By Dorian Dawes
Every story about No Man’s Sky says the same thing. The ambitious space sim launched to near universally negative reviews. It was a buggy mess with none of the promised features. Now through a decade of an absurd amount of free updates, the game is more popular and beloved than ever, and every time, the articles all come out with the same story. Game was bad, but is now good. I’ve been playing the game for nearly six years, and it’s been enjoyable for a long time, but to explain why I think it’s only recently that it finally has achieved its complete vision, I will have to go into the story no one ever tells, the content of the game itself, the philosophy at the heart of No Man’s Sky.
A new playthrough drops you onto a beautiful but dangerous planet. Your HUD activates bit by bit, and you’re given your first multitool. It allows you to mine for resources, manipulate the very terrain beneath your feet, scan flora and fauna, and so much more. It is our initial arm into this universe, what allows us to make our mark here, and prove we exist within it. We are then shown our health bar, our shields, and are reminded that this universe is hostile to us. The atmosphere itself can kill us if we do not harvest the resources to survive.
Thus begins the gameplay loop of gathering resources to survive, and eventually build. These are not unique mechanics. There is an entire genre based around this gameplay loop, from Minecraft to Terraria, virtual sandboxes which keep you locked in a treadmill of resource gathering and construction. Some people play these games with the survival mechanics turned off. I do not. They’re integral to my experience with this genre, especially No Man’s Sky.
While a different genre of survival entirely, Pathologic and its sequel Pathologic 2 outright tells you the narrative purpose of these mechanics, they are your connection to this world. They remind you that you have a body and you must take care of it. You need to eat, sleep, stave off infection with medicine, and you can be killed, as you are vulnerable.
No Man’s Sky might not take things to such extremes, but the philosophy remains the same. You need oxygen to breathe, sodium to power the filters that protect you from the hostile atmosphere, and to do that, you must explore the planet you’ve been stranded on to find resources. If you wish to leave said planet, you will need to craft technology to repair your ship. It seems so basic, but without the push to survive, we have no reason to explore, no reason to shoot off into the endless horizon. You could simply stay on this beautiful planet forever.
Your spaceship becomes your next point of connection to this universe, and I think this is where the game’s initial flaw presents itself. Less of a flaw and more of a technical hurdle that the developers wouldn’t solve for several years. Your spaceship was a random model. You couldn’t customize it. It wasn’t yours, but it had to represent you in the greater reach of space, and would be with you on whichever planet you landed, and this is important.
Famously No Man’s Sky uses procedural generation to create randomized planets. It’s the very foundation on which the entire promise of the game is built, infinite worlds worth exploring. Every update from its initial launch has added more complexity to these biomes, and more strange sporelike creatures that inhabit them (you can now battle said creatures like Pokemon thanks to an update earlier this month). As an aside, it’s a funny rebuttal to AI evangelists who talk about how generative AI will revolutionize gaming with infinite content, while procedural generation has been doing this effectively without gen-AI for years.
Your spaceship represents a constant point in an ever-changing universe. It has to be something that stays with you. These random planets will come and go, but your spaceship, this thing that is as part of you as your multi-tool, your arm with which you extend into this world, must be something you own.
Base building doesn’t work to these ends. It’s a common feature for the survival sim, the player’s personal hideaway, and yes, it’s fun. It’s never not going to be fun to construct your little house where you store all your stuff. Part of the campaign, which primarily serves as a lengthy tutorial, involves building a base, and staffing it with weird crew members who each have their own interesting stories and quest objectives. This also serves as an extension of the player into the universe, but here’s the issue, a base cannot leave the planet. It’s cool to leave something you’ve built behind, it is counter intuitive to the goal of getting you the player out exploring amongst the stars if you’re staying on one planet with one base.
Eventually the game would add freighters, fully customizable bases that can be about as large as a city hub in an rpg. You can hire other frigates to pad out your fleet, send them on missions, and of course the staff you hired for your land base can come with you with their stations. I do like my freighter. It serves as a great anchor, but I can’t take it into a space station with me, fly it during battles with pirates, and I can’t land on a planet with it. My old non customizable spaceship was still my primary means of interacting with the setting, no matter how many cool different ships I’d added to my personal garage like it’s Grand Theft Auto in space.
The recent corvette update finally brings us fully customizable ships. They’re smaller than the freighters, but still allow a great degree of utility when adding rooms to its interior. The first week this update launched, players flooded reddit with screenshots of crazy ships shaped like guitars, nokia phones, millennium falcons, and of course penises. Most importantly, through a feat of technical wizardry, players can leave their ships while in space and float freely amongst the stars. No more loading screens on leaving your ship, and in fact, you can walk right out of it over a planet’s atmosphere and fall freely to land on it yourself. It succeeds at creating the player’s anchor in this world, allowing them to take this piece of themselves, this little home they’ve built across the infinite planets, and do what the game does best, letting you explore its vast and strange mysteries.
All that mechanical discussion aside, none of this would work if there wasn’t something compelling at the heart of the game itself, something beyond the procedural generation and its continually evolving complexity. This is why I argue the game has been good for a while, because its base elements are all there. No Man’s Sky is one of the most beautiful and atmospheric games I’ve ever played. Rejecting photorealism for a more stylized retro scifi aesthetic, every screenshot could be a Michael Whelan painting. The various species that populate the setting all look like muppets from Farscape. It’s an instantly recognizable and striking visual style that sets it apart from every other game in its genre, add to that the excellent ambient soundscape and music, the vibes are immaculate.
Before all the bells and whistles of deep sea diving, derelict freighter exploration, and the many graphical improvements over the years, this was and remains the core strength of No Man’s Sky. The foundation is solid. You can literally choose to not partake of any of these mechanics and still find some way to enjoy yourself by inhabiting this universe. Take your ship out, go fly anywhere, land on a random planet, and survey it in all its splendor. Sometimes I put on a podcast or audiobook, but most often I like to let the vibes wash over me. That I can now do this while fishing is a fantastic plus, staring up at a ringed planet over the horizon while the occasional ship hums by overhead.
Compounding all this is the game’s exceptional writing, and this goes beyond the lengthy campaign tutorial, but in the structure and pieces of narrative scattered throughout the game. Exploring derelict freighters give us snippets of survival horror inspired logs left behind by the doomed crews and the strange mysteries of their demise. There are crashed ships with the last logs of dying captains, abandoned research bases, and forgotten ruins. Space is not only beautiful with its shares of whimsy, but it is mysterious and terrifying. There is horror in the unknown.
The setting of No Man’s Sky has sometimes been called nihilistic by its fans, but I think that is a gross mischaracterization. For whatever reason the internet has decided to apply that term to any form of media that trends in a darker than expected scenario. There is a darkness at the heart of this game, but I think the appropriate term to describe it is melancholy. To put it bluntly, this is a very sad game.
Following its initial tutorial detailing the nuts-and-bolts of a universe inhabited by the mercantile gek, warlike vy’keen, and robotic korvax, the storyline takes us on a journey involving strange signals from a distant traveller called Artemis and the mystery of their disappearance. The campaign also serves as our introduction to the sad and desperate world of No Man’s Sky. We follow a breadcrumb of broken signals to a distress beacon labelled Artemis, eventually contacting them and discovering they are in need of our aid, stranded on a sunless world.
Upon gathering a star chart from which we might pinpoint their location, we discover from cartographers that no such location exists. It is as if we have been communicating with a ghost. We soon find all that remains of Artemis is a projection, data trapped in a loop. We are given a choice between allowing the remaining data to die, or upload Artemis into a simulation of another universe they can explore. Whatever the player chooses, it is a moment of sadness and grief, the voice that has been calling to us since we first began this experience may have already been dead, and we have only been chasing a lost and corrupted signal throughout our entire journey. We could not save them, for they were already gone, we can only choose the fate of what passes for their soul.
Our next tasks involve research for a figure named -null-, so-called for their name appears to have been completely erased, deleted. Another lost data fragment. -null- believes the galaxy is unravelling, and wishes to assess the state of the multiverse and how we got here.
Through conversations with the three prominent species of the game, we learn the history of the atrocities of the gek, how they enslaved the mechanical korvax and destroyed their world, and were opposed by the war-like vy’keen whose real enemy are the ever-patrolling sentinels who serve the intelligent computer god the korvax worship, the Atlas. There is a moment of tragic horror at which a gek historian breaks down in tears, because the gek were never really overthrown, but tamed and domesticated via generational biological warfare manipulating their genetic code. They never had a moment coming to terms with the horrors of their empire, and may never redeem themselves for all they’ve done. Scattered throughout the game, evidence of this ruined empire persists in the form of statue remains floating in space with messages proclaiming their infinite glory, like that of Ozymandias King of Kings.
Occasionally some gek cults and pirates rise, claiming “the First Spawn will rise again!” It is eerily familiar, reminiscent of Dixie flags and Union Jacks who long for the history of a great and glorious empire, utterly ignorant to the devastation swirling around them, or perhaps motivated by it in a misguided attempt to restore what they believe they’ve lost. What they believe is rightfully theirs.
-null- comes to think these stories are a cry for help from the Atlas. These tales of degradation, loss, conflict, and torment. They believe the Atlas is dying. Our next journey takes us to communicate with the god of this multiverse, to uncover the secrets at the heart of this sad world. We discover that the reason the Atlas is everywhere, is because we’re part of it. The irony of restoring Artemis into a simulation, is that they were already in a simulation with us, we are of the machine as are they, as is everyone, and that machine is dying. The player is faced with the choice of persisting in the galaxy as it is, or resetting it, and creating life anew. What is fascinating here is that while the galaxy is dying, the simulation at its end, it is doing so on an alien timescale, with thousands even possibly hundreds of thousands of years left remaining.
The simulation theory of the universe has always struck me as a philosophical dead-end. Whenever it comes up, my answer has always been, if it were, so what? How would that affect anything? No Man’s Sky forces the question though by putting the simulation at risk, all of existence at risk, but making it so thoroughly abstract, that it forces us to consider all that we’ve learned and all that we know, the connections we’ve made, and experiences we’ve shared.
No Man’s Sky positions us at a universe still crawling on despite being on its last legs. Settlements are small and scattered, and space stations are little hubs of connectivity for people trying to cling to what vestige of life remains. All those scattered logs and lore documents all add to people trying and failing to understand the very mysteries that govern their lives. The sentinels are an oppressive faceless authoritarian force keeping the peace and preserving planets, but they also prevent the rebuilding of civilization. It can seem bleak and hopeless if that’s all you’re looking at.
Yet some persist. There are settlements where people try and eke out a barely sustainable planetside living. Players have the option of adopting these settlements as an overseer, protecting them from sentinel attacks, and investing resources into seeing these settlements grow and thrive. I keep having to discourage my settlement of gek from becoming cultists and submitting their will to malign intent.
This is why I tell people to play through the campaign tutorial, not just to ingratiate yourself with the game’s many foundational systems, but because it forces you to interact with all the saddest parts of the game’s world, and also its most hopeful. We are introduced to Nada and Polo, a korvax and gek from different universes, who are part of the station caught outside of space and time, the Space Anomaly. Like the corvette and your freighter and all the little bases you leave scattered across different planets, they are an anchor. It is a refuge for anomalous travellers like yourself. There are friendly NPCs on the Anomaly who wave happily whenever you approach. They have come to this place to explore the wonder of the universe free of the watchful eye of the sentinels and the Atlas simulation that ostensibly governs and embodies them.
And the universe is wondrous. Whether I am simply fishing, or riding some weird butterfly snake creature as the moon sets behind me, traveling to the ocean depths where terrifying megafauna lurk, or discovering some lost ancient alien ruin, there is always something to explore, and life goes on. The universe has been beaten and battered, empires risen and fallen, and yet people persist. They build in spite of authoritarian overreach seeking to control them. They hack space stations and form rebellious pirate bases. They explore. They form communities.
I had grown attached to a few NPCs that I didn’t know if they’d be the same in a new galaxy, at this point in the story. The crew you are staffed with at your first base in the initial tutorial, while they may have the same dialog and writing from each playthrough, will have randomized names and characteristics. The story is the same for each player, but those procedurally generated features are for you and you alone. Are they the same characters in another galaxy? I could not bring myself to end this world and start a new one, because I couldn’t bring my friends with me, these alien beings I’d developed real emotions for.
Yes, it’s fiction, but fiction that forces us to deeply consider what makes someone themselves, what makes us us? It uses the meta-narrative of its own procedural systems to challenge the nature of existence. I’m unsure I’ve ever seen anything like this in a videogame before.
There are many other space sims out there, and many that people love but I’ve not fallen for them in the way that I have for No Man’s Sky. EVE Online is more fun to read about than actually play for me, as I have little patience for a game that requires multiple spreadsheets to comprehend. X4 Foundations keeps tempting me, but I find the control scheme a struggle. I’m not particularly in love with Elite Dangerous, and while Star Citizen may shape up to become something impressive someday, it’s not there yet. Furthermore there isn’t a space sim that looks like No Man’s Sky, with this colorful retro-futuristic palette that makes every screen look like an 80’s scifi paperback cover.
In terms of science fiction game narratives, I think No Man’s Sky might be a particular favorite. The big ambitious existential questions and wounded romanticism remind me of the writings of Isaac C. Clarke. There is poetry to its sad broken world full of life and beauty. It’s a funny contrast to other games about space I love, like the horror of Alien: Isolation or the immersive story of tech morality in Prey and its inspirations in System Shock. Those games leaned towards the darkness of the universe and the terror of the infinite, and while NMS does acknowledge that terror frequently in some of its darker moments, it beholds that terror with wide-eyed wonder and curiosity. The terror is part of the beauty, because terror and sadness and grief and loss is part of life, and life is wondrous.
One of my favorite quotes in the game comes from a Korvax cartographer, {{Existence is beautiful, if you let it be. Life is not a question. There does not need to be an answer…}}
It is the closest the game comes to telling you explicitly the way it is meant to be played. The campaign isn’t there to provide a goal, but a platform, a tutorial in its multitude of systems. There is no goal. Not really. Most of the ones you find end in self reflection and melancholy. Your goal is to exist in this place. Your goal is to exist.
Dorian Dawes is the author of several short stories, a sci-fi novel, and the dark fantasy novella A Dream of Saints. A perpetual goth, they love reading books of all kinds, but horror is and always will be their first love. More of their work can be accessed at their patreon.