Just imagine a game where no one is a winner or a loser, where you get to travel to more than 18 quintillion planets, where you are unlikely to meet any other players, and where the self-generating environment will take you four billion years to explore.

That doesn’t sound like a winner at all. And yet, No Man’s Sky, developed by indie studio Hello Games for Playstation 4 and Microsoft Windows, has taken the proverbial world by storm and is generating rave reviews.

No Man’s Sky is essentially a game of exploration. You play as an astronaut piloting a spacecraft from one planet to the next – you start your journey on an undiscovered planet, the surface of which no other player has ever walked. Once you have had your fill exploring your planet with all its caves, waterfalls, canyons and lakes, you board your ship, take off and start your tour of the galaxy.

What the game does particularly well is combining scale and detail. The galaxy is quasi-infinite, with millions of planets dotting the atmosphere. Yet every planet has its own unique characteristics: on one, the tall palm trees reach towards a green sky and explode in an orange blaze, and on another, the landscape is populated with antelope-like creatures. Planets are either bright or dark, sunny or wet with mist, radioactive or safe for life.

The biodiversity is just staggering and every creature and machine – depicted with artistic bravery and a hint of 19th century space travel nostalgia – has its own routine, regardless of whether gamers decide to interact with them: animals drink during the daytime and then retreat to the hills. Space freighters plod through the sky according to trade routes and a specific timetable. All behaviour is based on the game’s mathematics.

As a space-bound Christopher Columbus, your destiny is in your own hands. You can either stay on your own planet and chart its terrain, day by day, month by month. Or you can take off and try to reach the centre of the universe, meeting other players on the way – although that, with an environment that consists of 18 quintillion planets, is highly unlikely.

No Man’s Game may, on paper, sound like a lonely, nomadic pursuit bordering on the boring. However, every move you make is unique and an achievement in itself. Indeed, the game itself is an achievement – Hello Games is a small studio that, with a tiny development team, has managed to create an incredibly scaled universe that is ripe for exploration.

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