NAUTUS is a charmingly quirky island adventure where the surface is your sanctuary and the ocean floor is a very different proposition. You pilot an upgradable submarine into the depths, fight and capture mutant marine life, and recover mysterious artifact stones to restore the locals’ memories — while working out what actually happened to your uncle.
It’s the next game from Magic Design Studios, published by Arc Games, and it’s heading into Steam Early Access in 2027 with exact timing still to be announced.
Two Games, One Island
Return to the surface to breathe, build and unwind. Befriend eccentric island locals, take quests to restore their true selves, manage resources, and expand a tropical outpost into a thriving hub.
Take the helm and plunge into the abyss. Navigate uncharted trenches, coral reefs and sunken pirate wrecks while battling and capturing bizarre mutant creatures for materials and artifact stones.
The narrative framing supports it neatly, too. The scientists’ amnesia and ocean phobia is a tidy justification for why you have to do all the diving — an in-fiction reason for the gameplay structure, rather than the usual arrangement where the story and the loop politely ignore each other.
Your Submarine Is the Progression
Everything you haul back feeds the sub. You’ll craft specialised modules, protective equipment and weaponry, advancing your tech to reach deeper, more hostile trenches and defend against increasingly aggressive marine life.
That’s a clean loop — the depth you can survive is a direct readout of how much work you’ve put in, which gives the ocean a natural difficulty gradient without needing artificial gates.
Craft modules, protective gear and weaponry to dive deeper into hostile trenches and fend off mutant marine life.
Fight and capture strange creatures that, in the studio’s words, should never have existed.
Transform a secluded tropical base into a thriving hub with crafting machinery to refine rare materials from the deep.
Hunt ancient relics and hidden clues to uncover what happened to Bernard Torpedo — and to the island itself.
Solo or Four-Player Co-Op
The cast waiting on the surface sounds appropriately odd: amnesiac locals including a tanning-obsessed diver and a quirky expedition chief, all of whom you collaborate with on projects while hunting the artifact stones that will restore them.
A Studio With Serious Range
That’s a genuinely varied catalogue. A Journey to the West-inspired platformer, a roguelike about an overworked Death, and now a co-op submarine adventure — three completely different genres in three releases, all sharing a distinctive art sensibility. Whatever else NAUTUS turns out to be, it’s unlikely to look like anything else.
Arc having published Have a Nice Death already means this is a continuing relationship rather than a fresh pairing, which usually bodes well for a project of this length.
NAUTUS is available to wishlist on Steam now, with Early Access arriving in 2027. More details are at playnautus.com.
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