I ended up with a few Subnautica codes, most of which I gave away via the Tweeter. But the role I enunciate for myself in the strip is true, I think Weird Uncles are completely vital. I don’t have any non-weird uncles. But apparently Gabriel the Younger can only cling terrified to a laptop in a digital ocean that threatens to swallow him whole.

But, also: Subnautica.

I met some of the developers over there when they were fashioning their custom marketing Ziggurat with power drills, over by the Indie Megabooth at PAX West. I’d known them by their works before - “Unknown Worlds” as they are called made the Natural Selection mod for Half-Life, and also the sequel, which they built from the ground up. I like their story but I think the games are pretty great also.

Subnautica stole the last several days from me. It is, in my experience, a very scary game about being underwater, where you are constantly widening your circle of efficacy in a murderous alien ocean. It certainly flatters Steam’s “survival” fetish, but it does it in a way that involves a kind of breadcrumb narrative where things also happen. I understand that things “happen” in survival games and that our brains, being brains, will fix them in place with retroactive power. That’s a very cool emergent property. But I’d also like to know certain things about what a creator intends. I’d like to know them as well as I can, through the work; words can help with this. I like to gather materials an I like to plan and make things but I also want to be in a place that doesn’t feel like it was born ten seconds ago while a a bar crept left to right. I want an opportunity to learn metaphysical things and I want them to be important. I need something that feels intentional to invest long term in survival. Subnautica does this with aplomb.

It’s just under twenty-three bucks on Steam, and that’s stupid. It’s like twenty bucks on Xbox One “preview” right now. You shouldn’t be able to get it for that. It’s dumb.

With Monster Hunter World hitting I bit the bullet on an Xbox One X, which I might have done before, but in order to take advantage of it I needed to have a television that understood terms like UHD and HDR which increased the functional cost of the system substantially. Gabriel, being much more on the Gadget side of things, wants to be where he can expect performance to be best on third-party stuff and right now that’s the X. I haven’t talked about Monster Hunter much as a relatively recent adopter of the franchise, but let me establish that I still have some measure of that new convert zeal. When I saw the announcement at E3, I couldn’t tell if they intended it to be a “real” entry inthe franchise or if they were forking it a little, something comparable to Forza and Forza Horizon. The more that comes out about it, the more it looks like regular, old Monster Hunter to me, which sounds bad but is meant as an expression of unbridled joy.

(CW)TB out.