Games like Subnautica, where the map opens when you earn it

The Seamoth stops at 200 metres. You can hear the hull groaning before the warning prints, and the only way past that line is to go back to base, build a depth module, and come down again. That loop — a wall, a workbench, a wall further down — is why people go looking for games like Subnautica the week they finish it, and why most recommendations miss. The ocean was never the point. The point was that the map only opened when you earned it.

Seven games here keep some part of what Subnautica was doing, and each comes with a dated low from our own record, because a game you are curious about and a game you are about to buy are different problems.

Lowest price we logged per game, read on 4 November 2026 and covering 26 September to 28 October 2026. Offers before that period are left out because our feeds then also carried accounts, console keys and region-locked keys, so the low shown on a game page can be lower than the figure here. Live prices are on each game page. Co-op column from each game's Steam store categories.

Game	Co-op?	Low	Date	Store
Subnautica: Below Zero	No	$6.93	7 Oct	GAMIVO
DREDGE	No	$5.51	11 Oct	Driffle INC
Barotrauma	Yes, online	$8.74	26 Oct	YUPLAY
SOMA	No	$5.99	2 Oct	Steam
Raft	Yes, online	$13.32	7 Oct	GAMIVO
Green Hell	Yes, online	$1.88	16 Oct	Gameseal
The Forest	Yes, online	$3.99	27 Oct	Steam

Go deeper: games like Subnautica with a map that keeps opening

Subnautica: Below Zero

Structurally this is the same machine. Planet 4546B again, two years later, with habitats to build, a Seatruck to extend module by module, and biomes gated behind equipment you do not have yet. Unknown Worlds also fixed the thing people complained about most: the scanner room and base-building tools are better, and the Seatruck's detachable modules mean you can leave the cargo somewhere and keep diving light.

The real difference is above the waterline. Below Zero spends real time on land, hands you a named protagonist who talks, and tells a plot with characters in it rather than leaving you to assemble one from PDA logs. If the silence was the part that frightened you, that silence is thinner here. It is also the shorter game, and the shallower one in both senses — the deepest biome sits well above the original's worst depths.

So it is the nearest thing to another Subnautica that exists, and it is not quite the same experience. Nothing in our record for Below Zero suggests urgency either: the gap between its highest and lowest reading in our window is wide, which is the signature of a game whose price moves around rather than settling.

Below Zero splits its map between ice shelf and sea floor, which is the biggest structural change from the original. (Official Steam screenshot)

DREDGE

Black Salt Games made the small, sharp version of the same idea. You fish an archipelago from a boat, sell the catch, upgrade the hull and the rods, and each upgrade opens water you could not reach before. Rigs, nets and engine parts go into a grid inventory that you reshuffle constantly, and that grid is the whole progression system: more hold space or a longer range, never both.

Where it earns its place is the dark. Fish at night and the screen crowds in, panic ticks up, and things move at the edge of the lights — the same instinct Subnautica trains, compressed into a loop you can run in fifteen minutes. The catalogue of mutated fish in Dredge works exactly like the PDA scans did, a reward for going somewhere you should not have.

It is far shorter, far less punishing, and it ends. It is also on Game Pass, so a subscription you already pay for covers it. Our record puts it among the steadiest games in this list: 23 readings and barely 5% between the highest and the lowest, which is a game that has found its price rather than one waiting for a promotion.

The inventory grid on the right is the progression system; everything you add competes for the same space. (Official Steam screenshot)

Watch the oxygen gauge instead of the health bar

Barotrauma

Europa's ice crust, a submarine, and a crew who all have jobs. Barotrauma is the only game here that makes the pressure a mechanic rather than a mood: hulls flood compartment by compartment, reactors need someone watching them, and a breach two rooms away is somebody else's problem until it is yours. FakeFish built it for crews, and online co-op is where almost all of it lives.

Played alone with bots it becomes a management puzzle instead of a horror game, which is a worse fit for what Subnautica did to you. Played with four people who do not know what they are doing, it is the closest anything gets to the moment your oxygen meter turns red at depth.

Every room in the cutaway is simulated separately, which is why a single breach escalates. (Official Steam screenshot)

SOMA

Frictional Games set this one in a collapsing research station on the Atlantic floor, and the walks between buildings are the best underwater sequences in any game on this list. There is no crafting and no base in SOMA. What there is instead is the writing — a story about copied minds that does the thing Subnautica's PDA logs only gestured at, and a hostile world Frictional's own store page promises will make you question your existence.

SOMA's sea-floor walks are short, rare and the reason people remember it. (Official Steam screenshot)

Build the base, then leave it behind

Raft

Redbeet's version answers the question of what Subnautica would be if the base moved. You start on a few planks, hook debris out of the water as the current drags you forward, and the raft grows into a multi-storey thing with crops, purifiers and a sail you steer by. Diving is still how you get the good material, and the shark that keeps biting your foundations is the reason you build a spear before a bed.

Four players can share one raft, which changes the game completely: jobs split, somebody always has the anchor. Raft is also the one in this list where our window shows the widest swing, so the figure in the table is a long way from the top of its range.

The base drifts, so everything you bolt on has to survive being towed. (Official Steam screenshot)

Trade the water for trees and keep the fear

Green Hell

Creepy Jar's Amazon is the strictest survival simulation of the seven: wounds get infected, parasites need the right plant, and your character inspects his own body for leeches. Nothing else here resembles Subnautica's early hours as closely as Green Hell does, when not knowing a recipe was the actual threat. The low in our table is the lowest of any game here by a distance.

Green Hell's injury system is modelled in enough detail that first aid is a skill you learn. (Official Steam screenshot)

The Forest

Endnight dropped a plane on a peninsula full of cannibals and let you dig in. The construction system is the draw — real walls, real foundations, traps you lay along a path they use — and the enemies watch you build, probe the defences, then come back with more of them. Caves take the place of biomes: dark, unmapped, holding the equipment you need to go further.

It leans much harder on combat than Subnautica ever did, which makes it the furthest from the seed on this list. Our window for The Forest swings by a factor of five from top to bottom, almost all of that from one official promotion late in the period, so the table figure is not the number that sits there most of the time.

Walls, floors and traps are placed piece by piece, and the cannibals learn the route around them. (Official Steam screenshot)

Subnautica's own cinematic trailer, from the Subnautica channel.

Take this one down with you

Play DREDGE next. Below Zero is the closer relative and we have said so, but it is also a second helping of a meal you have just eaten, and the thing you actually want back is not the ocean — it is not knowing what is below you. Dredge gives you that in a form you have never seen, for a fraction of the hours, and it finishes rather than fizzling. Start there, keep Below Zero for the winter.

One timing note from the record: Dredge is the steadiest price in this list, 23 readings sitting inside 5%, so there is nothing to time. For the rest, our notes on what a historical low actually means, the wider sweep of discounted survival games, and the co-op list cover the three rows above that need other people. If you are buying from the cheapest seller in the table, read whether keyshops are safe first.

We wrote this from store pages, published reviews and our own price record, not from playing each game for this piece. Some store links on our game pages are affiliate links, so playze may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.