Could this be the game you were searching for?
If the dull corridors of Montpetit have your eyes glazing over or your syllabus has already got you daydreaming about adventure, then you probably need an escape into the world of video games.
But what game to play? With such a large selection and varying genres, it can be overwhelming to decide what to play next. The best part of video games is arguably their variety, especially if you like trying new things and exploring niche genres
In this case, No Man’s Sky might just be the escape you’re looking for.
Unlike a lot of recent blockbuster releases, this game prioritizes exploration over combat. This idea is hammered home from the very beginning, since you start out by standing next to your crashed ship on an unidentified planet. From there, you walk around using your mining laser to gather up the resources needed to fix the ship.
Once repaired, you can use your ship to hop from planet to planet, eventually gathering enough resources to build a hyperdrive and jump to new star systems. Along the way, you will find the occasional alien with whom you can trade goods and knowledge. However, each alien species has its own language, which must be learnt word by word.
According to the developer Hello Games, the game contains over 18 quintillion procedurally generated planets, and every single one of those planets can be explored. Each planet has its own unique environment, ranging from the extremely cold to the very radioactive.
Each new animal species can be scanned and uploaded to the Atlas, a galactic database containing all the discoveries made by every player.
There are also space stations in every system along with some fleets of ships. But watch out, because some of those ships are manned by pirates that will not hesitate to blow you out of the sky.
With that being said, the game isn’t for everyone.
You will spend most of your time chipping away at rocks, teleporting inventory from your exosuit to your ship, and hopping from little outstation to outstation. You won’t be spending your time discovering huge cities or fighting epic wars.
However, what this game allows you to do is to explore an entire universe, and encourages you to boldly go where no one has gone before. That universe is the strongest point of the game—it is endless and stunning, a fact that makes the game’s steep price of over $60 worth it, especially since the developers have promised free updates in the future.
It’s important to note that this isn’t a linear game and the developers didn’t design it with any specific goals in mind beyond the ones you make yourself—but that’s the beauty of it.
No Man’s Sky allows players to wander freely throughout the cosmos, walking paths no one has ever walked before and manages to make it enjoyable despite the sometimes dry gameplay.
For those living on a student budget, we can only hope that Morisset’s media centre picks up No Man’s Sky in the not too distant future, rendering it more accessible to us earth dwellers. 
Right, here’s what’s actually going on with those No Man’s Sky refunds https://t.co/zhxtaE1XMu pic.twitter.com/l5wifOD3Bu
— IGN 🎮 & 🎬 (@IGN) August 30, 2016
