•Filip Premuš• 12 min read
Games
Top 8 Games Like Subnautica (2026)
Few survival games create the same mixture of curiosity and dread as Subnautica. The underwater adventure from Unknown Worlds Entertainment begins in welcoming tropical shallows before gradually leading you into dark caves, abandoned facilities, hostile ecosystems, and depths your equipment cannot initially survive.
Its appeal comes from more than being set underwater. Subnautica combines resource gathering, crafting, base building, vehicles, environmental storytelling, alien wildlife, and a constant need to venture farther from safety. The best alternatives capture several of those elements, even when they exchange the ocean for outer space or a ruined version of Earth.
Here are the top games like Subnautica to play in 2026:
# | Game | Best For |
|---|---|---|
1 | Flooded-world survival and building | |
2 | Subnautica-style survival in space | |
3 | Survival crafting and exploration | |
4 | Mobile-base survival | |
5 | Alien worlds and underwater bases |
1. Sunkenland
Sunkenland takes place after rising water has submerged most of civilization. Instead of exploring an alien planet, you dive through drowned cities, flooded buildings, subway tunnels, industrial facilities, and other ruins left beneath the ocean.
Recovered materials can be used to craft equipment, improve your diving capabilities, establish farms, build boats, and construct a fortified base. Bases can be placed on islands or directly over the water and customized with defensive structures, storage, crafting stations, and other practical facilities.
Combat is much more important than it is in Subnautica. Pirates and hostile factions control territory, attack bases, and compete for valuable resources. Sunkenland is also still in Early Access, so it is less polished, but its combination of diving, scavenging, survival, water travel, and modular construction makes it an unusually close mechanical match.
Why It’s Similar:
Large areas of underwater exploration
Diving equipment and oxygen management
Scavenging inside submerged structures
Modular base building
Boats and water-based travel
Solo and cooperative survival
Available on: PC
My Verdict: Sunkenland is the closest alternative outside the Subnautica series. It exchanges alien ecosystems and careful environmental storytelling for guns, raids, and faction combat, but exploring drowned cities for resources creates a similar reason to keep venturing deeper.
2. Breathedge
Breathedge is frequently described as Subnautica in space, and the comparison makes sense. A catastrophic accident leaves you floating among the remains of an enormous spacecraft, where oxygen, radiation, temperature, electricity, and limited equipment restrict how far you can travel.
Early progression involves leaving a temporary shelter, gathering nearby resources, crafting tools, and gradually extending your exploration range. Better oxygen tanks, protective equipment, vehicles, and station modules allow you to reach wreckage that was previously too distant or dangerous.
The biggest difference is its tone. Breathedge fills the story with absurd jokes, parody, and an immortal chicken, which can weaken the sense of isolation. Its later chapters also move away from the open survival structure, but the first several hours reproduce Subnautica’s exploration and equipment progression surprisingly well.
Why It’s Similar:
First-person science-fiction survival
Limited oxygen during exploration
Environmental hazards and dangerous regions
Crafting and equipment upgrades
Vehicle-based exploration
Mystery surrounding a catastrophic accident
Available on: PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch
My Verdict: Breathedge is one of the strongest recommendations based on mechanics alone. Its oxygen-limited expeditions and gradual equipment upgrades feel remarkably familiar, although its aggressive comedy will either charm you or become exhausting.
3. Grounded
Buy Grounded for another survival game that turns an ordinary environment into a vast and unfamiliar ecosystem. You play as one of four teenagers who have been mysteriously reduced to the size of an insect and abandoned in a suburban backyard.
Grass becomes a forest, puddles become lakes, and spiders become terrifying predators. Surviving requires gathering materials, finding food and clean water, crafting weapons and armor, and constructing bases capable of protecting you from the backyard’s increasingly dangerous inhabitants.
Grounded also uses exploration to deliver its story. Laboratories, recordings, environmental clues, and unusual technology gradually explain why the characters were shrunk. The setting is completely different, but its handcrafted world, biome progression, hostile wildlife, base building, equipment upgrades, and underlying mystery are remarkably close to Subnautica.
Why It’s Similar:
Handcrafted survival world
Resource gathering and crafting
Flexible base-building system
Distinct biomes and hostile creatures
Equipment-based exploration progression
Story uncovered through laboratories and recordings
Available on: PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch
My Verdict: Grounded is one of the best alternatives for players who enjoyed Subnautica as a complete survival adventure rather than purely as an underwater game. It recreates the same balance of exploration, crafting, danger, scientific mystery, and gradual mastery of a hostile ecosystem.
4. Forever Skies
Forever Skies replaces an underwater habitat with a customizable airship. Earth has been devastated by an ecological disaster, leaving its surface buried beneath a massive layer of toxic dust. You return centuries later to investigate what happened and search for a cure to a mysterious illness.
Your airship functions as transportation, shelter, workshop, and mobile base. It can be expanded with additional rooms, engines, storage, research stations, and equipment. Each improvement allows you to travel farther and safely reach areas that were previously inaccessible.
Descending beneath the dust reveals dangerous ecosystems, biological threats, abandoned structures, and clues about the collapse of civilization. The setting is aerial rather than aquatic, but the loop of researching technology, improving a mobile base, exploring hostile environments, and following an environmental mystery strongly resembles Subnautica.
Why It’s Similar:
First-person survival and exploration
Expandable mobile base
Technology research and crafting
Environmental hazards
Abandoned facilities and hidden records
Story revealed through exploration
Available on: PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S
My Verdict: Forever Skies is one of the best alternatives for players who enjoyed building a Cyclops into a mobile home. Flying through toxic clouds cannot reproduce the fear of deep water, but upgrading your airship provides a similarly satisfying sense of safety and progress.
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5. No Man’s Sky
Get No Man’s Sky to expand Subnautica’s alien survival concept across an enormous procedurally generated universe. Every planet can contain its own climate, resources, wildlife, environmental hazards, ruins, and underwater regions.
You can gather materials, construct bases, scan creatures, uncover ancient histories, upgrade equipment, and travel using starships and land-based vehicles. Ocean planets also allow you to build underwater habitats and explore the seabed with the Nautilon submarine.
No Man’s Sky is broader and less tightly designed than Subnautica. Its creatures and locations are procedurally assembled rather than individually placed to control tension and progression. However, few other games offer this much freedom to study alien ecosystems and establish bases in environments no human has previously visited.
Why It’s Similar:
Alien planets and unfamiliar wildlife
Scanning and cataloguing discoveries
Resource gathering and crafting
Underwater base construction
Submarine and other vehicles
Environmental storytelling and ancient mysteries
Available on: PC, macOS, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, and Nintendo Switch 2
My Verdict: No Man’s Sky is the best choice for players who want Subnautica’s sense of discovery on a much larger scale. Its individual planets lack the handcrafted progression of Planet 4546B, but its freedom, building systems, vehicles, and alien environments are difficult to match.
6. DAVE THE DIVER
DAVE THE DIVER combines underwater exploration with restaurant management. Dave spends his days diving through the mysterious Blue Hole, catching fish, gathering materials, completing missions, and investigating increasingly unusual events beneath the surface.
Each expedition is limited by Dave’s oxygen supply and carrying capacity. Travelling deeper provides access to rarer creatures and more valuable resources, but it also introduces colder water, stronger currents, hostile wildlife, and other hazards. Running out of oxygen causes Dave to lose most of what he collected during that dive.
Money earned from operating Bancho Sushi funds improved diving suits, larger oxygen tanks, better storage, weapons, and other equipment. The restaurant management is completely different from Subnautica, but the loop of diving deeper, collecting resources, returning safely, and upgrading equipment creates a familiar sense of progression.
Why It’s Similar:
Underwater exploration
Limited oxygen during dives
Equipment and carrying-capacity upgrades
Distinct ocean regions and aquatic creatures
Increasing danger at greater depths
Mystery hidden beneath the surface
Available on: PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch
My Verdict: DAVE THE DIVER is much lighter and more structured than Subnautica, but its diving loop captures the temptation to push slightly deeper before returning to safety. The restaurant adds a completely different management layer that helps make every successful expedition feel useful.
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7. Under the Waves
Buy Under the Waves for a narrative-driven adventure built around isolation at the bottom of the North Sea. Set in an alternative version of the 1970s, it follows professional diver Stan as he attempts to process a life-changing loss while working far beneath the surface.
Stan can leave his underwater base in a diving suit or pilot a small submarine across the seabed. Exploration leads through caves, shipwrecks, industrial facilities, and fields of underwater vegetation containing collectibles, salvageable materials, and fragments of his past.
Under the Waves includes equipment crafting and resource collection, but it is not a full survival sandbox. There is no extensive base construction or long progression tree. Its similarity instead comes from its submarine travel, isolated underwater setting, environmental storytelling, limited resources, and willingness to make the ocean feel beautiful and deeply unsettling at the same time.
Why It’s Similar:
Underwater base and submarine
Seabed, cave, and wreck exploration
Equipment crafting
Isolated science-fiction setting
Environmental storytelling
Beautiful but unsettling ocean atmosphere
Available on: PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S
My Verdict: Under the Waves is less survival-focused than most games on this list, but it captures Subnautica’s isolation and underwater atmosphere exceptionally well. Choose it for exploration and story rather than open-ended crafting or base building.
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8. Loddlenaut
Get Loddlenaut for a much cozier adventure set beneath the ocean of an alien planet. You play as an interstellar custodian sent to GUP-14, where pollution left by a spacefaring corporation has damaged the local environment.
Exploration leads through several underwater biomes containing oil spills, discarded machinery, sunken corporate buildings, and abandoned ships. Collected debris can be recycled into equipment upgrades, while new gadgets allow you to remove different forms of pollution and reach additional parts of the planet.
You will also encounter axolotl-like creatures called loddles. Feeding and caring for them affects how they develop, while cleaning each biome allows the local ecosystem to recover. Loddlenaut removes Subnautica’s survival pressure and dangerous predators, but its alien ocean, environmental story, technology, underwater ruins, and study of aquatic life make it a relevant alternative.
Why It’s Similar:
Open underwater alien environment
Distinct aquatic biomes
Sunken corporate ruins
Equipment upgrades and unlockable gadgets
Environmental restoration
Strange alien sea creatures
Available on: PC
My Verdict: Loddlenaut is essentially a peaceful ecological version of Subnautica. It lacks danger, base construction, and complex survival systems, but exploring an abandoned alien ocean and helping its ecosystem recover provides a pleasant change of pace.
Best Games Like Subnautica on Each Platform
Best Games Like Subnautica on PC
PC players can access every game included in this list. Sunkenland provides the closest underwater survival experience, while Breathedge, Grounded, and Forever Skies reproduce Subnautica’s crafting, exploration, and equipment progression in different environments.
DAVE THE DIVER, Under the Waves, and Loddlenaut are better choices for players who care more about underwater exploration than complex survival systems. Additional options are available through PC game keys.
Best Games Like Subnautica on PS5
Grounded is the strongest overall alternative on PS5 due to its handcrafted survival world, base building, progression, and environmental mystery. Forever Skies, Breathedge, No Man’s Sky, DAVE THE DIVER, and Under the Waves are also available.
The broader PlayStation game keys category can be used to explore other survival games available across PS4 and PS5.
Best Games Like Subnautica on Xbox
Xbox players can choose from Breathedge, Grounded, Forever Skies, No Man’s Sky, DAVE THE DIVER, and Under the Waves. Grounded is particularly suitable for cooperative groups, while Under the Waves provides the most concentrated underwater story.
The Xbox game keys selection includes options for Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S, although platform and regional compatibility should always be checked before ordering.
Best Games Like Subnautica on Nintendo Switch
Breathedge, Grounded, No Man’s Sky, and DAVE THE DIVER are available on Nintendo Switch. Grounded offers the strongest survival and building systems, while DAVE THE DIVER focuses more directly on underwater exploration.
Nintendo Switch 2 owners can also access improved versions of selected games. The Nintendo Switch game keys category can be used to find other portable survival and exploration titles.
FAQs About Games Like Subnautica
Final Words
Sunkenland is the strongest alternative for players who want to remain close to the ocean, while Breathedge and Grounded reproduce Subnautica’s survival progression in entirely different environments. Forever Skies and No Man’s Sky emphasize technology, vehicles, bases, and exploration across unfamiliar worlds.
DAVE THE DIVER, Under the Waves, and Loddlenaut place greater emphasis on diving, ocean environments, and discovery than demanding survival systems. None combines every part of Subnautica, but each captures a meaningful part of what makes leaving the safety of the shallows so compelling.
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“ Filip Premuš is a seasoned gaming content writer specializing in titles like Steal a Brainrot, Old School RuneScape, and other popular online games. With a sharp focus on accuracy, updates, and in-game strategy, he creates comprehensive guides that help players stay ahead of the meta and make informed decisions.”
