No Man’s Sky, the survival-exploration game that first came out for the PC and the PlayStation in 2016, is full of beautiful planets. In every galaxy you can find thousands of vividly coloured paradises, directly inspired by mid-20th-century science-fiction book covers, with fat, backlit moons hanging heavily just over the horizon. You could take your time gathering resources to fix your little spaceship under the cool light of a planet’s rings, studying the exotic flora and fauna, and leisurely exploring the alien terrain on foot.
But that is not where you begin.
When you begin a new No Man’s Sky playthrough, your hapless spacefarer will appear on a planet that cannot support human life. In fact, your starting planet will probably try to kill you as soon as the load screen fades. You could wake up in the midst of a firestorm, the synthetic voice in your helmet snidely warning you that the temperature outside is hot enough to melt lead. Or perhaps you’ll find yourself on a toxic planet, the edges of your vision slowly turning green as your suit tries, and probably fails, to filter out ammonia. In my case, the planet where I started was highly radioactive, and I had to decide moment-by-moment whether I should search for sodium to power the detox system in my suit, or jog around looking for shelter so that I could get my bearings under a sickly yellow sky. I eventually found shelter—or, perhaps I should say that shelter found me, since I fell through a crevasse into a massive underground cave network. The radioactivity didn’t bother me down there, thanks to a quirk in the game that makes underground zones safe from all environmental hazards, but it took me nearly half an hour of real time to dig myself out.
Players in No Man’s Sky cannot choose where in the galaxy they begin, and many new characters die before completing the tutorial. (I didn’t, but it was a near thing.) Every so often, someone on Reddit politely requests a less brutal opening scene, so that a new player could learn the game’s mechanics without having to worry about freezing to death or suffering from blood poisoning within the first ten minutes. But this is not the way the game works: your place in the universe is random, and you simply have to begin on the planet you’re given.
It was the last week of March. The school where I worked invited us, then eventually ordered us, to work from home. The provost posted a video warning staff that layoffs would come. She looked tired. I predicted, correctly it turned out, that my position would be made redundant before the end of the summer. But like everyone else, I tried to soldier on, learning Zoom and Microsoft Teams, starting a sourdough, picking out cute masks on Etsy. In the evenings I played No Man’s Sky.
Early marketing materials for No Man’s Sky made much of the fact that the game provided eighteen quintillion planets to explore. Eighteen quintillion! That’s eighteen with another eighteen zeroes! If I visited one planet per second, it would take more than thirty times the age of the (real) universe to see them all! The planets were procedurally generated, using an algorithm that spun out mountains, shorelines, rocks, plants, animals. Every solar system was assigned a space station populated with a handful of aliens who might provide maps or supplies. Every single object and creature was named—with a random series of syllables, to be sure, but named.
Everybody who purchased the game was visiting the same universe, but that universe was so immense that it was very unlikely that any of us would ever cross paths. Something seemed magical to me—it still does—about the idea that I can give a friend the coordinates to my little outpost and that she can visit it if she likes, docking in the landing bay I built and inspecting the buildings I clumsily assembled from local woods. This, even as the odds of us encountering each other in normal play (or, indeed, seeing any other player at all) were vanishingly small.
It seemed like the perfect game for quarantine, especially after I became unemployed and needed to find a way to fill the suddenly-empty hours. Unlike most role-playing games, which would eventually run out of dialogue and plot and quests, and unlike most action games, whose final boss was theoretically defeatable for good, NMS promised to provide a brand-new place to see, every second if I needed it, until the end of the world.
The first reviews of No Man’s Sky were harsh. Players were disappointed in how little there was to do. How could a game have eighteen quintillion planets and nothing to do? There was no real plot, and not much of a quest beyond using local materials to improve your ship enough to fly to a new place with better materials. Critics claimed that the number of planets seemed, from a player’s point of view, disappointingly low: some were pink and others were brown and others were orange, and some had water and some didn’t, and some had rings or moons, but after a few dozen landings they all started to look sort of samey. The animals could be funny, assembled from an algorithm so that some looked kind of like deer and others looked more like walking mushrooms and still others looked like dinosaurs. But even then there was a sameness, a sense that a computer had simply cross-referenced body parts (hooves, fins, tentacles) on a table and presented a random combination in a vaguely animal-ish shape.
I didn’t buy the game when it came out in 2016, but it came back onto my radar when my city went into lockdown a few years later. No Man’s Sky and its developer, Hello Games, had since made a comeback that was unusual in computer gaming history. The version of the game that I played in 2020 was already very different from the initial release, and by the time I purchased the game it had expanded features like underwater exploration, massive customizable frigates, and even something of a narrative plot guided by the memories of someone called Artemis. The game I played was a beautiful and compelling one, and I put more than two hundred meditative hours into it in quarantine. I suspect that even the early reviews may have been unfair, driven by a disappointment about hype rather than flaws with the game itself.
All that said, NMS even at its best is a strangely lonely experience. Your avatar wears a form-obscuring spacesuit topped with a spherical helmet of dark glass; you never see its face, and you are never asked to give it a name or a gender. (The aliens are not gendered either; every sentient creature in the game uses the pronoun “they”). Though the aforementioned space stations are lightly populated by creatures of three different species, you begin the game knowing nothing of any of their languages, and every dialogue is gibberish. (You can learn a single word at a time, either by asking an alien to teach you or by visiting “knowledge stones” on planets. Watching the nonsense sentences slowly fill in known words was one of the more satisfying aspects of the game for me.) You fly your ship alone, land clumsily on uneven terrain, and walk around, gathering organic and metallic elements with your mining laser. Occasionally you’ll encounter a structure: a storage container with a chair inside it, or a sleek black monolith, or a mostly-buried ruin, or an outpost with a single resident. But much more often, you will go hours without seeing anything but rocks and wild plants. Sometimes there is a blizzard or a heatstorm or acid rain, and you need to hide for a while, waiting for the robotic voice in your helmet to tell you it’s safe to go outside again.
A vast universe of possibilities, vague environmental threats, an anxious emptiness, and the gnawing feeling that maybe this is all there is. The game seemed to be an echo of my own life during lockdown. Before the real horrors of Covid-19 had fully revealed themselves to me, I dared to wonder whether quarantine might be fun. When my employer first told us to work from home, I suddenly had three more hours in a day, formerly wasted in a downtown commute, hours which I could spend on any of… well, eighteen quintillion projects. I could learn a new language! Fix the crooked blinds that had been bothering me for nearly a decade! Start knitting again! Read for pleasure! Before Covid, I had often fantasized about what it might be like to be able to afford to go part-time and spend the extra hours doing things I enjoyed. Strictly speaking, they didn’t even need to be things I enjoyed. Chores seemed less daunting if I could perform them slowly and on my own terms, in a way that didn’t eat up the scarce time I had to myself. But now I did have those extra hours in a day—three, at first, then all of them after I got laid off—and instead of filling my time with hobbies, or chores, or anything at all, I just scrolled dully through Twitter or flew around in No Man’s Sky. My days were both filled with potential and terrifyingly pointless. I could walk for hours in any direction and not see another soul, not know how to find shelter when the next storm came.
There are no planetside cities in No Man’s Sky. The closest the game comes is the “trade outpost”, which might have half a dozen aliens milling about, keeping plenty of social distance in a massive open-air structure that hosts landing pads for starships that come and go. Though some of the visiting pilots will trade with you, most exchanges of goods are between you and a metal cube roughly the size of a microwave hovering in the centre of the complex. There are no roads or land vehicles anywhere on any planet, unless you yourself build them. There are very few shelters, nowhere near enough to house even the scattered population you meet, and most of the ones you find are abandoned. The critics of four years ago thought that this felt unrealistic; what language or culture could even persist across thousands of light-years without managing to make a single real settlement, or even, say, a kitchen?
But in the age of Covid-19, I know I am not the only one who has scrolled through eerie photos of an empty Times Square or Shibuya Crossing, or watched video of slow pans across stadiums where football games are played to no audiences. The cheeky meme that often accompanies these photos on Twitter says, nature is healing, we are the virus. And it turns out, without spoiling too much of NMS’s slender plot, that this regrowth is happening throughout the universe. Things might look empty, but there’s a reason, and it might not be forever.
We are still in quarantine as I write this, and everything is changing so fast that I can’t pretend to write a conclusion for these thoughts. But I do want to end on a hopeful note. I am not the first to congratulate Hello Games for shaking off their troubling start and working hard to create a viable game, generously offering every patch and expansion to all players for free. So in the limited, game-dev sense, it’s heartening to see that it’s possible to return from failure and frustration and fear of the future.
But my broader point is on a larger scale. I reject the capitalist axiom that our productivity defines our value as human beings, though at the same time my mental and financial health have been tested sorely by the emptiness of quarantine. Like many of us, I am trying to be gentle with myself for failing to make the most of this simultaneously limitless and suffocating world we’re in, where unemployment means lots of free time but no money and no certainty about the future; and where the threat of contagion means lots of new places to explore—virtually, or outside—but no people to do it with safely. I think that No Man’s Sky has something to teach us about that. I’ve learned that it’s just as natural to be bored and frustrated by eighteen quintillion planets as it is to be awestruck by them. And that sometimes you have to hide underground for a while until the storm is over.
Miriam Oudin is a lapsed academic who can turn just about anything into a double dactyl. She has contributed stories and essays to several collections, including Fractured: Tales of the Canadian Post-Apocalypse and Chicks Dig Gaming. She lives and works in the traditional territories of the Treaty 7 First Nations and the Métis of Region 3.