So, you thought you'd finally escaped the water trap that was Planet 4546B. Guess again. The brilliant survival game's first dedicated expansion, Below Zero, which we honestly thought would take much longer to, err, surface, is now available to play in Early Access on both Steam and the Epic Games Store.

Set a year after your escape from the planet, the game is still in very early stages, but this is how Unknown Worlds likes to build games -- out in the open, and at the mercy of a critical community. Here's their official line:

Subnautica: Below Zero is now available in Early Access! Set one year after the original Subnautica, Below Zero challenges you to survive a disaster at an alien research station on Planet 4546B.

This frozen underwater adventure is a work in progress. As we did with Subnautica, we are building Below Zero out in the open. With your help, we will craft a worthy follow up to the original game.

Below Zero is full of bugs, runs poorly, and includes only a small portion of our planned features. It’s also a game we’re excited about. If you join us, we think you might enjoy this journey through Early Access.

If you would like to wait until the game is finished, please sign up to our Development Newsletter. We’ll let you know as soon as the game is done!

As much as I love Subnautica, and cannot wait to get my freeze on, I'll be waiting for this to be complete or as close to complete as possible. I played through Subnautica in Preview and Early Access form more times than I can remember, so I want this to be as fresh as possible.

Check out the studio's impressive CG trailer for Below Zero embedded below.

I will probably get it in 6 months or so, once they iron out a few more things.

gah, gotta finish the original game. its no hand holder, that is for sure!

The Epic store will eventually give it away for free.

The Mighty Jingles has a video for it.

So many stores and game launchers.

Someone should create a meta launcher that indexes and launches games from your launchers, sort of like trillion back in the days when people had MSN and yahoo and ICQ and AOL chat clients.