No Man's Sky

The bundle of blips that pop up on my hud are color-coded to indicate what kind of resources they’re leading me to, a luxury of the particular scanning suite I have installed on my weapon.

One of the larger [space debris wreckage containers] yields something perhaps more valuable than raw materials: a blueprint for a new tech upgrade. This one is a suit attachment that increases my oxygen capacity when exploring underwater. At this point I think back to when I first entered the planet’s atmosphere, recalling that large swathes of it were covered with blue oceans. Maybe the components that had eluded me on the surface would be found below it? I shifted focus to scrounging up the materials to build my new toy, and once I had, I headed straight for the nearest body of water I could find.

My transgression against nature did not go unnoticed however. A planet-monitoring Sentinel robot floats over – it’s roughly the size of a basketball – giving me a sideways glance with its cold-looking metallic eye. It doesn’t open fire, it just wants me to know that it sees me, and it is not happy with the choices I’ve made. I’m not interested in a fight (yet) so I quit making like George Washington with the cherry tree and move along. Besides, I’ve got an ocean to explore.

And what an ocean it was. Teeming with exotic creatures and plants that looked like nothing if not alien, I was at a loss to even choose where to begin. I dove as deep as I could and just picked a direction, scanning every other-worldly fish I could along the way. Eventually I happened upon a yellow crystal deposit that looked quite unlike any I had seen up on the surface. I mined it out and as luck would have it, it was one of the two minerals I needed to build my hyperdrive. I was halfway there!

My elation was short-lived, though. I had suddenly started taking damage, and a quick glance upwards revealed two Sentinels hovering above sea level while taking pot-shots at me. In a panic, I swam back the way I had come and just hoped they’d stop pursuing me. One of them did, but the other followed me all the way back to shore, where I had no choice but to defend myself.

The firefight proves longer and more dangerous than expected. This angry little floating box soaks up a surprising amount of punishment before giving up the ghost. If he’d been any tougher, I would have died, seeing as my shields were now gone and I was living on a sliver of health. It wasn’t for nothing though; upon defeat, he dropped the second resource I needed for my ticket out of this system...just not nearly enough of it. But now I knew where the rest was going to come from.

But I wouldn’t be heading there until I could be sure I wasn’t being followed. Killing a Sentinel had jumped me to a two-star rating on No Man’s Sky’s GTA-esque “wanted” scale. I’d need to get far away, and stay out of sight until they gave up the chase. Barely alive, I made a dash for a large alien monolith and hid behind it until the coast was clear. As I limped my way back towards my ship, I was feeling like a bonafide scoundrel, all the way up until a coiled-up, harmless looking plant violently uncurled and scratched away the last of my life. Slain by a plant, I had died much as I had lived...as a hardened space criminal.

It’s here where I start taking more notice of No Man’s Sky’s flight model. I was happy to find that pitch, yaw, and roll were all controllable, though roll was oddly mapped to the L1 and R1 buttons so that the right analog could be used to aim guns independently within an arc in front of my ship. It took some adjustment, but it wasn’t long until I was able to pull banks and immelman turns much like I would in any other space flight game. Of course, no amount of fancy flying could change the fact that I was in a ship mostly specced for hauling cargo, trying to take on three ships that were many times my size. I certainly did some damage, taking out a few gun emplacements and cargo-spheres along the sides of one freighter, but the end result was, ultimately, a predictably fiery death.

Since mining the environment seems to immediately pique the Sentinel’s interest, I started stripping every red crystal formation I could find for plutonium. Sure enough, one of my old, floating friends showed up, but this time, he brought backup. A single Sentinel had proven to be a challenge, but taking on three would be suicide. I picked one of them to focus on, and unloaded with everything I had while trying to bob and weave through the incoming fire from the other two. I was taking hits, but my target was beginning to billow smoke – in a few more shots he would go down and I could grab my spoils and run.

Only there wouldn’t be a few more shots. I was out of ammo, and out of the resources I needed to craft any. With three Sentinels bearing down on me, my shields on the verge of giving out, and my thermal protection layer eroding away by the second, the only sane thing to do was to hightail it back to the ship. I make a run for it, jumping into the cockpit with barely any health left, and taking off in the nick of time with the three Sentinels still giving chase. A daring escape for sure, but I wasn’t out of the woods yet.

Sentinels aren’t the only peacekeepers in the galaxy, and as soon as I broke free of the toasty planet’s atmosphere, an enemy fighter was in hot pursuit. Much less imposing than the hulking cruisers that felled me before, I dispatch him with relative ease. I take my finger off the throttle and just float in space for a moment until my wanted stars blink away. I ponder how the last pieces that I needed slipped through my fingers as a trade ship or two whiz gently by to a nearby docking station.

What I’ve written here is just the CliffsNotes version though. There was an in-atmosphere dog-fight that ended poorly, there was the time I blew open a building I wasn’t supposed to be in, and another time when I spent a cold, harsh night evading deadly predatory animals. Survival really is the beating heart of this gorgeous, enigmatic beast. Only time will tell if my 20th or 200th hours with No Man’s Sky will hold a similar sense of driving purpose, but my first two most certainly did, and that’s a good start.