It took me about three months to realize that I love No Man’s Sky. During this period, I fiddled on-and-off with Hello Games’ mind-bogglingly enormous science-fiction survival sandbox. Although space-based adventure isn’t normally my cup of tea, genre-wise, my interest was piqued by the game’s staggering technical concept and luscious visual presentation. Harkening back to the hand-painted cover art from many a mid- to late-20th-century science-fiction paperback, NMS unfolds in a universe of spectacular planetary vistas, bizarre alien lifeforms, and enigmatic ancient technologies. The game taps into a retro-futurist compulsion to venture beyond the edges of the galactic map, offering an effectively limitless bounty of cosmic wonders: 18 quintillion unique, procedurally generated planets to discover, explore, and terraform. (Yes, you read that right.)
As is my tendency where buzzy games are concerned, I was a late comer to the NMS party. In this instance, however, that tardiness may have ultimately been for the best. The game’s initial 2016 launch was notoriously rocky, characterized by complaints of tedious gameplay, missing features, and inadequate communication from the developer. (The frothing pre-release hype didn’t help matters.) However, Hello Games subsequently put in the hard work to overhaul and enhance their flagship title. Eight years and almost 30 major updates later, and NMS is now heralded as one of the great redemption stories of 21st-century games publishing.
This is where I entered the story: after the game’s reputation had already been amended from over-hyped boondoggle to robustly supported modern classic. My experience with other survival games is admittedly limited. I’ve walked away from alleged exemplars of the subgenre like RimWorld, Subnautica, and Valheim in the space of hours (if not minutes), quickly losing interest in the repetitive, unstructured experience such titles seemed to offer. I gave No Man’s Sky an honest chance, however, based mostly on the strength of the game’s critical and popular 180-degree turnaround.
To my surprise and delight, NMS proved to be an absorbing experience, an open-world sandbox (open-universe, really) for people who typically bounce off such games. It was a slow seduction, admittedly, one that started out as more of a superficial infatuation. Like many new players, I was initially charmed by the game’s striking aesthetic approach, which is less concerned with next-gen photorealism than with evoking a sensation of wonder. Between the creamy graphics, imaginative art direction, and suitably cosmic soundtrack by British post-rock band 65daysofstatic, the game (at least in its 2024 iteration) makes a strong first impression.
Consistent with most sandbox games, however, NMS soon reaches a point where its open-ended character starts to become apparent. When a new game is created, the player’s avatar – a nameless Traveler in a cutting-edge space suit – spawns on a random planet. My starter world turned out to be an arctic planet, where the weird alien flora and fauna had evolved to withstand perpetually frigid temperatures and nightly ice storms. I wandered around, cataloging every species I saw and searching various caves, ruins, and other landmarks for critical resources and the occasional space-age treasure. This strangely thriving frozen hell seemed to go on forever, and yet it was just one of six equally vast planets in a larger star system. By the time I had warped to my third or fourth uncharted system in a row – which prompted me to open the galaxy map and start zooming out – the true scale of the game’s universe had begun to inspire a shivery, intimidating kind of awe.
NMS has a central storyline that players can follow, the so-called Artemis Path, but this relatively slight narrative serves first and foremost as an extended tutorial, guiding newcomers through the game’s various systems. Although there are some minor substantive benefits to following this story – chiefly free items and blueprints – players are allowed to ignore the main plot and blaze their own trails. As innumerable Minecraft addicts can attest, most sandbox games require that the player make their own fun, and NMS is no exception. Many players dedicate themselves to constructing their ideal base, a planetary outpost painstakingly crafted to suit their exact preferences. Of course, this endeavor first requires finding the perfect “Goldilocks” planet to settle: lush ecology, minimal hazards, and a politically and economically stable star system. (Although more adventurous colonists have been known to put down roots on horrifyingly toxic or radioactive worlds, just for the challenge.) Other players prefer to take command of a deep-space freighter to exploit the galactic trade lanes, building a fleet of support frigates and customizing their mobile headquarters. Still others search eternally for their ideal, first-class starship in exactly the right color – or they just build it themselves.
While many players can thrive in an environment with so many possible paths, that same open-ended quality can inspire an aimless sort of decision paralysis in others, yours truly included. Confronted by an in-game universe that is effectively infinite, I soon found myself going in circles, alternately hyper-focused and fatigued with whatever virtual micro-chore happened to occupy me at any given moment. Should I concentrate on improving my primary starfighter or first focus on unlocking the enormous library of base-building blueprints? Should I conduct some intra-galactic commodities arbitrage or go hunting for space pirates? (NMS rather unexpectedly triggered some nostalgia flashbacks to playing TradeWars 2002 via text-based BBSs in the early 1990s.) Should I hopscotch via arbitrary warp-jumps to the farthest edges of the galaxy or dedicate myself to exhaustively surveying a few systems? Eventually, my questions turned more existential. What was the point of a “game” with no objectives, resolution, or victory? Where is the sense in “exploring” a cosmos that feels as incomprehensibly vast as our own? (Though the real universe is, in fact, much, much, much bigger.)
My engagement with NMS waxed and waned over several weeks, but I kept coming back to the game, despite my occasional frustrations with its systems. I’ve never been a serious literary science-fiction enthusiast, but the game’s relaxed, technophilic vibe scratched a certain trailblazing itch that I once satisfied as an adolescent by poring over back issues of Popular Science (and its freaky New Age cousin, Omni). Granted, the tone of NMS isn’t exactly one of utopian futurism. The obscure and convoluted in-universe backstory reveals a shockingly bleak, tragic history defined by a slow slouch toward entropy. It’s not a game that positions space exploration as an answer to terrestrial problems, and its relatively simple setting – which features just three primary sentient alien species – largely precludes a nuanced engagement with typical genre themes like imperialism and colonization.
However, there’s an undeniable tingle of anticipation that attends every warp-jump to the next star system, a pleasing “explorer’s buzz” gleaned from the promise of gorgeous, strange, and terrifying new sights that no one has ever seen before. Seemingly every game update has added new kinds of planetary weirdness to the NMS universe, expanding the roster of more familiar biomes to include glass planets, metallic planets, and planets where everything is hexagonal (including the flora and fauna). While the algorithms that generate the game’s world operate according to certain predictable rules, the unpredictability that they do produce is an endless source of excitement and amusement for players. It’s a phenomenon that Hello Games seems to recognize: One key addition to the game is a glyph system that allows players to easily share the exact location of their most spectacular screenshots, facilitating visits from fellow Travelers. NMS players seem to have adopted JFK’s line on space exploration: “Whatever mankind must undertake, free men must fully share.”
Indeed, the pleasure of shared discovery is a key feature of the NMS community, which has an uncommonly friendly and cooperative reputation among online player bases. (Especially when compared to the grueling, Hobbesian hellscape of a player-vs.-player survival game like Rust.) Crucially, the ingenious design of NMS allows for a kind of facultative multiplayer experience. The universe is sufficiently enormous that one can theoretically avoid other players indefinitely, but, if needed, a helping hand is usually available in the “Anomaly” hub area that is accessible from any star system. This delicate balance is one key reason I’ve warmed to the game over time: It preserves the foundational sensation of solitary exploration without completely isolating confused or struggling players. And, admittedly, sometimes you also just want some backup when taking on a pirate dreadnaught or monstrous alien queen.
Ultimately, I’ve come to accept the liberating and terrifying freedom proffered by NMS – its Sartrean qualities, if you will – because its space-exploration milieu creates such an inviting arena for the creation of personalized stories. In my primary game, I am currently pursuing a scientific agenda in the style of an old-school traveling naturalist. I’m cataloging the ecologies of a few star systems, slowly exploring outward from remote research stations where I cultivate alien flora and fauna for study. There is no foreseeable endgame to this endeavor, given the scale of the universe, and apart from a trickle of currency from scanning new lifeforms, there is little in-game benefit to such an approach. However, NMS is not a game about winning. It’s a game about what lies beyond the horizon, and the horizon after that.
No Man’s Sky is now available for Windows, MacOS, Playstation 4 and 5, Xbox One and SeriesX/S, and the Nintendo Switch.
