Review | No Man's Sky

No Man’s Sky is a new first-person space exploration video game where you can take off from one planet and fly through space and land on another planet without any kind of loading screens. According to marketing materials, there are exactly 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 of these planets in the game’s universe, and you can visit each of them.

Here’s how the game actually works: you start on a [RANDOM COLOUR] planet with a [RANDOM COLOUR] sky. There are [RANDOM COLOUR] pillars and blobs which must be broken to get resources to repair your broken spaceship. Once you do, you can fly up into the air and up into space and land on another planet. Now the ground is [RANDOM COLOUR] and the sky is [RANDOM COLOUR]! You must shatter [RANDOM COLOUR] pillars and blobs to get resources to replenish your ship's fuel and your exosuit's various meters, which deplete at [RANDOM RATE] due to [RANDOM ATMOSPHERE]. The selling point of the game is that you get to repeat this experience 18 quintillion times.

It's certainly an achievement in terms of scale, but the actual experience is a bit like flying around an early version of Google Earth, except you can’t go look at the blob that represents your own IRL house.

Like the similarly popular Minecraft, No Man’s Sky generates its worlds procedurally. This means that a set of premade assets are plugged into some fancy math equations and the end result is an infinite variety of possible worlds (in this game, the spaceships and creatures and trees are also generated the same way). Minecraft’s world has hard boundaries a few hundred meters up and down, but each of the trillions of one-meter cubes that form the world can be destroyed, moved, and replaced, allowing players to build castles, giant golden penises, or whatever they can think of. In No Man’s Sky, your interactions with each world are limited to destroying specific blobs of it for resources or making dents in the ground with explosives.

Where Minecraft gives the player near-unlimited creative freedom, No Man’s Sky falls back on more traditional video game activities: talk to aliens, trade items to make money, shoot things. Each of these facets of the game has a layer of polish on top of them that barely disguises how shallow and uninspired they are. They all seem to be there to check off boxes and justify the game’s price (in Canada, it’s $90 once you include tax).

The other problem with the game is that it misses why people connect with science fiction. Bizarre new places and creatures aren’t compelling just because of their newness, they’re compelling because they somehow reflect the human condition in all its extremes. When racial segregation still existed in the United States, Gene Roddenberry imagined a future where a black woman could be a distinguished officer on a spaceship, and future astronaut Mae Jemison was watching wide-eyed. H.R. Giger and Ridley Scott tapped into our deepest fears about sex and pregnancy. George Lucas made us re-examine our fucked-up relationships with our dads. No Man’s Sky, on the other hand, tells the story of a nameless protagonist who needs to break rocks for resources to get from Purple World to Green World while fighting off robots.

If this game had come out for $20 with little fanfare, it would have been a beloved cult classic. Despite all its flaws, it’s still a compelling experience in many ways--it’s meditative, it’s occasionally beautiful, and the soundtrack (also procedurally generated) is fantastic. Unfortunately, most of the best experiences I had with the game happened at its periphery, and the systems that have been put in place to provide things for the player to do just got in the way.

I didn’t play hundreds of hours of the game, and I didn’t get to the center of the universe. It’s fair to say that maybe I missed out on some really incredible experiences. Maybe there are planets in the game with alien life that isn’t just a variation on a dinosaur or cat, and maybe I might have found something brilliant in one of the Places With Things To Do that reminded me so much of the plastic toppers that sometimes come on grocery store birthday cakes. With 18 quintillion planets, though, by the time I’d visited each of them, the Earth would have been swallowed by the sun and the universe would either have exploded or collapsed in on itself.

Maybe No Man's Sky is an argument for cosmic nihilism. Everywhere is more or less the same, and all effort is meaningless. It makes sense: we spent billions of dollars taking a close-up look at Mars, and it's just some shitty red rocks as far as the eye can see. We may as well stay home and play video games.

No Man’s Sky is out now for PlayStation 4 and will be released on PC August 12.

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