Intro

I realize that this is not a unique sentiment, but I was very into Spider-Man as a kid.  I devoured the giant Essential Spider-Man books, fervently watched and rewatched each of the animated series, and bought every Spider-Man branded knicknack I could get my hands on. And this is an obsession I’ve mostly stuck with as I’ve grown older, because new Spider-Man content is always being released. When I got tired of the original Amazing Spider-Man run, I aged into watching the Sam Rami Movies. When those got…umm…bad…Amazing Spider-Man had gotten good again, and I read J. Michael Straczynski and John Romita Jr.’s Volume 2, along with Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley’s run on Ultimate Spider-Man. By high school and college, there was a new crop of Marc Webb Spider-Man movies of varying quality for me to dig into. And now there’s Insomniac Games’ Marvel’s Spider-Man (2018) (wow, that’s a mouthful), something I’ve sunk a frankly excessive number of hours into since it’s launch back in September. So, when Stan Lee died a few weeks ago, I had a lot to think about in terms of how his most popular character has been such a consistent companion for me since childhood. Because, when playing Insomniac’s Spider-Man (I’m just going to call it that for the sake of convenience), I found myself consistently saying, “Wow, this is really good Spider-Man writing”, without having a solid definition for what good Spider-Man writing was. Still, having spent close to two decades with the character, I think my gut feeling is probably a good place to start.  Fortunately, Insomniac’s Spider-Man is not only an accurate recreation of what I internally think of as Spider-Man, but a genuine expansion on the literary value of the character. Because, despite his pulpy roots as an adolescent power fantasy (and it very much still is that), Spider-Man has an inherently literary

quality that sets him apart from most other superheroes. In short, I have read/watched/played a lot of bad Spider-Man media, but even the worst ones, such as Marc Webb’s Amazing Spider-Man 2, cannot help but tap into the fundamental human truths that Spider-Man represents. Still, it takes a lot of effort to write Spider-Man in a way that that doesn’t just reference the literary value of the character, but actually expands upon it, and I think Insomniac’s Spider-Man has done that. Yes, its web swinging feels incredible, its combat is systemically deep, thematically appropriate, and flashy as hell, and yes its soundtrack feels as epic as any superhero score should, but I think the writing in the game is what really makes it stand out as a piece of Spider-Man media. So, in this piece, I want to dig into how Insomniac Games’ writes Spider-Man, explore a few other works that write Spider-Man similarly, and try to get to the heart of what makes good Spider-Man writing so compelling in the first place. In short, this is an an attempt at publicly defending the ungodly amount of time and money I’ve spent on this franchise.

Tone

Let’s start with tone, because this is something a lot of bad Spider-Man adaptations get very wrong. Compared to other superheroes, Spider-Man’s tone is a bit more complex, because there are many different takes on the character that writers can lean into. To list a few, there’s Spider-Man the low-budget engineer, Spider-Man the human being with real life obligations, Spider-Man the wise-cracking crime fighter, Spider-Man the dorky high school kid, and Spider-Man the high-budget scientist. Other writers have carved out their own side of Spider-Man, such as Amazing Spider-Man Vol. 2’s take on Peter Parker as an earnest high school teacher, or Spider-Man as a monstrous spider, operating on animal instinct. So, while many Spider-Man stories feel formulaic, they have a lot of possible options to choose from when writing the character itself. However, despite these varied sides of the character, most good Spider-Man stories follow a very particular tone that carefully balances seriousness and levity. Go to far towards the levity and you get a kind of PG-Deadpool, mostly written for animated kid’s shows. Go too far towards the serious and you get…well, everything written in the 90s. Going too far in either direction breaks the character, and good Spider-Man writers know how to balance both. As far as humor goes, something a lot of writers don’t seem to get is that Spider-Man is not Deadpool. Marc Webb’s Amazing Spider-Man films fall into this trap the most. That Spider-Man is making quips non-stop, and they feel distinctly mean-spirited in a way that most other Spider-Man writing doesn’t. Because, Spider-Man is a dork. He’s making bad jokes at criminals because he genuinely finds them funny; it’s not done out of malice. Fortunately, Insomniac’s Spider-Man follows this mold. In a very important distinction, Spider-Man is cracking jokes to himself, not to the people he’s beating up. And, also in keeping with other good Spider-Man writing, these joke are horrible. I cringe at at least half of them! My favorite one takes place during the Turf Wars DLC where Spider-Man, quietly talking to himself, comes up with a punny name for a variant of enemy tank, laughs at his joke, then repeats it louder for the bad guys to hear. And they make fun of him for it! Bad guys making fun of Spider-Man for his bad jokes is a perfect encapsulation of Spider-Man’s humor.

However, the game is not all light-hearted, and knows when to hit some serious beats. It’s main plot centers around honest-to-god terrorists invading the city, and a militarized police force sent in to combat them. These are much more explicitly political issues than most Spider-Man writing usually deals with, as most of the franchise’s writers’ attempts to engage with explicitly political issues are goodhearted, but often sloppy. Insomniac’s Spider-Man, meanwhile, seems to avoid commenting on the issues directly. It says that terrorism is bad and scary, that the militarized police force is bad an overextends its reach, but the NYPD are paragons of virtue. This is a…troubling narrative, and flies in the face of Spider-Man’s history being consistently at odds with the NYPD. In this game, he is functionally a special forces freelancer; the game even opens with him going on a SWAT raid. Avoiding discussion of politics when your enemies are dudes in wacky costumes is one thing, but refusing to acknowledge the political messages when engaging with real-world organizations with sweeping systemic problems is quite another. The game wants to stick to its simple message that egomaniacal plutocrats are screwing over honest, hard-working New Yorkers, and I can respect that. But by uncritically including the NYPD in its “us”, I think it inadvertently steps over a political line it wasn’t intending to cross.

However, the rest of the game’s more serious beats are much more competently executed. The general setting of the story pulls heavily from Sam Rami’s Spider-Man 2, leaning into the “Spider-Man as a real human being with real life obligations” side of the character. Peter’s juggling paying rent and managing relationships with crime fighting and an actual career in science. This is pretty commonly stated as the aspect of Spider-Man that makes him compelling as a character, and I absolutely agree. Spider-Man was created to appeal to teenagers reading comic books, and shares many of the troubles and experiences that they do. Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne own skyscrapers and mansions, but Peter Parker gets evicted from his apartment in the first few hours of the game. This is, from a writing perspective, what makes the character so malleable and consistently interesting. The character’s foundation involves him struggling with real-world issues, and this is something most superheroes just don’t do. Spider-Man may be just as much of a power fantasy as Batman or Captain America, but it’s not just a power fantasy, because it’s contrasted against conventional character writing. I think this dichotomy is highlighted in the game’s best scene, where Peter swings and wall crawls through the city while talking to Mary Jane after a dinner that may have been a date, but neither of them are quite sure. It’s not really clear, and that’s the dramatic linchpin of the scene. Both of them are trying to figure out exactly what they’re doing with their relationship, and are both really bad at communicating. If this scene were written in a non-superhero film, it might have Peter pacing around his apartment, but, “someone paces around their apartment while texting” is not exactly the most cinematic of setups. But, when that awkward pacing is up the side of a building instead of in an apartment, that gets a lot more cinematically interesting. It allows the animators to exaggerate smaller gestures into more obviously readable ones. Want to show Peter getting uncomfortable? Just have him awkwardly swing to another building. This contrast of the grounded and real with the dramatic and exaggerated is a perfect encapsulation of Spider-Man as a character, because it sends the message that even superpowers cannot save you from reality. And that is strangely comforting.

Characters

Aunt May

Like most good Spider-Man writing, this game is centered around just a few core characters, in this case, Mary Jane, Aunt May, and Doc Ock. Each of these relationships is written wonderfully, reaching the core of the character from the comics, while adding additional depth. Peter’s relationship with Aunt May is, I think, the most transformative. There have been a few interesting takes on Aunt May in the past, though most of them fairly limited. In the original run of Amazing, she really only existed as someone to worry about Peter, and for the occasional story where she found out he was Spider-Man. She cared about Peter, and Peter cared about her, but it was never especially deep. The best take on the classic version of the character I have see is in Straczynski and Romita Jr.’s Amazing Spider-Man Vol 2. run, where

This is probably the best Spider-Man comic?

Aunt May discovers that Peter is Spider-Man (for what must be the fifth time), and they spend a few issues talking about it, processing it, working to establish a new relationship with that knowledge in mind. It felt incredibly realistic in the tone of its writing, contrasting the bombastic web-swinging art on the cover of the comic, with the twenty-odd pages of two people just talking about trust and family. Aunt May’s is still the strong old woman who has had to deal with a lot of pain in her life, but they lean into that depth a lot more than previous writers had. Bendis and Bagley’s Ultimate Spider-Man iterates on this approach, with Ben and May being written as an old hippie couple. Where the May in Amazing Spider-Man felt fragile and troubled, Ultimate’s May is no less troubled, but is fiery where Amazing’s is frail. Amazing’s May would worry about Peter, Ultimate’s May will yell at him when he’s being stupid. I really like this take on the character, as it creates a more explicitly hostile but no less tender relationship between Peter and May. Because, from May’s perspective, Peter has become a flaky and moody teenager since Ben’s death. It looks to her like he’s spiraling. But, she is also dealing with her own grief over losing her husband, and genuinely feels like she has no idea how to raise this angsty teen on her own. Ultimate’s May is more directly empathetic than Amazing’s; the reader is given the ability to relate more directly to her struggles. I find both takes on the character to be interesting, but neither entirely define where Insomniac went with the character.

The most notable thing about Peter and May’s relationship in Insomniac’s Spider-Man is just how many people I’ve heard comment on how good it is. Aunt May is rarely the focus of the drama in any given Spider-Man story, and in this one, she is still mostly in the background, but the story beats that do happen with her feel more substantial. The player gets a real sense of the history between them, feels Peter’s overwhelming gratitude for what she’s done for him, and just how much the two of them have been through together. This is something that requires writing Peter as a little bit older, when he’s lost the rebellious teenager personality, so the relationship has gotten more mature. But in a really obvious bit of characterization, Aunt May exists as a character outside of Peter. In Amazing and even in Ultimate, it’s never mentioned if she has hobbies or even a job (Note: Ultimate’s May has a job, but I have yet to find out what it actually is). She exists purely in relation to Peter. But in Insomniac’s, she basically runs a homeless shelter on her own, she tries to help out Miles when he’s dealing with the death of his father, and she is close to one of the game’s main antagonists. You start to see Peter’s overworking of himself not as something particular to him, but as a family trait. At one point, Peter says that, after trauma, it helps him to stay busy, and given the amount of trauma Peter and May have had to go through, it makes sense that they always seem to stay busy. So, while May’s relationship with Peter is still important to the story we see, it’s not her only or even her defining characteristic. And this a good segue into how the game treats Mary Jane.

Mary Jane

Mary Jane is a…hard character to write well. The early comics never really gave her any defining characteristics other than, “She’s hot.” Which, aside from being a deeply problematic way to write one of the main characters in your canon, is also a really difficult starting point for new writers. Other major characteristics include “she likes Peter” and “she has red hair,” (and the new movies don’t even do that!) which doesn’t really help you much. So, pretty much any author that tries to write Mary Jane in any other than voyeuristic (which is, frustratingly, the route that most writers seem to take) certainly has their work cut out for them. One advantage of this is that

Pictured: A very normal way to draw fifteen-year-olds

writers can pretty much do whatever they want with the character. Ultimate writes Mary Jane as a childhood friend of Peter’s who is actually kind of a geek (though still uncomfortably sexualized for a FREAKING FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD). She, again, has actual interests and personal problems going on outside Peter. When Peter acts like a stupid fifteen-year-old boy and claims to be entitled to her affections, she shuts that shit down. But…ultimately (pun intended) Bendis’ take on the character only progresses her so much from her roots.  Her main hobby is sewing Peter’s many costumes. She is still, consistently, drawn to be gawked at by the presumably straight dudes reading the comic. There’s some more depth there, but it has its limits. It does include the one bit of depth Mary Jane’s character did have from the early Amazing comics, which is her abusive father, but…it feels kind of trite. The writers don’t really have anything to say about abusive homes, it doesn’t feel authentic to people’s lived experience, and it mostly just serves as an easy source of drama.

This is an area where some Amazing runs actually surpass Ultimate in character writing, because it does eventually have some actual depth for Mary Jane. Over the early 2000s of Amazing Spider-Man Volume 2’s run, Mary Jane is slowly transformed into an interesting character. Straczynski and Romita Jr. create a backstory that tries to explain why she was written as such a shallow character, and how she can grow from it. In what is mostly a retcon, they cast her shallow and carefree aspects the early comics as a defense mechanism for her broken home life, to deny the shitty reality she had to go home to. And…okay, that’s not a bad take on the character. It explains her earlier actions, and lets them transition the character her into a more interesting one as she learns to process her past trauma and start to grow past it. Throughout the early 2000s, Mary Jane takes her modeling career (which only ever existed so the artists had more excuses to draw more panels of MJ being hot), and tries to transition into acting. She struggles with being typecast as a model in early movies, but eventually transitions to a successful stage acting career, and there are a few legitimately insightful scenes where she talks about how she acts by channeling past experiences. So, basically, Mary Jane becomes a method actor. This leads to some genuinely good character beats between her and Peter as well, as their struggling marriage is approached with some actual depth, genuinely exploring how a regular human being would feel if they were married to a superhero. She feels unimportant, like she can’t be involved in the most important parts of Peter’s life, and she is always worried that there is something he’s hiding from her. These are realistic approaches to fantastical problems, and I found them immensely personally understandable. So, despite the many missteps previous writers have taken with the character, there were a few solid examples that Insomniac had to pull from to start writing their own Mary Jane.

They ignored all of them. And the game is much better for it. Insomniac’s Mary Jane is pretty distinct from all previous incarnations of the character.  I suppose in visual design and some of the vocal performance, she lightly resembles Kirsten Dunst’s mostly forgettable portrayal of the character, but the resemblance ends there. They don’t pull from Amazing’s characterization of her messy family history (aside from a single throwaway line), her acting career, or her modeling career. They don’t pull from Ultimate’s characterization of her as a geeky childhood friend. They basically just write a new character, have her date Peter, and give her red hair. And even though there are some aspects of previous Mary Jane iterations I found interesting, I think this was the right decision. Their new character is an investigative reporter, she’s working on the same cases Peter is, she’s not just there to be saved by Peter (though that does still happen). This is strange, considering game director Bryan Intihar said that, they created Mary Jane by “deciding what we wanted from Peter and his journey. Mary Jane’s role came as a result of that, to balance everything out.”[1] If that was their goal, they definitely failed at it, because Mary Jane seems to exist as an independent actor in the world. Yes, she works with Peter, but she’s doing her own thing most of the time. Their relationship is played very straight, just a realistic, messy, twenty-something relationship. Oh, and the game never visually objectifies her, which…is something I don’t think any Spider-Man media has done before?  She’s still Hollywood actress-level attractive, and there’s still sexual tension between her and Peter, but it’s, again, played realistically. She does not exist for dudes to gawk at. So, when the game takes their relationship seriously it’s easy for the player to get invested in the back-and-forth of their relationship.

Black Cat

This isn’t to say that the game is entirely sexless. Black Cat is in it, after all. And, the way the game wrote Black Cat was ultimately what convinced me to write this piece, because, I think a good rule for Spider-Man writing is, if they know how to write Black Cat, they know how to write Spider-Man. Black Cat is a (not at all Catwoman-inspired) antihero who Spider-Man alternatively fights and flirts with. They date for a bit, they hook up, she steals something, Spider-Man chases her, she gets away, repeat. This is a fun dynamic to write, because it has clear rules and conflict: Black Cat will always go back to her life of crime, and Spider-Man will always try to get her to go straight. This means the end of any Black Cat story will already be known to the reader, so good Black Cat writing is just about having fun along the way. Unfortunately, most writers interpret “having fun” as drawing multiple, incredibly detailed panels of Black Cat looking hot. And having her shamelessly flirt with Spider-Man.

I know this is bad, but this is genuinely hilarious to me

The best Spider-Man writers will use this as an opportunity to just write some fun superhero banter. My personal favorite take on the character an arc in Amazing Spider-Man Volume 2 where the two of them team up to take down some big bad. They are crawling through some abandon warehouse preparing to attack some henchmen, get distracted, and have sex in the air vents.  I laughed out loud the first time I read that.  Because it is probably the best superfriends-with-benefits writing I’ve ever read. The problem with the character, however, is that even the best writers fall into the trappings of the bad ones. So, with Insomniac’s Spider-Man being a video game, I was worried that this would be taken to another level of creepy pandering. If Black Cat flirts consistently with Spider-Man in the comics, then in the games, where the player is Spider-Man, this could get borderline masturbatory. Fortunately, they don’t do that, and just have fun with it. Banter between Spider-Man and Black Cat is consistently hilarious, with Cat taunting Spider-Man and him reacting as uncomfortably as you would expect. There’s a consistent back and forth (I refuse to write cat and mouse) between the two of them, and they consistently reference their years of history together. They know each other; they’ve been through this before. It’s a great example of the game taking something that worked in the comics, and removing much of its less effective aspects.

Doc Ock

How the game writes Doc Ock, however, is an example of taking something that never worked in the comics and turning in into something that absolutely does. One of the biggest problems with Spider-Man writing is that his villains are usually pretty boring. Doc Ock is perhaps the greatest example of this. Best I can tell, he has only been written well once. ONCE. One of the best-known Spider-Man villains and his only interesting story arc is in Sam Rami’s Spider-Man 2 (I like to pretend Superior Spider-Man never happened). In the comics, he is just an angry science dude with a bad haircut who makes some robot arms. They have him try to marry Aunt May one time. That’s about the only interesting thing he’s ever done (again, Superior Spider-Man never happened). So, the Insomniac writers looked to that one time he was written well. In Spider-Man 2, Doc Ock is a sympathetic scientist who takes on a mentor role to Peter before being turned evil by his robot arms. And, okay, that’s an interesting start, certainly more than his comic iterations. But Insomniac takes that foundation and goes much further with it. Where Spider-Man 2 didn’t have the time to develop the mentor relationship, Insomniac can spend the majority of the game developing it. So, as Doc Ock slowly slides towards super-villainy, it can be both more believable and emotionally complex for the player. While his transition to super-villain is definitely too abrupt, the complexity behind the shift remains intact. Peter treats him as a father figure, and that doesn’t feel trite, because the player spends most of the game working with Octavius and feeling sympathetic for him. While the wholesale murder of an entire city is a slightly extreme reaction, the player can, at the very least, understand why Octavius is doing it. And that is because of the real villain of the game, Norman Osborne.

Norman Osborne

I said earlier that Spider-Man villains are boring, but Norman Osborne is one of the few exceptions to that. He is Spider-Man’s most famous villain, and as a result, has been adapted several times. Willem Dafoe’s portrayal in Sam Rami’s Spider-Man might be the best known, and went for a fairly goofy take on the character that fits with Rami’s other work. But the basic idea of a genius billionaire who experiments on himself and goes “insane” is still present. Other adaptations lean pretty hard into the “insanity”, which is lazy and problematic for a dozen reasons, and simplifies what could be a complicated take on real mental health issues into an excuse to make him act weird. Ultimate Spider-Man’s take on the character is probably the most tonally consistent, and it exchanges the mental health metaphors for an addiction/alcoholism one. Despite being an egomaniacal sadist (and not the hot kind), Ultimate’s Norman is a relatively mentally stable person. He’s not coded as having dissociative identity disorder, and while he does hear voices, they’re portrayed as the side effects of the drugs he’s taking, rather than an inborn mental health issue. Ultimate’s Norman is addicted to Oz, his genetic engineering goop that drives most of the superpowers in the comic. This isn’t exactly a progressive take on the subject matter, but it is, at the very least, less regressive. Ahh, my standards for comic book writing.

Insomniac’s Norman, however…never actually becomes the Green Goblin in this game, though they tease the hell out of it. He’s deep into genetic research, trying to cure a genetic disease lifted from, of all things, the Marc Webb Amazing Spider-Man movies. His son Harry is dying from the disease, and most of Norman’s foyers into more gobliney science seem to be driven by that. The game even ends with a tease that Harry’s disease and Norman’s attempts to cure him have turned Harry into the goblin. Either way, the game is setting up a hell of a sequel. But Norman himself is an interesting character, even without his goblin-focused pursuits. Going off of the pre-release media, a lot of fans, myself included, thought they were setting up Norman as a sort of Donald Trump analog. And, even having played the final product, that isn’t too far off. While it’s The Kingpin of Crime’s Fisk Tower that defiantly occupies Trump Tower’s Fifth Avenue local in the game’s New York City, Norman is the more obvious Trump stand-in. His general character design, mannerisms, and speech patterns at least gesture in the direction of our esteemed president, but it’s his role as both a sleazy New York CEO and the mayor of the city (a conflict of interest that is barely even acknowledged by the game’s characters) are the most explicit comparisons. While the game doesn’t lean too hard on the comparison, writing a Trump analog who is so villainous that his awarding of lucrative city business deals to his own company is his least damning trait is a fair critique. So, the comparison feels present, but not heavy-handed; Norman has Trump-like elements, but is not just Trump with his name changed. At least Norman never turns to the camera and says “Make New York Great Again”.

Structure

So, the game has all the written elements for a great Spider-Man movie, or maybe limited series. How do they turn that into a video game? Well, the obvious elements, like web-swinging and combat, have already been deconstructed and explored by a lot of really smart critics, so I want to focus on something I haven’t seen talked about as much: the game’s structure. Spider-Man is an open world game, closer to Assassin’s Creed than Skyrim, and this tends to make thematically-relevant pacing difficult. Usually, the story of Ubisoft-style open-world games doesn’t meaningfully address the order the player is doing things. Assassin’s Creed used its computer simulation framing device to state that, in the game’s actual alternate history, Ezio and Altaïr probably were not living these events out in the exact order that the player did. And this works for the type of gaming Ubisoft was trying to make, but not so

This shot is *so* on the nose, but I love it

much for Spider-Man. Fortunately, the developers use this open world framework to tap into some fundamentally Spider-Man characteristics. Essentially, Spider-Man is always stretched for time. He’s always late to everything, every part of his life is always just about to fall apart, and he never has time to just relax for a little. The structuring of the Ubisoft open world game, then, fits this perfectly. I’ve complained before about open world titles spattering activity icons all over the player’s map, because they feel like a list of chores, but in a Spider-Man game, that is exactly how they should feel. Spider-Man has so much to do and not enough time to do it. So, constantly having to jump from activity to activity feels perfectly in-character. There is a point, probably near the end of the game depending on the player, where they have completed nearly everything in the game, and then genuinely can just swing around the city and relax. That does feel out of character, but since the game can’t generate infinite content, it’s a character break I’m willing to accept.

Additionally, the plot structuring of the game fits into this format as well. Unlike most open-world games, Spider-Man takes place over just a few, concretely-defined days, starting with Peter waking up and ending with him finding a place to sleep. Before the main plot even really kicks into gear, we see a full day of Peter’s life, taking place over a few hours of gameplay. The player takes down the Kingpin, goes to work, meets up with Aunt May, has an awkward encounter with Mary Jane, and stops random crimes throughout the city. This feels like a day in the life of Spider-Man, and the rushed pace makes the player feel like they are experiencing that day the way Spider-Man would. Each of the individual beats work well on their own, but this structuring makes the experiencing of each individual beat stronger. When Spider-Man says he’s overwhelmed and rushed, the player feels that, because they are overwhelmed and rushed. This is something unique I think games can add to the Spider-Man canon, to expand upon the characterization of a well-trodden aspect of a character that has been adapted dozens of times. One beat I particularly like in the game is when, after completing a few story missions in a row, Spider-Man will say something along the lines of, “Okay, that was a lot, but I’ve been neglecting the city, time to relax and go on patrol.” Functionally, it is the game telling the player to take a break from the story and do side missions. I love when open world games do this, but this particular example accomplishes that same functional purpose while communicating something important about Spider-Man to the player: he can never really focus too much on any one aspect of his life.

Conclusion

This, I think, is the most valuable literary contribution of Spider-Man. In all its mediums, the franchise has tried to explore the idea of a super hero that is overwhelmed with real-life obligations, just like everyone who reads his comics, watches his movies, and plays his games. This is the very personal value I have gotten from the franchise, and why I have found it so compelling for so long. Because despite being about a dude in spider-themed spandex who punches a wide variety of people in other animal-themed spandex, Spider-Man feels profoundly grounded. The comics, films, and now games are consistently committed to exploring this on-the-ground take of a character’s life, to see what being overwhelmed with conflicting obligations does to a person, and how they can deal with it. One of the weaknesses of serialized content is that the state of the world rarely significantly changes over its many installments, but this is a strength for Spider-Man. One of the rules of his character is that he will never solve his problems; he will never figure out a perfect life balance. His relationship with MJ will always have issues. Aunt May will always be worrying about him. He will always struggle to pay rent. There will always be super-powered dudes in equally ridiculous-looking spandex trying to punch him real hard in the face. This does mean that any particularly dramatic arc will most likely be reversed (Aunt May will not die, Peter and MJ will never break up for good, Peter will never quit being Spider-Man). But it also means that the character and the audience spend their time sitting with that inevitability. When discussing the themes of Spider-Man, the phrase that so often comes up is, “With great power must also come great responsibility,” and this is a wonderful lesson. But I think an often-neglected thematic contribution of Spider-Man is the capital-T-Truth that you will never have enough time to fulfill all of your responsibilities completely. And that can be okay. There have been a lot of Spider-Man games released in the past four decades. Some of them have been fun; most of them have been crap. The best of them have really captured the physical feeling of swinging around New York City. But, until this point, none of them have captured this particular aspect of Spider-Man, and this game has not only captured it, but contributed to it; evolved it. I think that’s pretty cool.

Introduction

My favorite thing about Subnautica (2018) is that it is full of mysteries, from the backstory of the watery planet you crash land on, to the unique mechanics sets you discover, to the unmapped and objective marker-free world.  But the biggest mystery in Subnautica for me personally has been figuring out exactly how it evokes and maintains its sense of wonder. This has been my biggest barrier to writing about Subnautica, despite having played it for almost two years now.  *Something* about Subnautica makes me play and experience it differently from other games, even other games in its same survival-crafting-Minecraftlike genre. I’ve played many games with a mystery-focused plot, but on repeat playthroughs that mystery is gone, because I already know the answer to the mystery.  I’ve played many games with fascinating systems to dig into, but on repeat playthroughs that mystery is gone, because I already know how they work. When recently starting my third playthrough of Subnautica, I was surprised to find that the sense of mystery was still present, even though I knew all the secrets of the game’s lore and the intricate details of its systems.  But what made that feeling linger? On a metatextual level, I enjoy that Subnautica had one last mystery for me to solve, and I hope that, through this essay, I can do that, because exploring Subnautica’s various mysteries has been one of my most engaging gaming experiences of the past two years.

Before I continue, I do want to give a spoiler warning of sorts.  Being a game all about mystery, Subnautica’s experience is cheapened, though not ruined, if you lose the experience of discovering it for yourself.  Even seeing screenshots of late game areas or learning about late-game craftables can take away from the exhilaration of seeing something for yourself for the first time.  I avoided wiki pages, trailers, and even other reviews of the game until I had finished it, simply because that particular rush of discovery is Subnautica’s emotional core.  If you have no intention of playing Subnautiuca, and due to the intense thalassophobia it evokes, I can absolutely understand that, feel free to read on. But if anything I’ve said piques your interest, I highly recommend you pick it up on your digital platform of choice and enjoy some of the most wonder-provoking experiences gaming has to offer.  So, with that out of the way, let’s dive in! (That is the last ocean-related pun I’ll make in this essay, I promise).

Systemic Mystery

The opening of Subnautica is an abrupt one.  The player violently crashes on the surface of a planet; they’re confused, the don’t have much narrative context, and they’re surrounded by a world that feels truly alien.  So, the first type of mystery they uncover is not a narrative one, but a systemic one. The player is given a set of survival systems that they’ve probably encountered in other games before: find food, find water.  The early

I destroyed at least three of these by bad driving alone

bits of this are fairly straightforward as the player gets acquainted with their environment, gets comfortable with the game’s elegantly designed underwater control scheme, and starts to dip their toes into the game’s crafting system to synthesize food and water.  From here, the game reveals its complexity slowly, and ramps it up just as the player is getting comfortable. The game has three primary systems for the player to deal with: crafting blueprints, oxygen management, and environmental interaction. Each of these are emphasized to different degrees throughout the game.  The opening strongly emphasizes oxygen management and moderately emphasizes crafting blueprints, but doesn’t emphasize environmental interaction much. The mid game is all about crafting blueprints, with a moderate emphasis on oxygen management and environmental interaction. Meanwhile, the end game almost entirely foregos oxygen management (and, in fact, all survival elements), with a slight emphasis on crafting blueprints, and an intense, maybe too intense, emphasis on environmental interaction.  So, how do each of these systems pique the player’s curiosity?

Let’s start with oxygen management.  This system exists to some extent in other games, but Subnautica emphasizes it much more than other titles on the market, so new players will probably be less immediately comfortable with it.  The player starts with 45 seconds of oxygen, refillable by swimming to the surface or entering a player base or ship, but it is later upgraded to 75 by the mid-game, and can be optionally upgraded to 225 by the end game.  But simply changing these numbers has a massive impact on how the player interacts with the system. In the early game, it prevents them from spending too much time under water, and since the majority of the game world is set under water, it makes any interaction with the ocean floor feel risky.  Exploring a wreck, gathering resources, and hunting fish all feel more tense when the player can only do it for 10 more seconds before swimming to the surface. It also leads to moments where the player sees something new and exciting, but has to quickly duck back to the surface for some oxygen before they can explore it, increasing their anticipation for when they return.  However, as later game areas become more complex, this system would start to get cumbersome, so the devs wisely deemphasized it with greater and greater player oxygen capacities as the game continues, and portable oxygen reserves in the form of vehicles. It helps add to the pacing and tension of early environments in the early game, and then quietly exits when it is no longer necessary.

Importantly, the player’s ability to upgrade their way out of the system is done organically, through the game’s tech tree.  Subnautica’s tech tree is the mechanical system that perhaps contributes the most to its systemic exploration, because it consistently creates moments of anticipation.  The player unlocks new blueprints by finding a hunk of wrecked technology and scanning it, but they usually need 2-4 wrecks to unlock each blueprint, and those wrecks are scattered throughout the game world.  The use of the blueprinted item is teased in item descriptions, giving the player some delayed gratification when they finally craft it. The blueprints themselves will often reference resources the player has not found yet, creating a rush of excitement when they finally find the final resource in a complicated blueprint.  The result is a system that absolutely follows the tech tree conventions of traditional crafting system, but is done diegetically, which can prevent the player from being aware of how gamey its systems are. And this diegetic reframing of classically abstracted game elements is one of Subnautica’s greatest strengths. The blueprint system is just a crafting tech tree, the crashed lifepod signal locations are just map markers, the cyclops’ scanner is just a minimap.  But because of how the game frames these elements, the player mentally models them as more complex than they often are. Games critic Joseph Anderson said that, “It seems like the devs wanted you to feel that, if you took your helmet off, those HUD markers would disappear”. That extra layer of authenticity takes what would be mundane features and uses them to enhance the player’s explorative excitement. Exploration feels more real when the player believes the tools with which they explore are real as well.

That isn’t to say there is no added depth to the systems, or that it is all smoke and mirrors.  The map marker system might just be a standard HUD map marker, but the player can craft buoys to place their own markers.  The crafting system may just be a gated tech tree, but the player can choose which branches of the tree to explore, ignoring some entirely.  Part of what has made my repeat playthroughs so exciting is that I get to dig into systems I had missed on previous playthroughs. The majority of the blueprints the player finds are optional, cool things they can dig into if they want to, not hard, mechanical requirements the game is forcing on them.  And the simple fact that these blueprints aren’t revealed from the start adds so much to the thrill of discovering them.

This principle is carried over into environmental interaction just as strongly, though it is one of Subnautica’s less refined systems.  Early game environments are genuinely interesting to explore, with new features such as oxygen-restoring brain coral, or hidden predators that rush the player.  They make the environment feel dynamic and fully realized in a way most survival games simply do not. Each object in the world can be scanned by the player, and most likely plays into some greater system.  Stalkers grab hunks of metal, dropping a tooth the player can use for crafting, and hoarding the metal hunks in their nest. Sea treaders kick up large resource deposits as they walk along the ocean floor. Some rocks have strange, organic objects attached to them that cause them to float, and the player can take those objects and use them to make any other physics-enabled object float.  Unfortunately, in the late game areas, this environmental interaction seems to decrease. These areas are much larger and less finely detailed. An area that might take a player ten minutes to fully explore, scan, and loot in the early game might be cruised over in a matter of seconds in the late game. This is partially because of how much the player’s speed has increased by the end game, but it does also seem like a deliberate choice on the part of the designers.  Many of the late game environments do look genuinely impressive, but feel systemically more empty.

Exploitative Mystery

While some of the late game environments might be lacking in detail, exploring Subnautica’s world and uncovering its secrets is its greatest pleasure.  In keeping with its commitment to diegetic user interfaces, there is no map screen in game. And, after playing the game through three times, I am convinced that this is the single most important creative decision the designers made.  It encourages the player to interact with the world directly, in three full dimensions, not via a map screen. Over-emphasis on minimaps is a trap many contemporary games fall into, and an interesting thought experiment to highlight this is 1998’s Metal Gear Solid.  Metal Gear Solid is a soft 3D remake of its predecessor, the 2D game Metal Gear (1987). What makes this interesting for our purposes is that, if you removed the 3D viewport from Metal Gear Solid, and just looked at the game’s soliton radar minimap, it would play almost identically to the 2D Metal Gear.  This is forgivable for Metal Gear Solid, an early 3D game, but many contemporary games can still be played surprisingly well just by looking at this minimap. Because 2D maps are more easily readable than 3D environments, this can encourage the player to just look at their minimap, pulling them out of the 3D world.  To avoid this problem, Subnautica does away with the map entirely. This means the player has to get more familiar with the landscape itself, and navigate it accordingly. The player’s vision can’t be drawn to a mini map in the corner, it has to be figuring out how the environment itself works. Additionally, because Subnautica is set underwater, traditional 2D maps might not work as well, since the player has to navigate complex, vertically-oriented cave structures.  The combination of complex environments that emphasize 3D navigation and the lack of any sort of mapping system to mitigate that complexity makes navigation in Subnautica a very intentional and involved process, which is surprisingly unusual in contemporary games. The player puts effort into navigating winding caves, avoiding ambushing predators, and ducking back to the surface or their vehicle for oxygen. I’ve said this before, but making traversal engaging is perhaps the most important factor for making open world games interesting over their long runtimes, and Subnautica does this by consistently forcing the player to interact with it in ways they aren’t used to.

This mapless system dovetails well with the utterly alien quality of the world itself, both in visuals and in systems.  By playthrough three, I know the environment well enough that this effect has faded a bit, but during my first two playthroughs, I was completely enthralled with the environments.  The were gorgeous and strange, filled with bioluminescent and oddly shaped organic matter, packed with strange sounds from off in the distance, like the groan of a far-off whale-like creature or the cackling of a nearby predator.  This further encourages the player to explore, by scanning everything in sight, finding out where those sounds are coming from, and learning what each of those creatures do. While the beginning of the game leaves the player confused and in awe, by

This is a map mod that exists and I hate it

the end, they genuinely feel like a scientist and explorer.  They know what every sound means, how every predator hunts, which of the plants are useful, and which of the fish are difficult to catch. The fact that the starting area alone is packed with this much mystery encourages them to explore further. Maybe they’ve gotten comfortable in the Safe Shallows zone, but soon their radio picks up messages from crashed survivors, drawing them further away from their comfort zone and helping them find new blueprints.  This is further enhanced by the game’s one major landmark: the Aurora itself. From the moment the player gains control, they see the wreck of the Aurora far off in the distance, knowing that they will be able to explore it at some point. It’s a tease for something later, building up that anticipation. I think this accomplishes what is perhaps the most important part of exploration-focused games: making the player feel that there is something out there worth finding.  This was one of my issues with 2017’s Breath of the Wild, where the mechanics of exploration themselves were executed to near perfection, with new ways of exploring environments by climbing or gliding or shield surfing. But, after a few hours, I started feeling that there wasn’t anything worth finding. Nearly every discovery would lead to a korok seed or shrine, which made it eventually feel closer to checking things off of a list rather than genuinely following my own wanderlust.  But Subnautica wants to create a feeling of braving the unknown, and in order to do that, it has to have something out there that is genuinely unknown. Even by the end game, it continues to do this wonderfully.

This is not to say that the player can explore freely with no limits.  Early on especially, the player is limited by easy access to food and water.  Furthermore, the depth of certain areas might not allow for exploration with the amount of oxygen the player has, or they might hit the hard limit of crush depth.  Crush depth is one of the only linear upgrades in the game, where the player’s vehicles cannot descend below a certain depth without breaking. The player needs to craft expensive depth modules to allow them to go deeper.  I initially wasn’t a fan of this more artificial upgrade system, but I think it does work well to gate the player from certain areas and build anticipation for reaching them. Some of my favorite moments in Subnautica include stumbling upon new areas that I didn’t know existed, even on later playthroughs, and knowing that I couldn’t go there just yet because of limits.  These are accompanied by these dramatic, terror-inspiring drop offs. Usually, this particular track on the soundtrack kicks in right as the player is staring down the drop off, Original Inhabitants, filled with unsettling choral tones.  I’ll be

Finding Nemo (2003) really does this best

completely honest, this moment TERRIFIES me.  During my most recent playthrough, I tried to play the game in VR, but staring over the edge of one of these underwater cliffs was the moment, I said, “Screw it”, and switched back to the non-VR version.  Subnautica is brilliant at capturing both the beauty and the terror of the ocean, and as someone who is absolutely petrified by any large body of water, these are moments where that terror hits its peak.

But eventually, the player crafts the resources to go back and explore these areas, and the terror must be confronted.  I love the setup phase for these expeditions, as you have to pack up food and resources, top off your batteries and ship fuel, then set sail into the unknown.  And these later game areas really do feel different from the earlier ones. The intense god rays streaming down from the surface and friendly, bioluminescent creatures from the starting zones give way to pitch black environments with more predators, more pressure, and less oxygen.  You interact with these environments differently, staying close to your ship in case a predator swims by. The Blood Kelp Zone and Grand Reef are my personal favorites, and evoke the very specific kind of terror of looking back up towards the surface of the ocean and seeing only blackness.  At this point in the game, interactions with the game’s leviathan-class predators becomes more common. And goddamn, are they terrifying. The Reaper Leviathan is the first leviathan-

Yeah, I lost that ship

class predator the player is likely to encounter, probably the ones swimming around the Aurora crash zone. In pictures, they look kind of goofy, but in game, few creatures can evoke its specific brand of shear panic.  It’s first encountered far off in the distance, where the player might just barely see its silhouette or catch a brief glimpse of it. For me, this is the most terrifying part. Wondering if you actually saw a reaper, or if it was just a trick of the light, wondering if it’s headed in your direction, if you have time to get away…this is Subnautica’s horror at its finest. Actual interaction with the Reapers is fairly simple.  If you get too close, they’ll make chase and attack your seamoth, and if you’re unlucky enough to be caught outside of your ship with it finds you, well, that’s game over. So, not the most mechanically interesting enemy in gaming, but absolutely one of the more emotionally interesting ones. End-game areas are filled with Reapers and the even more deadly Ghost Leviathan. Avoiding them is an absolute treat when playing in the Seamoth, but unfortunately, it becomes less interesting by the true endgame, which…is definitely Subnautica’s weakest moment.

The late game begins when the player crafts the Cyclops submarine.  The actual process of doing this is incredibly exciting, and finally gathering all the parts to construct it feels like a towering achievement within the hostile game world.  Boarding the sub, realizing you have complete control over this massive vehicle, can use it to go to depths you could never reach before, is legitimately exhilarating. But the player’s actual experience of the sub is…mixed, to say the least.  Firstly, it is *incredibly* easy to get the sub stuck on the environment. It has four exterior cameras that help with this navigation, but moving around the safe shallows where most players set up their base is a good way to get it permanently stuck.  Additionally, the sub is primarily used to navigate the extended underground zones of the Lost River and various lava-filled zones. These environments are entered through winding caves that are easy to navigate when the player is swimming alone or zipping along in their tiny seamoth, but with something the size of the cyclops, it never feels quite right.  I absolutely understand what they were trying to do with the cyclops experience, it just feels untested and unfinished in a way other aspects of the game really don’t. It feels like it needed a few more months of dev time to smooth out the cyclops movement, maybe decrease its size or increase the size of the cave entrances in the Lost River, maybe improve the FOV from the cyclops window…there are a lot of potential solutions, but they clearly didn’t have the time or budget to iterate on them.  The end result is an experience with a lot of good ideas, most of them poorly executed. The idea of distracting large predators by firing out a decoy is a unique idea that delivers on the premise of the game, but the large predators are so non-threatening that it’s rarely worth the hassle. The predator attacks are genuinely terrifying, with the player safely inside their ship, but hearing the giant beast outside. But, after the player realizes that they can just run away, they become more annoying than tense.  The sonar system is a legitimately fascinating idea for how to explore dark environments. But it drains 1% of the ship’s energy per tick, meaning it is better used as an occasional aid than a viable navigational alternative. There are a lot of ideas to love about the cyclops mechanics, but the whole of the experiences feels much messier than the rest of the game.

To close this section out, I want to pose one more criticism of the game’s exploration systems, and propose a potential solution.  I don’t usually do this, because inventing mechanics on my own is cheap when I don’t have to do the work of actually implementing, testing and iterating on them, but I think exploring the possibility space the mechanic proposes can lead to some interesting insights.  So, the game’s lack of a map is something I praised earlier in this section. But, near the end game, it becomes incredibly cumbersome. Trying to find a specific resource or blueprint fragment is engaging when there are just a few zones to search, but less so when you need this one item to progress and you have no idea where to find it.  This means that, by the end game, I usually end up caving and looking up a map or wiki entry, rather than spend hours scanning every environment for something I might have missed. So, how could it be improved? Well, the game already has a system I think this could be built on top of, the scanner room. This is unlocked fairly late in the game, right around the time the player would start to feel the slog of the game’s lack of map.  By this point, the player has started to expand into a space that is larger than they can reasonably keep a mental map of, especially with the lack of distant landmarks other than the Aurora. So, I’d propose turning that scanning room into a map room, that the player can only access from the scanner room itself. Their scanning room maps some of the area after a few minutes, and they can build portable scanners to place in other areas of the map to increase that radius.  Existing buoys would also show up as the map expanded. Maybe they could use the cyclops to generate mapping data as well. I think this works because it keeps the early game feeling of the unknown, but by the mid-to-late game when the player is probably looking up maps on the wiki already, it makes mapping and exploration an active progress. The player would have to go out of their way to do this, it wouldn’t happen automatically. I think that’s consistent with the feel the game is going for, helps remove some late-game frustration, and actually adds more exciting actions.

Narrative Mystery

Even without my proposed mapping system, Subnautica already evokes a greater sense of wonder and discovery than most games on the market.  And, fortunately, the game’s loose frame narrative only expands on this idea. The premise of the game is fairly narratively simple, and I think that works to the game’s advantage.  The player is flying on a ship to an uncharted world, their ship crashes for some reason, and they need to survive. That premise does expand slightly as the player explores the Aurora, but not by much.  What you see is what you get. At first, this might seem to be missing an early opportunity for more mystery. Hit the player with a narrative hook early on so they have something to stew on. But I think this would detract from the initial emotional experience of the crash.  The player is supposed to feel frantic, scrambling to survive. Adding more narrative beats would dilute that experience. And, additionally, it means that the player doesn’t go in *expecting* a story. Most survival games on the market barely have a narrative at all, and Subnautica’s opening is about as complex as they get.  There is an implied narrative beat of reaching the Aurora in the future, but nothing explicitly story-focused. From here, the story is eased onto the player, giving them the audio logs of other survivors, which at first seem almost narratively empty; just glorified quest markers. But then the player starts realizing that all of the life pods have been destroyed.  Maybe they don’t put it together on their own that something is hunting these characters, but some of them might. But, this is still light enough that the player isn’t expecting a larger story. Even reaching the Aurora and disabling the ship’s reactor doesn’t provide much of a narrative resolution, it just makes the area nearby safer. The player is being driven by systemic and explorative mystery, and the last bit of narrative possibility has been removed from their mind.  But, after finding the Aurora, the player gets a message with a rendezvous point for survivors. Confused, they’ll head to the coordinates, and this is where the narrative finally reveals itself.

The rendezvous coordinates are on dry land, which seems to have appeared out of nowhere.  It’s kind of hard to express how much of a shock this is. In any other game, finding a normal island would be a fairly mundane experience, but in Subnautica, a game set entirely underwater with no land in sight, this is a shock.  That beat of intense surprise and wonder is something Subnautica pulls off multiple times throughout its runtime, and it is incredibly impressive to me that it can continue to do this even when the player is already expecting it; most games can’t even manage to do this once.  This puts the player into a specific mindset that Subnautica evokes intensely during just a few narrative beats: investigative wonder. The player’s scanner becomes their primary means of interacting with the environment, learning bits and pieces for each blueprint or hidden audio log.  During these sections, the game becomes less of a survival game, and more of an adventure game, which dovetails Subnautica’s mystery genre effortlessly. Having popups with links to in-game descriptions of items is not uncommon in contemporary games, but Subnautica is one of the few that has me to actually read them.  These entries provide actually valuable information, and stoke the player’s curiosity on just what they imply. And, in a genre-appropriate touch, almost every entry ends with the phrase “Further analysis needed”.

The remainder of the game switches back and forth between exploration mode, base building/crafting mode, and these intense moments of adventure game-like discovery.  It doesn’t overload the player with these info dumps, it spaces them out to make them feel unique. Discovering the first bit of alien technology also evokes this feeling wonderfully, because, going into the game, the player didn’t even know there would be any technologically-advanced aliens.  Digging into the apocalyptic plague that forms the crux of the game’s lore also fits Subnautica’s existing genres, making the player feel like a scientist as they scan, research and synthesize a cure. The last narrative shock moment in the game is the reveal of the immense sea emperor leviathan, a moment that genuinely shocked and terrified me even on the non-VR version of the game.  This introduces the game’s first honest-to-god character well into the third act of its story. If a game is going to have characters at all, they’re usually introduced early in the first act, but here Subnautica is, adding them in right before the endgame. And while the final story missions of the game are…basically a glorified fetch quest, the narrative does conclude in a satisfying way.  Building a rocket to leave the planet is as time-consuming an undertaking as it needs to be to feel momentus, and the sequence of saying goodbye to the planet (and the adorable cuddlefish pet), dropping a time capsule for another player to find, and going through the launch sequence feels final and satisfying in a way few endings from systems-focused games ever are. The narrative may not be the foundation of Subnautica, but the restraint with which its beats are delivered to the player and the subtlety with which they are conveyed make it stand out.

Conclusion

TV and Film director J.J. Abrams is famous for his concept of “mystery box” storytelling, and his ideas for how crafting that mystery box can draw audiences in, even over long form, serialized content.  The problem with his approach is that, most of the time, revealing what’s in the box ruins the story. I loved Lost during its original run, but I have never gone back to rewatch it.  The mystery is gone. I know all the answers. Yet, after three playthroughs of Subnautica, I can still return to it and feel almost the same sense of mystery I did the first time.  The game’s systems make the player experience the world in a way that keeps that mystery present, by always teasing them with more to explore. With over 70 hours invested in this game, there are still entire areas I have not explore to the fullest, still narrative possibilities and text logs I haven’t discovered yet.  But it’s not just that there is more of the text that I have not seen, it’s that the methods of engaging with the text themself evoke the same experience that its static narrative beats try to. Subnautica doesn’t work because it contains a mystery, it works because its systems, narrative, and environment create the experience of uncovering one.  In the same way that John Wick can show a stylish gunfight, but Superhot is a stylish gunfight generation engine, Subnautica is a mystery generation engine. The team at Unknown Worlds is currently working on a standalone expansion for Subnautica, titled Below Zero. And while I’ve tried to avoid any of their pre-release media, I have caught a few screenshots of frozen oceans and eldritch deep-sea creatures.  Perhaps Subnautica’s mystery generation engine is set to do a take on H.P. Lovecraft next, perhaps not. But, regardless, the team has proven themselves adept at evoking wonder and curiosity in all elements of their game, and I look forward to seeing what they adapt their formula to next.