No Man's Sky, after all of the hype and the flak and the silence and the contreversy, stands as one of the most interesting if flawed games of the decade. You start your journey in one of a quintillion completely unique but somewhat samey planets as you collect resources to repair your ship, learn the language of the alien races that have populated the universe, and investigate the strange anomalies that pop up in a small fraction of the solar systems that you visit. The game does nothing particularly well: its item inventory screen is a pain, combat is spongy, the controls are sluggish, and the story underdeveloped, but as a whole it provides some feeling of the vastness of space that is initially breathtaking, then depressing, then frustrating. If this game was supposed to be a metaphor for the feeling of being utterly alone in this universe then it succeeds gracefully, if its goals were literally anything else then it stands as an abject failure. There are a few points in this game where you land on an unknown and unnamed plannet and see an elephant with the head of a fly, or see the sun be eclipsed by a moon during an acid rainstorm, or find the anomalies for the first time that are truly majestic. Unfortunately, they probably aren't worth the million other moments where you are bored out of your mind.
It's not good. It's not old. It's not a game.
