No Man’s Sky
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where the hell am I? Which is the correct path? What should I do next? You’ll find yourself frequently asking these questions while playing No Man’s Sky, as the game doesn’t exactly let you know what it wants you to do – in fact, it’s deliberately elusive at times. The lack of a spoon-fed narrative is a welcome diversion from the de rigueur of current games. Too many titles restrict free range, opting instead to hand-hold a player through a tightly controlled series of events. Not so, No Man’s Sky, and it’s a better game for it.
The action begins with your character stirring from a state of unconsciousness to find himself stranded on an alien planet at what appears to be a crash site. A small spacecraft is nearby, smouldering, and all you have to hand is an exosuit and a pistol-shaped multi-tool. As you look in awe at your surroundings, you’ll begin to ponder your options. Anxiety will soon creep in as your suit happily chimes that your life support is running low, and you realise that it’s up to you to fix the situation. Problem is, this ain’t Matt Damon in The Martian, and there aren’t any Thanksgiving spuds lying around to save your bacon – so your multi-tool will need to come into play. Essentially a galactic Black & Decker cordless, it’ll enable you to mine resources from the surrounding rocks and vegetation, extracting their base elements. These materials aid in the repair and re-fuelling of equipment, such as your environment scanner. Use it and the landscape becomes dotted with icons indicating potential points of interest and further resources.
Question-mark icons appear in the distance – subtle navigation markers that indicate the variety of paths. Using the jetpack makes terrestrial travel less of a chore, as there’s a varied mixture of environments to traverse. Mining as you go is a must, but collected items quickly amass to fill your inventory, so you’ll need to carefully manage your slots.
Every planet has a multitude of alien structures to visit, artefacts to discover and mysterious languages to decode. Abandoned crates contain resources that can be scavenged, aiding in the repair of your stricken craft. When you get everything ship-shape, you feel an incredible sense of accomplishment, and that inaugural lift-off is liberating – few games give the player the ability to fly to any location, or blast into orbit without a cutscene to mask loading.
Escape gravity and space stations await, each one containing a plot objective to help widen the game’s scope. When access to a hyperdrive