars not only of interactive horror but of the potential complex experiences made possible by blending design structures into something focused and new. Traditional signposts of genre are, here, bypassed in favor of only those mechanics, systems, and structures that support the player’s desired emotional experience.

Endnotes

[1] The Reaper Leviathan is one of the largest and deadliest creatures in Subnautica, and likely the first Leviathan-class creature the player will encounter. It is a fast, aggressive, eel-like creature roughly the size of the player’s largest submarine that will use its horns, mandibles and teeth to ram and kill the player on sight. In game, Reaper Leviathans reduce the player’s maximum health bar by 80% in one hit and are assessed by the player’s PDA as “extreme threat -- avoid at all costs” (Unknown Worlds, 2018).

[2] Death in Subnautica is handled in a fairly standard way for digital games. Upon the player’s death by drowning, creature attack, environmental hazard, or other means, the screen fades to black, a grim musical cue plays and the game reloads the player’s last save.

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