Regular readers know I don't usually do game write-ups on here, this is mostly a tech-and-work blog and I try to keep it that way. But I've put something like forty hours into No Man's Sky since it came out on PS4 two weeks and change ago (the 9th, if you're keeping track, which apparently I am), and I have Thoughts, so here we go.
Quick recap for anyone who missed the run-up: this is the game from Hello Games, a four-person studio out of Guildford, that promised an actual, honest-to-god procedurally generated universe. Eighteen quintillion planets was the number that got repeated everywhere. $59.99 on PSN, standard price, no special edition nonsense unless you count the pre-order ships which I did not spring for, for once in my life showing some restraint.
The headline story from the first week wasn't really about the game itself, it was about two guys on stream who flew to the exact same set of galactic coordinates, both swore up and down they were standing right there, and neither one could see the other. Not a bug exactly, more a design choice nobody had explained clearly beforehand, but it landed like a bug because the whole marketing push had leaned hard on "you might run into other explorers out there." Sean Murray ended up having to walk that back publicly. I bring this up not to pile on, plenty of outlets already did the pile-on in the days right after, but because it's the thing that actually predicted how the game would feel for me once I sat down with it. Which is: gorgeous, occasionally, and completely alone the entire time.
Here's what fourteen days of actually playing it looks like. You wake up next to a broken ship on some planet with a name like "Ausoinia XVI-b" that the game spit out from a word list, you mine a bunch of iron and plutonium with a mining laser that overheats every fifteen seconds, you fix the ship, you fly somewhere else, repeat. Eighteen planets visited on my count, and I'd say four of them were genuinely striking, all weird fauna and purple grass and skies doing something odd. The rest were rock, or desert, or rock-desert, with the occasional radioactive storm that chases you back to your ship whether you want to leave or not.
The inventory management is the part nobody warned me about and it's honestly the biggest drag on the whole experience. Your exosuit starts with something like 24 usable slots and every additional slot costs real in-game currency that ramps up fast, so for the first ten or so hours you are constantly, constantly dumping resources on the ground because your pockets are full. I've deleted more oxide and carbon than I've actually used for anything. It's not hard, it's just tedious in a way that a survival-crafting game usually earns through tension, and this one doesn't really have tension, it has a very calm, very repetitive loop of scan-mine-fly-repeat.
I stopped pre-ordering games back in 2013, after the SimCity launch, servers down for a week, the whole mess. Learned my lesson, I told myself. Then this one came around with four years of hype behind it and a documentary-style trailer and I pre-ordered it anyway like an absolute mark. So some of my grumbling here is on me, I fed the hype machine and the hype machine did what hype machines do.
That said, I'm not sorry I bought it, which is a weirder position than the "this game is a scam" takes going around some corners of Reddit this week. The core loop is thin, sure. But there's a specific feeling around hour six, when you jump to a new star system and the loading screen clears and you genuinely don't know what you're about to see, that I haven't gotten from a game in a long time. It's just that the feeling doesn't stretch as far as forty hours. I'm still playing it most nights, mostly on autopilot while half-watching something else on the other screen, and I don't have a clean verdict for you beyond that. Some nights it's the most relaxing thing I own. Other nights I catch myself checking how many resource slots are free before I've even looked at the planet I just landed on, and that probably tells you something too.
Anyway. If you're on the fence, wait for it to be $30 and go in expecting a walking simulator with a mining minigame attached, not the multiplayer galaxy-hopping thing the trailers sold you. You'll have a better time.