How to Enjoy No Man’s Sky

Learning to love a weird game.

No Man’s Sky is fantastic because it doesn’t care about having a goal. It’s a game about creating your own goals, and wandering around without any at all. The game is best played when you don’t have any particular task in mind.

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We, as players, tend to think of video games only in the context of beginning and ending. We typically start a game and then reach its ending a collection of hours later. And even if we know a game is supposed to be different, it’s hard to fight that comfortable format. But once you realize that No Man’s Sky is a truly open game that doesn’t care what you do in it, your enjoyment may instantly increase.

It’s not often that a game includes mechanics that have no important bearing on the rest of the game, but No Man’s Sky is full of them. You can scan the various plants and animals to your heart’s content, but it won’t get you anything more than a small handful of money. You don’t get anything special from meticulously naming all of your planets after various locations in the Metal Gear franchise (I am my own parody), but you’ll find yourself doing it anyways. Because not everything in games has to be done because it progresses you through the game’s hierarchy. Some things are just fun, and deeply personal.

NO MANS SKY

No Man’s Sky isn’t a game like Uncharted or even GTAV, where you play for a dozen(s) hours over the course of several days and then put it down for a long time. That format makes up 99% of video games, but is completely incompatible with No Man’s Sky. NMS is something that is not only best enjoyed in small, relaxing, therapeutic chunks, but it’s almost essential that it be played this way after a while.

And the best part is that Hello Games knew that it was this type of game from the start. Sure, the game’s crafting system and initial story of fixing your starship gave the player some linearity early on, but all that talk that Sean Murray gave for 3 years regarding No Man’s Sky being about exploration wasn’t off the money. It’s a survival game, sure, but at a certain point you feel like you’ve survived, and now you’re thriving.

Exploration is the new name of the game, even if that game may be played over the course of years. And yes, there are fast tracks for those who desperately want to see the center of the universe, but grinding out the same resource just to jump between systems is not a fun experience.

It’s important that you be aware of what No Man’s Sky is, if you’re still on the fence about it, but it’s even more important to recognize how to enjoy the game. Very few games are comparable to it, and it doesn’t have goals in the traditional sense. No Man’s Sky is the first game we’ve played in which you only ever get what you put into it, and that makes it something very special, in the right mindset.


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Author
Morgan Park
Journalism major from Bakersfield, Ca. 20. Metal Gear Solid scholar.