Why is a dumbed down version of Subnautica, with no enemy combat, with assets that are what you expect of an indie game developed by 2 people and an incredibly basic gameplay loop so popular on Steam?

If you're looking for an objective answer, you won't find it here, but I can give you some elements that maybe can convince you if this game is for you or not.

So Planet crafter is simple, cheap and straightforward. You get O², pressure and heat meters that you need to increase to terraform a barren planet that is filled with some resources that you gather to progress. You're sent here as a prisoner and as you work toward your goal, the corporate overlords provide you with better blueprints. The ONLY way to die is to deplete your O² bar (goes down fast), your H²O bar (goes down at normal speed) or your food bar (goes down slowly) or if you fall. And that's it, that's the game. As you explore further and further away from the initial base you discover some landmarks, some areas start to open, and you get new gear that helps you progress, and you start again.

Why is it so good ?

• Multiplayer : this can be played with up to 10 players and the crafting freedom, the allocation of roles (explorer, engineer, botanist) can be incredibly pleasing if you're in the mood for it.

• Stress-free : I couldn't pass the first few hours of Subnautica because of a latent thalassophobia and a steep learning curve. Here, you will progress toward your goals either very slowly or very fast, but there's virtually no punishment if you miss a specific spot or even if you die because of lack of preparation. The map itself is not super wide, so you don't have to spend dozens of hours to get the gist of it.

• Atmosphere : I'm a sucker for Sci-fi and this is a very well done crafting simulator in space, even if graphics are definitely not impressive.

• Overall pace : This is probably the biggest win for this game. The upgrades feel incredibly rewarding and are all pretty meaningful. You get new stuff every 20 min approximately, and it slowly shapes your base, your surrounding and it just hits rights (lizard brain goes brrrrrr). At some points you get new tech or milestones that will really change the way you play, and that happens a few times throughout the game. I don't want to spoil anything but experiencing them with a bunch of mates makes for really cool moments.

Overall it's not a perfect game but probably one of the nicest surprise I had the chance of playing this year. I can only hope the team will take home this massive W and come back with another banger when they are ready.

This game started out great for me, very addictive, and the arrival through blue sky stage is extremely satisfying. The trouble is that this is actually an incremental game wrapped in a survival crafting/base building game, and I'm not big on incremental games. Past the halfway point, it becomes entirely about slapping a few of whatever the newest machine is around at random and then launching more rockets for multipliers. Being able to fully clear out wrecks is fulfilling, but not interesting enough to be what I would call fun. For me, this was not a case of "game more fun when number go up."

Once you've done rockets and machines, there's really nothing else to do except wait for the next target number to be hit, and that's not good. There's nothing motivating me to do anything further; I redesigned my base five days in a row, and wandered around getting stuff I don't really need from golden chests and portal wrecks. The animals stage was really a bummer, too. If there were actually a reason to give animals different traits and colors (like if you have a shelter in a cave, animals spawned there might require bioluminescence), and if you had to, say, have particular plants growing from spawners before animals would move in, it would be far more engaging. If the animals reproduced on their own, and you had to add more plants or some kind of predator to keep them in check, that would also be great. Instead the assortment you plug into a shelter just sort of wander around and make noises.

I got partway through the first moon/planet you can go to after Prime, and that was even less engaging, just a highly abbreviated version of the original planet, with a less interesting story and also a ginormous planet in the sky that was setting off my megalophobia every time I turned in that direction. The process isn't interesting enough for me to do this twice more, especially when there aren't achievements for anything after Prime. I 100%'d the game's achievements, and that's all I really care about.

Let me be clear: this is not a bad game. Not at all. I just wanted more out of it, more story, a need for more creativity and strategizing on my part, and just generally a game where I can't win by spamming rockets and machines and making the ugliest assortment of devices possible. Survival crafting and base-building games are my favorite, and while the crafting was pretty good, and the survival well-implemented, the base building was far too fiddly (even with mods) to get any real satisfaction out of it. I did enjoy all the posters and animal figures, at least.