This Woman's Sky

I spent my day yesterday exploring a new galaxy.

It was a rich fantasy filled with beautiful colors, interesting creatures, and greedy aliens. And terrifying hell planets where everything is trying to kill you.

My first adventure into No Man's Sky was just that - an adventure. The game is unlike anything I've ever played before. And even though most of the games I've played before are JRPGs and Mario games, that really doesn't say much, but believe me when I say that this is very new. The game doesn't have a main menu. You start up the game and you're immediately playing. Your ship has crash landed on a planet. You're just there. There's no character creation. You don't name your character - the character is just you. And it's completely first-person, so you don't even know what you look like.

But it's not like it matters. You're not there to discover yourself. It's not about you. It's about what's out there. You need to get out there. The first thing you have to do is repair your ship. Using the materials and resources you find on the planet, you can blow that popsicle stand and get your ass into space!

Wait just a minute. It's not that easy. It's not like you can just pick up a pile of rocks and throw them at your ship and wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am you're on your way. This game doesn't hold your hand. You need to repair each part of your ship before you can engage hyperdrive and jump to another star system. So if the game dumped you on one of the aforementioned hell planets to start with (because it's random where you start - my starting planet had toxic rain) you could be in for a rough time.

It took me about 3 hours to figure things out, fix my ship, and leave the first planet. I kinda wish I had spent more time there, though. Despite the toxic rain, the flora and fauna were beautiful and the animals weren't hostile. You get paid to upload data (to where, I don't know, because half the time my game was disconnected from online services - I think their servers might have been flooded - but the uploads were still supposedly working) so it's worthwhile to explore and find all the points of interest, analyze all the species of plants and animals on a planet. It can get you some serious units (that's the in-game currency). Of course, I didn't realize how to analyze the plants/animals until about my 3rd planet or so... much to my dismay. I would have definitely stayed longer on that toxic rain planet if I had realized. The toxic rain wasn't so bad. If I ducked into a cave, I could shelter from the rain. My exosuit would politely inform me "toxicity levels... rising" whenever things were getting dodgy, then inform me that they were "stabilizing" when I was under cover away from the rain.

I think the best part about the game so far is the encounters with alien species and how you learn their language. It's very slow. But you can interact with them and slowly learn one word at a time. As you interact and trade with the aliens, your reputation with them changes (increases or decreases) depending on what you do - which becomes easier the more words you learn. I feel like I'm on a diplomatic quest to learn their language.

That's what's so strange about this quest. There's no objective. There's no end. There's no way to win, no way to "beat the game." But you can still die. Believe me, I've done it. Many times already. It's kinda cool when it happens, too, because the screen goes black and in white text displayed on the screen is a classic quote by a science fiction writer.

By far the worst part in this game is the inventory management. Your starting exosuit and ship are pathetically small. For a game that encourages you to collect materials to repair and build things, it's extremely frustrating that there's just nowhere to put any of it. It's worse when you've been walking for what feels like hours across a planet and you have all this great stuff that you don't want to toss because you know that you can get some good money for it if you can find a trader or someone to sell it to, but you don't know when that will be, and you need to make room for materials to repair your life support system in your exosuit... goodbye valuable alien charm that has no use to me but to sell. I wish I could just set you down and pick you up again after repairing my life support. But that's not a thing in this game. And I can't just send it back to my ship because my ship inventory is full, too.

The best advice is to be on the lookout for drop pods because those are probably exosuit upgrades, which give you another inventory slot. As far as I know, the only way to get more inventory space on your ship is to buy a new ship. But so far I haven't seen a ship for less than 800,000u, so that's not exactly an option for me. I only have about 360,000 right now.

Something I've learned about myself is that I am a terrible pilot and it's a good thing I never became an astronaut. Space travel is not easy. Or maybe it's just me, I don't know. But I'm going to need a lot more practice before I become an ace pilot. I think I'll stick to the planet surface.

Overall, though, I'm enjoying the game. It's frustrating at times, and there are some buggy things that have been happening (no, I will NOT make the carlite plate for the Jet Pack upgrade that I made a half hour ago!), but it's a good game with a ton of potential. I'm really interested to see how good it looks on PC when that version releases on Friday. If it looks this good on PS4, it must be spectacular on a good PC.