Games I Didn't Finish: Breathedge

At some point I’ll have to do a blog about my love of Subnautica, an underwater exploration/survival/crafting/base building game. 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. 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.

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.

Set in a comedy future in which the Soviet Union persisted and took to the stars, Breathedge starts strong. 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. Your mission: explore your surroundings, scrap together equipment to let you survive in space for longer than thirty seconds, find a way back home.

If you’ve played Subnautica, the similarities will be obvious. That game also takes place in the immediate aftermath of a spaceship disaster, of which you are the only survivor. 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. 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.

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 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. 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).

This is not the case in Breathedge, which apparently does get to the point where oxygen is trivialized, but not for significantly longer (I played for almost ten hours and didn’t get anywhere near that point). I can see why the developers made that decision: many people have commented that there’s something compelling about those initial stages of a Subnautica playthrough where you’re making short dives from the surface, constantly keeping one eye on your oxygen meter as you scrabble on the sea bed for copper or scrap metal. On paper, making a game around that mechanic seems like a smart idea.

In practice, not so much. Unlike in Subnautica, there’s no surface to swim for if you start getting into trouble; that means you have to go back to either pre-set air sources or crafted objects like a base or an oxygen balloon. This makes exploring in the early game an overly stressful affair, as you’re constantly watching the O2 percentage tick down and trying to work out whether you’ve hit the point of no return. I was so caught up with my air supply early on that I repeatedly missed plot-critical objects in my frantic haste to scour new locations as quickly as possible. As well as adding an element of artificial difficulty to the game, this just makes exploration unenjoyable.

Speaking of artificial difficulty, unlike in Subnautica, you can’t fill up spare air canisters and swap them out on the fly. The air tanks are instead equippable items that represent a hard limit on your air supply. annoyingly, the game doesn’t tell you this, which means I wasted valuable resources on extra tanks for no reason. 

So the early game leans way too heavily on your air supply as a means of introducing difficulty...but then it starts throwing tons of spare oxygen refills at you. This trivializes oxygen management just enough so that it no longer feels like an interesting challenge, but not so much that it’s not a chore any more. The game falls right into the difficulty uncanny valley between too hard and too easy, landing right at the bottom of Frustration Canyon.

That’s how the game fumbles the concept of air supply. The second big departure from Subnautica is world design. In Subnautica, you start out in the middle of the game’s world and slowly explore outwards (and downwards, since your starting area is also the shallowest point on the map). In Breathedge you begin the game at one end of what is essentially a wide, linear corridor made up of asteroids and spaceship debris. In principle, this makes sense for the setting, and it’s a neat spin on the “you’re trying to go deeper” angle Subnautica uses; instead, you’re trying to get to the end of the debris field.

But in practice (you may be sensing a pattern), it just doesn’t work very well.

An immediate issue I ran into was base-building. What’s the point in building a base if I’m just going to leave it behind soon afterwards? Subnautica’s map is very voluminous due to depth and verticality being such large factors and the presence of extensive caverns and the like, but the actual footprint it inhabits in terms of square footage is relatively small, such that you can always return to your base fairly quickly by going to the surface and sailing for a bit. In Breathedge, this is not the case and eventually you reach a point where there’s no longer any reason to go back to locations you’ve already been to. That raises inherent problems with limited storage (do you make some tough decisions over what to bring with you, or make multiple trips carting everything between locations?), but it also makes bases seem irrelevant since you know you’re eventually going to be leaving them behind.

Of course, this could have been alleviated if there was some easy way to move your base between locations, but the game’s developers love artificial difficulty so of course breaking down structures gives you back less resources than it cost to make them.

Mind you, even if that wasn’t the case, it might not have been worth the trouble since the game’s crafting and resource gathering systems are also frustrating and obtuse. Unlike in Subnautica, the tools are all breakable (with very low durability, I might add), and they’re sometimes made out of the very resources that you gather with them. This led to a point a few hours in where I thought I had soft-locked my game progress, because I needed a specific tool to harvest more metal, but I also needed metal to make the tool to harvest the metal with. It turned out an alternate metal source respawns infinitely, but the fact that I got to that stage to begin with shows that the game’s resource and crafting economy is severely out of whack.

(While I was writing this review, the game’s developers put out a patch aimed at addressing some of the issues I discussed above. In my opinion, it doesn’t go nearly far enough).

Speaking of resources, most of them are found floating freely in space as little balls. This raises some tricky problems with visual readability--a ball of glass and a ball of ice look very similar when they’re four hundred metres away and you’re trying to work out whether it’s worth the oxygen cost to make the trip--but it also gets hair-pullingly frustrating due to the decision to give the resource balls physics, which means it’s entirely possible to send something you were trying to interact with spinning off into the void.

That last issue is exacerbated by the game’s controls. The jetpack control was clearly calibrated for an analogue stick, as trying to navigate with keyboard buttons will make you fly around at top speed and crash into things, but the game’s default controller setup is absolutely bonkers. Clicking in one of the analogue sticks makes you fly down, but you don’t click the other stick to fly up. Instead, you press up on the D-pad. 

Yeah, I don’t know either. The rest of the controls are similarly bizarre. Thankfully you can change them, but the fact that the game shipped like that is making me wonder what was going on with the developers.

This drip-feed of constant annoyances, none of which would be ruinous on their own but which eventually wear down any enjoyment to be derived from the game, was my experience with Breathedge. And that’s before we even talk about the writing.

Breathedge wants to be a funny game. It wants very badly to be oh so funny. You can tell because of how many jokes the developers put in, which is to say all of them. Breathedge contains all of the jokes. Seemingly drawing all of its knowledge of comedic timing and pacing from the Deadpool movies, the game relies on the assumption that if a particular joke doesn’t land then one of the next sixteen will make up for it.

(The game unashamedly rips off the first Deadpool’s opening credits gag, so this comparison isn’t a stretch).

Many of these jokes are crude toilet humour--the air tank is made out of a condom! The jetpack is powered by farts!--that made me feel like I was playing a Leisure Suit Larry game. When the material rises above this level it sometimes gets a little too clever for its own good, such as an early bit where you have to craft a cryptographic analyzer to hack a communication console. The analyzer turns out to be a wrench taped to a metal rod, which you use to “hack” the console by whacking it a few times. Yes, it’s kind of cute, but the analyzer actually looks like a different object in the crafting interface, which made me think the game had bugged out when I tried to make it and got a wrench instead. There were several other points where the game’s attempts at playing with the UI similarly tripped me up before I got the joke.

When it’s not being either too highbrow or too lowbrow, the game is mostly regurgitating super hacky fourth-wall breaking jokes that have been stale for decades. I swear there were seven different variations on your spacesuit AI saying “the developers were going to do a thing here but they were too lazy lulz lulz lulz”. 

Granted, I will take this sort of tired gamer humour over the other kind of gamer humour, which the game also features.

To give just one example: one item in the game is an extremely I’m-not-mad-actually dig at Marvel for putting too much diversity in their movies, which feels like it could have come straight from any number of Angry Nerd Dude twitter accounts. That should tell you everything you need to know about the game’s occasional forays into edgelord humour.

But my main problem with the game’s comedic stylings is less the content of the jokes and more the fact that there’s so fucking much of it. Every single joke or comedic element is driven into the ground until all vestiges of humour has been wrung from it. Early on you start getting messages from “The Babe”, who is supposedly a voluptuous fellow survivor willing to marry the hero if he rescues her, but who it becomes apparent is actually trying to get him killed for some reason. Okay, it’s kind of funny at first.

But she just keeps messaging you, dozens of times, and every single message is some variation on “I’ve discovered this obviously dangerous thing that you should immediately go investigate, trololol I’m clearly trying to kill you rolflol” or “have you noticed my obviously-fake not-Russian accent lol lol lol here’s another joke about how fake it is”.

They don’t even really use the “Communists in space” angle, apart from people calling each other comrade and some Soviet-era aesthetic touches. The game could just as easily have been set in a generic Star Trek space opera future. If you’re going to use this aesthetic and framing--which is already kind of played-out to begin with--why not do something with it?

At this point, I should take a step back and make it clear that Breathedge is not, despite my very long list of complaints, some sort of unmitigated disaster. The game’s graphics are excellent, the creative space environments are well designed and interesting to explore, and the core concept of slowly extending your range via increasing access to air is a fundamentally sound concept. This is an idea that could have been good, and sometimes it is.

But that’s what makes the game so disappointing. If it was just total garbage, I wouldn’t have bothered writing this review. As it currently stands, I desperately want Breathedge to be better than it is.

And maybe it will be! The developers have promised to keep patching the game and are currently working on two free add-ons, which will give them a chance to look at the feedback they’ve been getting and create something that addresses the major issues. It’s way too late to do anything about the game’s abysmal writing, but the gameplay isn’t beyond salvaging.

In the meantime, Subnautica has an expansion/mini-sequel coming out of early access soon. I suggest you head there for all further exploration and crafting needs.