Remember when Thanos snapped his fingers and killed half the life in the universe? Well, imagine he had Infinity Gauntlets on both hands, and maybe Infinity Booties on his feet, and he kept snapping, punching, sneaking, and punching like crazy until all life in the universe was nothing but dust. Everything but you.
That's the tone in Adrift, a new expedition for No Man's Sky, where you “explore an abandoned universe” by yourself, “with no other life forms, no tents, no help.” Those cute aliens? Missing. Bustling space stations? More like arrested. You are alone, Traveler. Check out the haunting and lonely trailer above.
It's worth noting that the claim that “there are no life forms” is not exactly what the advance seems to be. You can immediately see various types of those strange monsters with wriggling tentacles, a sandworm abruptly jumps into the air, and other winged creatures appear in the sky. So there are still bugs to discover and catalogue, but there are no intelligent life out there: there are no NPCs, no merchants, no friendly aliens or robots to chat with or buy ships or run into at a remote outpost. Any buildings you find will be rusted and abandoned, and the space stations will be damaged and empty.
But all hope is not lost. You can roam the eerily abandoned universe in style with a new type of customizable spaceship called the Iron Vulture, which looks pretty sickly in the trailer, especially with the new propulsion types. There's also a “new class of ghostly frigate” that looks like a badly damaged starship that you can add to your fleet, so at least you'll have some company and a lonely void.
“Although you will all awaken on the desolate and infested planet Iapezuk, you will not be together in the usual sense,” Hello Games tells us in a press release. “The boundaries between realities have thickened. Communication is consumed by static. Even the normally bustling Space Anomaly is eerily quiet.
“In this abandoned universe, deprived of the support of merchants and merchants, self-sufficiency is more critical than ever. Survive a series of repair, exploration and combat challenges, and meditate in the darkness of deep space.”
As a survival experience, it looks like an interesting and probably quite challenging way to play No Man's Sky. If there really are no stores, that means there are no galactic terminals either. That's mainly what I use to buy and sell the things I need. If that's not part of Adrift, I imagine it will be quite difficult to progress.
However, I like the idea of being the only intelligent life in the universe. It was a little strange when No Man's Sky was first released that every planet you went to was dotted with structures, outposts, landing pads, and other buildings. It really took away the feeling of being an explorer when every time you landed on some strange, faraway planet, you immediately found an outpost with some Gek guy chilling there. It made it feel less like an unknown frontier and more like a galactic parking lot.
Completing the Expedition will reward an exclusive set of collectibles: “the rodent scuttler companion, a supply of stealth starship paint, a ghostly frigate, and the exclusive Iron Vulture starship.” And as with other limited-time Expeditions, those rewards will be available in all of your other Space Anomaly saves.
Adrift launches today and will run for seven weeks.
