After playing all of those stealth and shooter games (Bio-Shock Infinite, Assassin's Creed: Origins, Borderlands, and the Dishonored trilogy), the Fantasy Desk wanted a change of pace and, boy, did we ever get it!

No Man's Sky is close to plotless - there's some sequential quests and tasks you can make your way through if you so choose, although they're eminently ignorable and you're not only free but actually encouraged to just go explore on your own.  Your player, your on-screen avatar, is nameless and faceless and totally devoid of any personality other than what you instill into it.  Not unlike Minecraft, which it actually resembles in a number of ways, the game is basically just about exploring an infinite universe and making your own way through the cosmos.

The selling point of No Man's Sky, it's hook if you will, is that the player can travel among a literally endless series of computer-generated worlds.  The claim is that every world is unique, devised by a computer algorithm that determines the planet's temperature, the chemistry of the atmosphere, the flora and fauna present, the minerals, and the level of danger.  Since the computer spontaneously generates each world at which you arrive, the variety and number of planets is virtually limitless.  I've read that the game is capable of generating over 18 quintillion unique planets.  That's a lot of places to visit.

The reality is that after visiting a dozen or so planets, they all start to look the same, or at least fall into one of a half dozen of so categories (Earth-like planet, desert planet, weirdo planet, ice planet, etc.).  You've seen those mineral formations before, those little animals, those gangly trees, and so on.  Each planet has identical "cargo drops" from other spacecraft to find, and "broken machinery" to repair for bonus points, and alien artifacts to discover.  Maybe it's not exactly the same, and the geography is certainly always different, but each planet is most certainly not a completely unexpected experience. 

But that's okay, it's still fun harvesting a few resources from one planet and then blasting off in your little starship to the next, or visiting a space station to buy and sell supplies, or constructing a home base.  So basically, the game is Minecraft - you explore a procedurally generated., deterministic, open world environment, collect stuff, bring it home and craft your stuff into gear, a home, fuel, and other useful stuff.   With no boss adversary to defeat, you basically can keep playing for weeks or months or even years - you can keep going until you're finally bored of the game and are ready to play something else.

Since Labor Day Monday when we downloaded the game, we've played for some 45 hours so far and are willing to keep going some more, at least for now, especially since we've finally starting to get the hang of it and have learned how to find or craft most of the stuff we need for our space journey.  But just like in real life, the nagging question still remains - what is the point of it all?

So, you may be wondering, do we like the game or not?  Honestly, we don't really know - we're generally not enthusiastic about firing it up and starting it each evening, although we're not adverse to the idea either, but we find that once we start, we have a difficult time stopping.  So in other words, it's like eating pistachios - you don't care if you have the first one or not, but once you do, you'll finish the whole bag before you're done.