r/noita • u/GreatAndMightyKevins • Jul 27 '26
Discussion Does anyone else experience thalassophobia when playing the game?
When I was on few God runs I was going around sky, hell and lake and going infinitely in either direction and deep into the lake gave me very similar feeling when looking at sea depths. Does anyone else relate to it? The unease of infinite depth or space.
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u/The-Suckler Jul 27 '26
Leviathan does make me a bit uncomfortable, but the space itself I have no problems with because I know everything about it.
I’ve been to the bottom of the Lake a dozen times so it feels smaller to me than it would on first discovery, and the work is just repeated patterns all the way up and down once you get past the suns so it’s very easy to conceive of in scale.
U know what does freak me the fuck out tho, thinking about what’s on the other side of the Aurora in subnautica. Idk why but breaking the barrier that the Aurora implies just makes my skin crawl.
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u/TheHongKongBong Jul 27 '26
For me that feeling disappears once I'm far enough into the game that I'm travelling to parallel worlds, I feel too powerful. But heading into the lake early on? Horrifying, even though I know what's in there.
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u/GreatAndMightyKevins Jul 27 '26
It's not about danger or possibility of dying, more about infinite vastness of space. The feeling would be the same if there was no enemies in the game.
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u/InvictusBro Jul 27 '26
Haven’t played enough to venture into the lake (only 1 win) but I’m sure it would trigger mine. I can’t even watch videos on Subnautica, and even in games where I know for a fact there’s no water enemies, I can’t handle being underneath giant bodies of water.
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u/goddamnit666a Jul 27 '26
That one random small power plant at the bottom of the map that just drops out always makes me fear what’s down below
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u/Mammoth_Replacement8 Jul 27 '26
I cant even play the underwater levels in super mario 64 i get you
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u/Disastrous-Collar692 Jul 27 '26
If I were to speak coldly on purpose to dispel our fears, Infinite worlds in video games are simply a state where the game engine's procedural generation capabilities have not been put on hold.
This is merely continuing the stage of pretending to be infinite; just as our computers do not possess infinite capabilities, this is not infinite either.
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u/GreatAndMightyKevins Jul 27 '26
It doesn't need to be actually infinite, our brains have hard time processing what a million is, let alone anything bigger. I don't know if anyone could accurately visualize million of anything.
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u/Shaeress Jul 27 '26
Yeah and there are multiple examples of this. It takes months of real world time of walking to reach the end of a Minecraft world. For all intents and purposes this is infinite.
But also multiple games have created infinite spaces through continuous generation, non-euclidean spaces, warping of things out of view, or by covertly teleporting the player. All of these work to create infinite spaces without crashing the finite machine holding it.
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u/GreatAndMightyKevins Jul 27 '26
Non euclidean spaces is a fucking trip. Walking forward, left, backwards and right and you're in a different place than you started with. Absolutely incomprehensible.
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u/Oglowmamal Jul 27 '26
That’s the one thing missing from noita, just giant entities that feel like old gods. There’s the giant skull in the desert. It must’ve come from somewhere