"Lord, save me from all these fucking survival games. (There's an ironic joke in there somewhere.) They always start sensible with combining rock with stick to create stick with rock on the end. But sooner or later you end up mashing together two mushrooms and a piece of discarded tinfoil to create a magazine-fed 5.56mm Colt AR-15, which you then rub on a small pile of turds for a second to add the optional holographic sights. Still I understand why they appeal. Where most games revolve entirely around the player waiting giggling just over the horizon for you to step into the designated minotaur area so it can leap out and start flinging minotaurs, it's refreshing to play a game whose world feels like it couldn’t give a shit about you, that its environment and life forms could muddle along perfectly well by themselves and which will kill you stone dead if you go twenty minutes without sucking any hydration from the tear ducts of a passing sparrow. Anyway, we've done crafting survival games in most of the standard Mario level biomes -- grasslands, desert, jungle, ice world -- so until they bring out a crafting survival game set in food world where we have to make spears out of Twiglets, here's a crafting survival game set in a ocean level, Subnautica. You are Rex Handsome, faceless mute space adventurer with the superhuman ability to not go all wrinkly when they stay underwater too long. Sadly he got this power by trading in his ability to prevent spaceships from exploding, and his spaceship explodes over an ocean planet with only three survivors: Him, one escape pod, and the Mars bar in the glove compartment. Now our hero must find a way off the planet, but in the meantime do the usual survival crafting game stuff: Build a base, find food and water, explore, and remember to breathe every now and again, you dozy git. Subnautica is the kind of game that probably could have gotten away with procedurally generating the map and having no further plot beyond, "See how long you could last and maybe find yourself a nice crafting project, like building a castle with a fire breathing effigy of The Allman Brothers on the top." So I was surprised to see that it didn't do that. The world map is fixed and astonishingly there's a plot with an actual ending, where you get to leave the planet tearfully waving goodbye to The Allman Brothers as you go. HO, YES! That space ship disaster wasn't just a contrived setup; the massive wreckage is your principal navigation point for the whole game, and your first challenge is figuring out how you're going to loot it while it's on fire and pissing radiation like an incontinent dog from the Bikini atoll."