Subterrain is a deep, complex survival horror experience

Survival doesn’t simply entail saving enough bullets for your next zombie encounter; it’s also about going to the toilet.

Once exclusively for the PC, “Subterrain,” a top-down survival horror game, is now available for current-gen consoles. And it’s messy. It’s complicated. It’ll have you taking long tram rides and hoarding everything from power packs to underwear. South Korean indie developer Pixellore knew what they were building when they initiated this project, and now it’s here to teach us a thing or two about survival.





Lone survivor

“Subterrain” is set in MPO, the first human colony on Mars. You are Albert West – once a doctor, now an incarcerated “murderer” after an unfortunate lab accident prematurely introduced an innocent to his maker. You are scheduled for a prison transfer when the alarms start blaring, an unexpected development immediately followed by something even more surprising: a blackout. When the emergency power kicks in, you realize no one’s coming to get you. And so you pry open the air vent, get down on your belly, and crawl through the ducts…

Your first 10 minutes should clue you in on what has transpired in this place: something has gone terribly wrong, otherwise there wouldn’t be brain matter making a Jackson Pollock reproduction on the floor. When you meet your first shambling ghoul depends on your luck, as the game features randomly generated areas, creatures, and items. But it soon becomes clear: you are the lone survivor of some kind of mutant outbreak.

Eat, sleep, kill, survive

You spend the rest of the game not only finding out what happened to the people at the settlement, but surviving the horrors lurking in the shadows of the MPO’s many corridors. The mutants come in all shapes, sizes, speeds, and strengths. The weakest will take a few whacks to the head with a trusty crowbar to kill. The toughest will require plasma beams, maybe even grenades. And when they start attacking in droves, you better make sure those turrets are primed for a massacre.

Combat is simple: just point your weapon at the target, then swing or shoot. It’s plain yet effective, especially with a fully upgraded blaster and hordes of pustule-ridden monsters to vaporize. But before you even reach that level of excitement, there are dozens of other different things you’ll have to concern yourself with.

Such as scavenging. The colony is a hoarder’s wet dream, with cabinets, lockers, and strongboxes jam-packed with junk. You’ll find dolls, body lotions, touch tablets, gaming devices, beer, oxygen canisters, medicine. You’ll have to resist the urge to take everything with you, because the space in your bag is limited. You’ll be forced to drop items or store them in containers (you can always come back for them later). Who knows, maybe you’ll get lucky and find a larger bag.

A majority of these items may seem worthless, but they can be used to craft and upgrade more useful stuff such as weapons, reactor modules, suits, and flashlights – without which you won’t go far in “Subterrain.”

Other items cater to your biological needs. You’ll experience hunger and thirst, so food and drink are necessities. But eating and drinking can infect you with nasty germs, so you’ll need to be on the lookout for decontamination pills. Also, because you’re ingesting nutrients, you’ll eventually need trips to the toilet. Yes, defecating and urinating are actual game mechanics in “Subterrain.” It’s strange that you can’t just do your business on the floor. It’s not like the mutants care. And the corpses? They have other things to worry about.

Attacks from monsters can cause status effects such as bleeding and fractures, so scouring crates for bandages and nanocasting kits is a must. As for healing ordinary injuries, a good night’s rest does the trick.

It’s not just yourself you have to take care of. If you want the facility and your equipment to give back to you, you’ll need to give them some tender lovin’. Not enough sweet air to breathe? Make sure you bring a fully charged oxygen canister with you. Or, better yet, seek out oxygen generators and replace broken oxygen filters with working ones. Thermal generators, regulators, and canisters work the same way to prevent you from freezing to death. Power packs are necessary, too, as without them, your ranged weapons and flashlight cease working.

Speaking of power, you’ll need to keep the main Power Generator operational if you want the facility’s various machines and electronics functioning. Supplying much-needed juice to said Generator are reactor modules. The bad news is mutants will occasionally attack the generator en masse to destroy the modules. The good news is you can produce more modules once you’ve gotten MPO’s high-tech 3D Printing System up and running.

The Power Generator has to be protected at all costs; it not only allows you to allocate power to other locations in MPO so you can travel to them by tram, it’s also the reason the entire facility is capable of sustaining life.

Abandon all hope

As you can imagine, with so many moving parts to be mindful of all at once, “Subterrain” easily slips into “overwhelming” territory. The inventory micro-management alone is a pain – that you’re constantly sidetracked by considerations such as where you’re going to piss next can be downright irritating.

I didn’t even get into the rising global and local infection levels that make the mutant populations larger, stronger, and more vicious. Or the Biosphere that you can use to produce food. Or ore extraction and refinement. Or the research of body parts mutants occasionally drop upon death. There are so many things you can do – and so many things you need to do if you want to stay alive. Juggling all the demands “Subterrain” makes of you will drain you – mentally and emotionally.

It doesn’t help that the interface is clunky, that the loading times are generally bad, and that the drab visuals start looking samey after a couple of hours. The soundtrack conveys the direness of your situation, but it, too, gets repetitive quickly.

Oftentimes, you’ll be convinced you’re going absolutely nowhere, that you have utterly no idea what you’re doing, that your stupidity will ultimately be the death of you. But aren’t these signs that “Subterrain” works as a survival horror experience? Indeed they are. “Subterrain” is an extremely effective product of its genre – so much so that it stops being fun. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. This isn’t a game about journeying through colorful kingdoms eating magic mushrooms and stomping on bug-eyed turtles. This is a game about a slow, lonely, and agonizing death.

It’s also important to note that one relevant complaint lobbed at the modern gaming industry is that it’s dumbing down video games; that today’s games lack the complexity, difficulty, and depth of the classics. Well, if those are the things you’re looking for, you’ll find them in abundance in “Subterrain.”

And at the end of the day, you have to stand back and admire how all of “Subterrain’s” numerous elements come together to form one, cohesive whole. Save for the inability to take a dump anywhere you want, not a single system seems out of place.



A punishing survival horror experience

“Subterrain” is a fussy game that revels in all the minor details. It’ll inundate you with objectives – from the significant to the banal – to the point that you’ll feel anxious and drained.

Still, few games are as astoundingly deep and complex as “Subterrain.” There are so many things to see, do, and tinker around with, not to mention the action, while simple, is a blast.

True, this isn’t a game for everyone. If you’re looking for cheer or easy fun, stay as far away as possible from this title. But if you’re aching for a punishing survival horror experience that will take you to the brink of exhaustion and test your every limit, then “Subterrain” will reward you in spades. — TJD, GMA News