The history of No Man's Sky is one of anger and lamentations, of hysteria and disappointment. A creator's imagination returned against himself; a small, hopeful ideal bloated by an industry and its consumers, and the violent, vindictive response of the latter, expectations that were impossible to meet and impossible to stop. Along Metal Gear Solid 2 and its secret protagonist, it is perhaps one of the most controversial game in the short history of the medium, regardless of its actual content. The shadow of its supposed "fiasco" still towers over the game itself and its defenders.
One day, we will need to question the myth of the "uber-game", the boundless game of endless gameplay possibilities and the type of entitled, all-powerful player that this myth creates and unleashes upon the world. We will need to think about how games are sold and marketed as absolute promises and not possibilities, the absolute madness of game expos pandering to their audience, the incredible amount of time spent on pre-release material as opposed to the finished product. But this is not the time for me...
Because what is truly the most shocking thing in No Man's Sky is how it refuses to place its player in the center of the universe - to give them the role of the one and only prophet, the powerful savior (a human being, obviously) to which the entire world must obey in their quest. Instead, playing No Man's Sky is similar to visiting a strange, faraway land, having no knowledge of the language of the culture, always asking for directions and translations, living from day to day. Feelings of melancholy and smallness arise from this life, but not ones of sadness or desperation. Feelings that run contrary to the powerful colonialist and completionist fantasies of modern video games, even those present inside the game's mechanics: Does one really discovers new species, new planets, new worlds where other people have already established themselves? What remains of the ideal of supreme and universal knowledge if all this knowledge can never be discovered inside the life of one man, one civilization, one species? How can a man be great and powerful, towering above a landscape, inside a universe that is infinitely more great and powerful than he will ever be?
Despite such questions, the vision of science-fiction promoted by No Man's Sky is undoubtedly positive, optimist, colourful and relaxed - the complete opposite to the thousands post-apocalyptic works that are the sign of the times, of the plain, sterile future sold by Silicon Valley. Without weighty feeling of urgency, the player's attention should not be on the gigantic, but the minuscule, the benign, straying frequently from the paths of the important missions put in place by the game (reaching the center, meeting the Atlas) for tasks that are more personal, more spontaneous. Living from day to day, from waypoint to waypoint. Landing on a planet, a player might find themselves two minutes away from a point of interest; arrived to their destination, a new point would appear, and another, and another, and another. Progressing from one place to another, this is how the player peacefully loses themselves in landscapes, soundscapes, roaming without a precise idea, without haste. No Man's Sky has much more in common with Journey and Proteus than it has with Minecraft or Elite: Dangerous. This walk in the park, this fluorescent forest, this quiet desert, this is the dream of the techno-hippies of the past, children of Brain Eno, Steve Reich, The Orb, Aphex Twin, Fuck Buttons, and Boards of Canada; artists that managed to extract from computers and technology a certain nostalgia of the future.
"Nostalgia" is the right word to describe No Man's Sky. I am not talking about the reactionary definition pushed by many (What was before was much better than what is today.), but the true definition, drenched in melancholy: what was before is lost forever, and will never be again. Time and space separates us from our memories, and we are unable to stop it. Yet those distant moments haunting us throughout No Man's Sky do not come from an exterior reality, our childhood or even another game that Hello Games wants to reference. Those memories exist inside No Man's Sky itself, scattered here and there on our path; they are not anecdotes, they are atmospheres. To play No Man's Sky is in some way to accept the ephemeral: to accept that it is impossible to explore and "complete" the entire world, to accept leaving galaxies behind, with no possibility of return. It is to make peace with our own insignificance. It is also to find beauty, not in environments expressively built and compressed for our own pleasure, but in happy accidents of the virtual, lost between the banal and the chaotic.
All that tethers me to those memories, to my previous travels, are the pictures I've taken in Photo Mode - a functionality that was strangely absent on the game's original release. More than any other tool or weapon, this camera is the only one that can fight against time, space, and the ephemeral. I still sometimes look at those picture today, those thousands of calculations compressed in one instant. I have no hope to find those past places in the future, nor do I want to. I do not even know what I felt precisely at the moment I took those photographs, what came before or after, all I know is I felt something. Something that made me capture this instant for all eternity.
As I'm writing this, the NEXT update will be released online next week. The world I explored, its galaxies, its habitants, all of this will no longer exist in its actual form. You could even consider this text as obsolete. All that shall remain will be the memories of a lost world, distant but very much alive.