The Last Caretaker

Performance comes up in 18% of all reviews and 39% of negative ones. Some owners of high-end hardware report poor frame rates, CPUs pinned at 100% and running hot, and big drops at the Lazarus Complex, the warehouses and on boats crowded with machines. Others describe a frame rate that slides over a long session until the game is restarted. Fixes passed between players include turning off ray tracing through a launch option, lowering settings and capping frames.

Not everyone has trouble. Other players report smooth play, a number of reviews were flipped to positive after optimization patches, and some say a later update made things worse again. One player's verdict: "Stop adding stuff until you optimize the game, latest update is unplayable."

Crashes, freezes or lost saves come up in 11% of all reviews and 30% of negative ones. Players describe crashes to desktop during play, while saving, when loading a save, and for some, at launch after an update (several blame update 5.5). The save system is what turns a crash into a lost evening: manual saves happen only at backup terminals, and a few reviewers note that autosave defaults to 30 minutes. "No autosaves, frequent crashes. I have responsibilities, I don't want to lose 45 minutes progress when I have an hour to play daily." Players advise setting autosave to five minutes and saving at every terminal.

The bugs reviewers describe include boats wedged against docks with no unstuck option, boats flipping or launching into the air, deck equipment detaching and floating off, cables disconnecting after a reload, falling through the water to the seabed, and quests or lifts that stop registering. For long saves these can be terminal: "There is no recourse, there is no fix, just game over." Some of the same reviewers acknowledge that individual bugs do get patched.

Most of these complaints are about pests: leeches, worms and slimes that respawn in the dark, swarm the boat at night and take long to clear with weapons that give little feedback. Aiming is toggle-only, and enemy variety is low. One negative review: "One thousand Half Life enemies vs. Subnautica Knife." Another: "Combat is a dull clunky slog." Some players like the tension, and several ask for a peaceful mode or an enemy slider.

Firing, grabbing items and plugging cables share keys, so players unplug their own flamethrower or pick up a door mid-fight: "Firing my weapon and picking up items should not be the same keybind". Some vehicle keys cannot be rebound, a couple of players report menus stuck on screen after saving, and storage is hard to manage at scale because "you can't label the boxes, you can't search for specific resources everywhere". One negative review called it "the most clunky, frustrating inventory/storage management I've seen in a game."

Growing a human seed means guessing nutrient recipes and memories to hit a profession, and players call the system opaque, short on key items and easy to break (seeds expire, pods bug out). Launching rockets then repeats the same loop. Nearly all of these complaints come from players past 10 hours. "Great game until its not - Growing humans is a complete pain in the bottom", one wrote, and another negative review reads "Early game is very good. Mid game is bad. Late game doesn't exist at all." Content runs out for some at 25 to 40 hours and for others well past 100.

These complaints about parkour, ladders, climbing and the gyrocopter come mostly from players well into the game. An update that added island jumping sections turned a few fans against it, and unreliable ledge grabs plus terminal-only saves make failed jumps expensive. The gyrocopter's throttle and landing draw angry reviews; one player wrote "Cannot operate the gyrocopter after thirty tries".

Under 1% of reviews raise motion sickness, but for those players it is a hard stop. The camera bob and rolling boat make them ill, and there is "no option to remove head bobbing." A few refunded or stopped playing over it, and one points to a ship stabilizer skill that may help.

Under 1% of reviews say the in-game text reads as AI-generated, and some of them say it is why they can't recommend the game. Their main complaint is a repetitive sentence pattern; one wrote "Almost every line in the game contains" the same "It's not ____, it's ____" construction, and some object that this was not disclosed. Other players praise the logs and lore.