No Man's Sky

We don't particularly like the video game No Man's Sky and yet we can't stop playing it.

After playing through several role-playing games, first-person shooters, and stealth missions, and some games that were various combinations of those elements, we decided that it was time for a change of pace.  No Man's Sky is a science-fiction space-exploration game, and all that we knew about it was that it had a virtually limitless number of computer-generated planets to explore.  It sounded different and we decided to give it a try.

But wandering around planets endlessly collecting plants and minerals is all there is to the game.  Literally.  There is no real storyline, other than an endless number of missions you can choose to take on if you so wish although you can ignore them all if you want and most of which are just gathering the same plants and minerals for others as you do for yourself - in other words, it's the same thing you're doing anyway.

The game breaks down into a relentless series of sequential tasks that have to be repeated over and over again.  For example, to fly your starship, essential for getting around in the game, you need take-off fuel just to get off the ground.  The fuel is made from hydrogen crystals that for some reason are found all over every single planet.  So before you lift off, first you have to collect some hydrogen crystals.  Oh, and some iron too, because you have to craft a metal container to hold the hydrogen fuel.  

But that's just the start.  To gather the hydrogen and iron that you need, you have to use a mining ray gun that's fueled by carbon, which means you have to harvest a bunch of vegetation and trees first. And once you're finally up in space, you need thruster fuel for interplanetary travel, which is fueled by tritium, which you can find on asteroids out in space. So to get from Planet X to Planet Y, first you have to gather a bunch of carbon-based vegetation, then use the carbon to power a ray gun to obtain hydrogen and iron, and then craft a fuel cell with that hydrogen and iron to get off a planet and up into space, where you then have to obtain tritium for actual space travel.  Not that you're likely to make it all the way to the next planet without running out of fuel first and have to stop and gather more tritium to complete the trip.

All this is complicated by the game design, which only allots the player about a dozen or so cells to hold all the stuff that's gathered, and each cell only holds a restricted number of each item.  F'rinstance,  one cell only holds 250 tritium units, but fueling the thrust launcher requires 200 tritium units, which isn't enough to get you to the next planet, so you have to stop and refuel, and once you land on the next planet, as you can probably guess by now, you're now out of launch fuel, so off you go again to find more carbon-based flora, hydrogen fuel and iron for crafting a fuel cell. Over and over and over again.

On top of all this, your playable character has no real personality - you can't even see their face for the space helmet they always have to wear.  I couldn't care less about the character's fate, although the game is also vanilla bland with no real or present danger -  you really have to fall asleep at the console to die in game.  So, redundant game play, no story line, no sense of identification with the character ot anyone else in the game, and no excitement or sense of danger.

So why can't we stop playing?  Since Labor Day, we've logged 105 hours of game play, and spent more hours this weekend than we care to admit playing the game.  There's something almost hypnotic about the simplicity and redundancy of the game, and the never-ending spiral of having to complete one task first before completing the next, so that you can then move on to the one after that, and so on and so on.  We have absolutely zero desire to play when we're not in the game - we almost have to force ourselves to boot the game up, but once we're in it, we literally can't stop.  We've played until one, two o'clock and later on weeknights, and to near dawn on weekends.  It's bordering on the pathological, and it's clear that there's no end to the game - you just keep gathering carbon and hydrogen and iron and tritium on a near infinite number of planets.

Assassin's Creed Odyssey dropped last week and we expect to download that soon, and once we're playing a real game with a plot and likeable characters and some purpose to playing, we'll probably look back at No Man's Sky and laugh at ourselves for wasting so much time.

If, that is, we ever gt ourselves to stop playing No Man's Land and take on something else.