Going through my queue on Steam one day a few months ago, a peculiar game appeared. I don't usually pay attention to pre-release games, but this one made me stop. It was No Man's Sky. This game holds two personal records of mine: 1. longest game in my Steam wishlist, and 2. most expensive game that's ever been in my wishlist.
I wouldn't say that I wasn't caught up in the hype, but I also didn't ejaculate all over every rumor and developer's update. Part of the reason why I didn't get caught up in the hype was because I had been looking for a Minecraft in 3D that had guns and space exploration and I had been thoroughly disappointed by games like Star Forge and Empyrion: Galactic Survival, so my expectations were minimal for No Man's Sky. To be fair, my expectations weren't met with No Man's Sky, but that's ok — something totally different blew my mind and overwhelmed me.
Trying to call No Man's Sky a survival sandbox is an exercise in futility, and everyone who holds that idea should erase it from their heads because it is not a sandbox; it's a role-playing game. I've only played 5 hours, but from that experience I gathered that No Man's Sky has more in common with Mass Effect than Minecraft.
As is visible from the screenshot, this seems like something you'd see at the Citadel in Mass Effect.
From my experience with the game, you play as someone who crashed on an unknown planet. Memory lost, you wander aimlessly, searching through the wreckage trying to fix your spaceship. You stumble across Atlas—an unknown being. I chose not to follow him, but as I play through the game, I felt I had made a mistake, and you'll see why if you play.
Once you get off your first planet, you can fly to a space station, walk around it and communicate with aliens. One thing I love about communicating with aliens, however, is that you don't know the language, and you have to find encyclopedias or "knowledge stones" in order to learn the languages.
As you progress through the game, your purpose on this world is made ever clearer. The more contact you make with outposts on planets, the more monoliths you find, abandoned buildings you plunder, and anomalies you explore, the more you realize that you're special.
I can't give anything away, but crafting is truly secondary to story in this masterpiece of a game.
One moment I will never forget in this game is the first monolith I explored. I was used to finding outposts, but when I approached the structure I knew it wasn't one. It was a large triangular structure with one of its sides bisected by a floating sphere that glowed. When I approached it, I was elated to find that there were knowledge stones dotting the perimeter. After absorbing the words from them, I approached the large triangular structure and examined it.
My eyes widened and my stomach ticked with worry as I was shrouded in light and confronted with a riddle. I had no idea how to answer, so I guessed. The monolith shook, and threw me into the air above the planet's surface. I was scared because I didn't want to die. I calmed, however, when I looked towards the Sun and witnessed a beautiful sight.
The mountains of the world were painted across the horizon like black dimples on the Earth's smile. The light refracted across the ground, created beautiful patterns of shadows. Alien birds flew next to me as if I was one of them.
I actually cried.
No Man's Sky did not live up to my expectations, but what it gave me was something that was even better than I could have asked for.
