Once you get the first vehicle, running out of oxygen only becomes an issue again when you’re exploring wrecks or if you somehow lose access to a vehicle too deep underwater to surface in time (as in real life, this is usually fatal). In Subnautica your quest for more oxygen ends very quickly, usually within the first ninety minutes for a first-time player, and significantly faster if you know what you’re doing. They sound similar on paper.but there are key differences, and those differences go a long way towards explaining why Subnautica swims while Breathedge sinks (or suffers from explosive decompression, or whatever Hollywood space metaphor you want to make). In both games your initial goal is to find ways to increase your oxygen storage, and eventually you work your way up to building vehicles and distant bases. As in Breathedge, you’re initially confined to a small escape pod surrounded by a hostile environment that you can only leave for short periods. That game also takes place in the immediate aftermath of a spaceship disaster, of which you are the only survivor. If you’ve played Subnautica, the similarities will be obvious. Your mission: explore your surroundings, scrap together equipment to let you survive in space for longer than thirty seconds, find a way back home.

Playing as an unnamed protagonist, you’re transporting your uncle’s body to the location of his space funeral when the convoy you’re travelling with encounters some sort of catastrophic event and explodes, leaving you stranded in a tiny pod at the end of a massive debris field orbiting a barren planet. Set in a comedy future in which the Soviet Union persisted and took to the stars, Breathedge starts strong. This is all a preamble to explain both why I was really looking forward to Breathedge-described by many as “Subnautica in space”-and why I ended up dropping the game in disappointment very quickly. There are many craft-and-survive games out there, but most take place in randomly-generated environments that can’t match Subnautica’s meticulously hand-crafted alien ocean. I think it’s one of my favourite games of all time, and I’ve been eagerly waiting for developers to look at its popularity (not to mention financial success) and start copying it. At some point I’ll have to do a blog about my love of Subnautica, an underwater exploration/survival/crafting/base building game.

Space funeral 4 difficulty