My own thoughts on No Man’s Sky.

So, I’ve got tea and bagels; the hot takes are back on my YouTube feed, and I kinda wanted to write a piece on No Man’s Sky. So, here goes.

Last week, I was ready to publish a sort of “my thoughts on…” thing. A basic rundown of my first weekend with No Man’s Sky; I’ve been honestly pretty excited for the thing, and really wanted to put out my thoughts. It wasn’t anything particularly thought-provoking or heartfelt, but it was still something, it was still content (if generic) about a game I’m honestly in love with. So forgive me if I gush a little.
That plan all sort of changed about 5 systems into the game; when I landed on a world, a world I ended up calling Natalie’s Haven for reason’s I’ll get into later. Touching down on this pristine, pastel island world finally unlocked a lot of what I was feeling up to this point. In that moment, leg-deep in pink grass, on a lonely island on an alien world that nobody has ever (and in all likelihood, will never) step foot on — I started to get emotional. Generic “this is what the game is” wasn’t going to cut it. And in the climate that’s surrounded the game since it’s launch, about “weak mechanics”, “broken promises” and all that sort of discourse, it felt all the more necessary to write this down.

I want to start with a core thought though, that sort of gets to the root of why I love this game so much. At a very, very fundamental level, it’s a Bethesda game. Bear with me here, because this actually works on more levels than just “it’s a high-profile game that’s launched buggy, with objectively weak mechanics”. Elder Scrolls games, along with the Bethesda Fallout titles, have this very strong early-game feeling; the best parts of those games is long before you’ve filled out the map, and are just following markers and roads over hills and valleys you’ve never seen. The sense of exploration is just fantastic in them, even if locations turn out to be little more than boxes of bandits, or a crate with another steel sword.

No Man’s Sky feels like a game that’s built entirely around this feeling, of genuine exploration. What it sacrifices in curated exploration, it makes up for in unfathomable scale and in really tickling the idea of being on a galactic frontier. There’s a common complaint that a lot of the planets are similar, and… yes. A lot of them are. There are millions of toxic dumps and barren rocks out there that are a disappointment to land on, but that makes those fantastic planets, the lush pastel island-moons, or crimson forest worlds, or arctic forest goliaths, feel all the more “special”.

Whereas an Elder Scrolls or a Fallout will eventually run out of map, forcing the player to revisit identical locations ad nausea, that’s not really a concern here. The sheer scale of it all brings in an element of absolute isolation, too, that brings the game into it’s own. There’s a lot of hot, hot discourse on the Multiplayer component, of course, but just knowing that the universe is a shared, static universe between every player feels like enough. This game wouldn’t really work as a -wholly- single player experience, if it was just generating a new world from scratch until infinity. The discoveries system is such a basic thing, but works so well; the idea of finding some perfect planet is made all the better knowing there’s a small, SMALL chance that someone else can happen across it, see the same vistas I’ve found, and have “Discovered by ScarletCatalie on X date” is just all the sweeter.

That’s where Natalie’s Haven came into the picture. I’d warped into the system of Zhora’s Strife straight into a dogfight, badgered by a platoon of pirates. The fight was tense, using up all my shield reserves, so reprieve was needed. In the distance, a single small planet, where I could take my battered junker and resupply. For context, I’d been going through a severe few weeks of depression this summer — not as a response to anything that had happened this year, mind — and touching down on this isle of pastel blue and pink grass just set something off in me. I honest to god cried at the serenity of it all. The planet has no fauna and very few resources, but I still spent the better part of half a day just walking, enjoying the atmosphere. In this moment, I didn’t care that for all intents and purposes it was mechanically a useless planet. It was simply just a really pleasant place to be. Since then, I’ve found several worlds that match the serenity of Haven, and each time I’ve found myself stuck just walking around, taking in the scenery. They’re not the same as Haven, mind, but they’re still just serenely relaxes spaces to be in. The best time I’ve found to play the game is just before bed, in a sleepy content haze, just taking the time to walk around these garden worlds.

The moment to moment gameplay -is- a bit dull, though. I’ll concede that a lot of the moment-to-moment really boils down to chasing icons and holding a trigger on a rock or crystal. At time of writing this, thirty-three hours into the game, the monotony is slowly creeping in. That’s still a fair amount of time that I bought for colourful space road-trips, though; and I can’t decide whether the game could use deeper mechanics, or just be stripped of them. Functionally, things like mining and bar management give a little more incentive to trudge through worlds; having to manage hazards also gives more character to worlds. “Oh”, you say, “This is the planet that’s -literally hell- and spontaneously reaches 300 degrees every ten minutes”. “Blast!” you exclaim, “All crabs and acid rain!”

I’m almost tempted to agree with Danielle Riendeau’s thoughts on an Idle Weekend Podcast; that the game could easily work as just a pure walking sim. There’s a reason why I’ve avoided sprinting when a world has grassy meadows, or why my screenshots folder is now something like 200 images large in the space of a week — this game could just as easily had toned down most gameplay and built up it’s ambient experience. That’s where everything shines. It fills in a strange niche for me; again, a Bethesda game with less gameplay, or a Proteus with more direction. It’s an endless screenshot source.

Because, in the end, it’s what my flatmate described it as — a quintessentially “me” game. A game that’s ticked all the boxes in what I want out of something. Like Transistor, like Nuclear Throne, like Hyper Light Drifter, it’s the right game for me at the right time. Unfortunately for No Man’s Sky, despite being made by similarly small teams as those titles, it’s been placed on some massive pedestal and driven down the Playstation Hype Train hard. It’s a niche title at it’s core, and I love it for that. I just wish I didn’t have to feel like it needed defending every time I turn on my computer.