2397: No Man’s Sky

I dutifully downloaded No Man’s Sky at 6pm this evening when it became available on Steam and, aside from a break for dinner, I have been playing it all night.

It’s very good indeed, with a few caveats.

The first is that it is not a game for the impatient. Before you can even get off whatever planet you get dumped on at the beginning, you have to repair a bunch of your ship’s systems, which involves gathering a selection of resources, some of which are harder to find than others. (Pro-tip: zinc can be found in yellowy leafy plants, and heridium can be found in large blue-black rocky monolith-type structures. You’ll thank me for those.) It took me a good half an hour of wandering around (including becoming lost in a rather labyrinthine network of caves that I mistakenly thought might be a shortcut to the heridium deposit my scanner had helpfully found for me 15 minutes’ real-time walk away from the crater my spaceship had deposited itself in) before I assembled everything I needed to get going, but it was absolutely worth it; lifting off for the first time in No Man’s Sky is one of those watershed moments in gaming, like coming out of the sewers for the first time in Oblivion.

The second is that it is not a game for those who like to have their hand held, particularly in the early hours. While the ship-repairing process acts as a tutorial of sorts, the game literally starts with you waking up next to your crashed ship with absolutely no context whatsoever, and from there you have to determine exactly what you’re supposed to do.

There are supposedly three main “routes” through the game, one of which is simply “do your own thing and see what happens”, so wandering around aimlessly trying to scan all the indigenous life on the planet you’ve found yourself on is absolutely an option, but so too is following the trail of breadcrumbs left by the mysterious “Atlas” system, which has distinctly sinister omniscient, omnipotent being undertones (and, appropriately enough, this route was apparently penned by one of the writers of Deus Ex).

It’s a game that encourages experimentation. Arrive in a new system? Scan it and see if anything shows up, then go investigate. Wander around a bit outside to dig up some minerals and perhaps even find a few alien relics that help you learn the words of various languages. Found some weird technology? Disassemble it and incorporate its components into your suit, ship or multi-tool. Found some shiny glowy things? Sell them off for vast profit at your friendly neighbourhood space station. Met a malfunctioning cyborg bartender who wants nothing more than to shake hands with you? Make sure you have more than one health point before doing so, otherwise said bar will find itself adorned with a rather obtrusive tombstone for the rest of time.

There’s a frightening degree of customisation in the game, too, though you have to balance this with your relatively limited inventory space, since upgrades for your various pieces of tech occupy valuable inventory slots or cargo space in your ship. Upgrading your multi-tool is probably the most interesting so far, because by doing this what starts as a simple short-range mining laser can become a machine gun, a plasma launcher, a grenade launcher, a shotgun, a long-range scanner, a lifeform analyser and all manner of other things besides. You even have to consider the layout of the components in your tool, because upgrades and modifications unsurprisingly work better if placed adjacent to the parts they are tweaking.

The thing that’s struck me so far is how incredibly absorbing it is. The whole game has the look of Tim White’s cover art for Isaac Asimov novels, with a touch of Roger Dean here and there. The worlds you’ll visit are varied and interesting, despite their randomly generated nature; there are hills, valleys, caves, seas, deserts, mountains, canyons and all manner of other landscapes to explore, and, assuming you don’t piss off the local Sentinels or the indigenous life, exploring it is an enormously relaxing pleasure. Indeed, at one point this evening as I stepped out of my ship onto a tiny island, then dove beneath the ocean waves to see what lay beneath, the Zen-like atmosphere of it all made me feel more at peace than I think anything else I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing in recent memory. Then I started to drown, so I had to cut my underwater exploits short, but for a short period it was bliss.

Thus far, No Man’s Sky looks set to be a really interesting take on sci-fi that is a far cry from the usual “space military”-centric angle we tend to get in video games. Its dreamy, mysterious narration (all in text, no voiceovers) is written with a similar tone to Asimov novels and lends a suitable air of, appropriately enough, otherworldliness to the whole affair. I’m not sure if I’ve locked myself into one of the three “paths” as yet, or if that continues to be a series of choices you make as you progress through the game, but so far everything I’ve encountered with relation to the lore is fascinating and intriguing, and I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes. Well, I know that — the centre of the universe — but why? What happens there? Who are you, the player? Why is it so important you follow this path that has seemingly been set out for you?

I can’t answer any of those questions yet, but I’m looking forward to seeking some answers. It’s early days yet, but so far this feels like the space game I always wanted to play. Fly a cool ship, land on planets, wander around, shoot stuff like a badass, become embroiled in metaphysical crazytimes, possibly find out that you/your ship/the weird thing on the cover is God or something.