Now, admit it, the Leviathan is just sexy. Typically, artists working in the horror movie genre have been a bit freer to explore such otherworldly designs as audiences need not be able to empathize with the flesh-eating monstrosities they come up with. The less a particular creature resembles a human or even a mammal, the more I am drawn to it. What, in your opinion, is the single most compelling representation that popular culture has given us so far?Īlex: I am often compelled by strangeness. Tim: Countless writers, artists, and filmmakers have tried to imagine what alien life might look like. Then someone suggested I add centipede-like limbs to it, which made me think of the invertebrate predators from the Cambrian. At one point, it was meant to look like a dragon. However, I still wanted it to seem like an animal that could actually exist. Being one of the largest creatures in the game, it needed to be a truly horrifying creature. Tim: Which Subnautica creature was the most challenging to design?Īlex: The biggest challenge for me was the Shadow Leviathan, an arthropod-inspired sea monster. I also took real-world concepts like bioelectricity or the brinicle phenomenon and dialed them up. They become stranger, cuter, or more terrifying because this makes them more fun for players to interact with. Its creatures, while designed to be animals rather than monsters, often push the boundaries of what is physically possible. Subnautica, by contrast, is much more playful. You just know people would find a way to eat squidsharks. I love nature and real-world science - so much so that, when I was younger, I actually wanted to become a marine biologist - but I was increasingly drawn to the realm of science fiction when I came across the original Star Wars and Star Trek films. My schoolbook margins were filled with doodles of odd critters, imaginary monsters, and alien machines. Tim Brinkhof: When and why did you first develop an interest in drawing creatures that don’t really exist?Īlex Ries: Everything stretches back to my childhood. Each and every alien in Below Zero serves as an analog to creatures that exist or have existed here on Earth, and each and every one of them was born from the wild but surprisingly methodical imagination of Alex himself. Others - like the highly aggressive, 11-meter-long apex predator known as the squidshark - remind us of the truck-sized apex behemoths that swam through our world’s oceans during the late Cretaceous period. Some of these organisms, like the pengwing - a penguin-like critter with a magenta-colored coat, four sets of eyes, and an upright-facing beak - are cute and cuddly. Like its critically acclaimed predecessor, Subnautica: Below Zero (which was released last year) is about an astronaut exploring the darkest depths of a distant, largely aquatic exoplanet teeming with extraterrestrial organisms.
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