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"No Man’s Sky" provides a soulful antidote to our anxious times
"No Man’s Sky" provides a soulful antidote to our anxious times
Open up any newspaper, listen to any current events podcast, stream any pundit’s YouTube channel, and you’ll see it’s no secret we live in anxious times. In a world where every other second brings another push notification demanding your attention, it can be difficult to focus intensely on one thing for more than a few minutes, let alone escape into your own world for an hour or more at a time.
Wouldn’t it be nice to blast off into space for a little while, do some exploring and catch your breath before returning to real life again? After all, in space, no one can hear you scream — at your phone, or your inbox, or your boss. That’s the escape No Man’s Sky(opens in a new tab) offers, if you’re ready to suit up and blast off into a distant galaxy.
Whether you’re a diehard gamer or just picking up a PS4 or Xbox controller for the first time, No Man’s Sky provides a soulful antidote to our anxious times. Here are a few reasons why.
An open galaxy to explore at your own speed
What’s the plot of No Man’s Sky? The simple answer: you’re a space explorer who wakes up on an alien planet, without any memory of how you got there. You’ve got to repair your ship, take off into space, and explore the galaxy for answers. Along the way, you’ll discover endless new species of flora and fauna, fight enemies on land and in space, make connections with likeminded explorers, and more, as you search for the answers to the universe’s mysteries and your own.
The more accurate, less simple answer? The plot is whatever you want it to be. This is the largest, most complex open world game of all time.
“Open world” games invite players to wander their environments, free from the rigid, linear maps of old-school video games. Maybe you’re a knight crossing the hills of a medieval fantasy world to find magical artifacts, or a bad-seed gunslinger, ruthlessly galloping through the West in search of infamy and fortune. These games have primary missions, or “stories,” that players spend vast amounts of time finishing, along with plenty of side adventures along the way.
But the greatest thing about open world games, especially for a casual gamer? You don’t need to follow the storyline to have a great time. That’s the whole point of the open world. The bigger the map, the more potential for exploring it for your own purposes and at your own pace — and where those other open world games offer a continent or a planet to map out, No Man’s Sky offers something much, much more expansive. In fact, it’s almost unfathomably large.
Your character wakes up on one planet, but No Man’s Sky has 255 entire galaxies’ worth of planets to explore, totaling up to more than 18 quintillion worlds. It would take you nearly 585 billion years to see them all. No, that’s not a typo.
Mindboggling in size and scale, No Man’s Sky flips the typical video game experience on its head. There really isn’t any beating this game. You could finish the primary storyline, sure, but with an open world so enormous, is that really the true purpose of the game?
In that way, No Man’s Sky does something revolutionary in today’s culture: it asks you to stop thinking of life as a competition, to break away from the mindset ingrained in all of us from year one, and retrain yourself to find pleasure in slowness. Explore. Breathe. Slow down. Enjoy the scenery.
Pure beauty ahead: slow down to appreciate it
And what scenery it is. Desolate, rocky planets beautiful in their Spartan landscape. Wooded, green planets teaming with trees that would make Dr. Seuss jealous he didn’t draw them first. Desert planets like Georgia O’Keeffe landscapes on steroids. Space stations out of sci-fi dreams. Alien animals somehow familiar and psychedelic at once, prehistoric dinosaur-looking things and sleek, futuristic creatures alike. Not to mention the pleasure of simply zooming through the stars, dodging asteroids, discovering Saturn-esque ringed planets and red moons and more.
There’s so much to see, and the game underscores the value of simply pausing and looking — one of the main tasks in gameplay is to use your “visor scanner” to identify and catalogue undiscovered species, just like you discover new planets (yes you can name them yourself). Plus, No Man’s Sky is constantly updating, building on its original framework, so there’s always more to do.
Beyond, the latest update, brings expanded multiplayer gaming and VR compatibility into the mix, along with much more. Making a game as visually stunning as No Man’s Sky, with its huge map, compatible with VR gave its developers a staggering challenge. The work has paid off.
For years, tech experts and gamers alike have been predicting VR will bring the next revolution in home gaming. No Man’s Sky won’t bring about that sea change overnight, but it’s difficult to imagine a game better suited to popularizing VR for casual gamers. Who wouldn’t want to immerse themselves in these galaxies and their amazing sights? Still, even without VR, players will often find their jaws dropping at what they see onscreen.
A game with great values
Space travel has a long history of beautiful sights. With the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo moon landing this year, many stories from that era found fresh audiences — and one of the most inspiring ideas comes from the astronauts themselves, who famously spoke of how seeing Earth from space gave them a powerful sense of love for the planet. From the outside, it’s easy to see how small Earth really is, and how beautiful and fragile it must be.
No Man’s Sky brings that spirit to life, with its focus on the optimistic ethos of space travel. Exploring the solar system has always represented the better angels of humankind’s nature, our ability to leave the bickering politics of earthbound life behind in search of something bigger.
The game’s insistence on discovery makes it almost unique in a world of first-person shooting games and smaller, more insular open world games. Cataloging alien animals and trees in a video game doesn’t save the environment of the real Earth, but it does put players in the mindset of a conservationist, slowing down to pay attention to the creatures with whom we share our own planet.
In that way, No Man’s Sky just might be the game we need today. One that values slowly observing, rather than rushing through your world; the ways natural beauty and human strength can coexist, as best represented in the non-colonial explorer; the worthiness of travel, its mind-expanding powers. We can’t live in a video game, and we shouldn’t want to. But can a video game can teach us ways to live better in the real world? No Man’s Sky(opens in a new tab) makes a powerful case.
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Hello Games, LimeGreenLegend