Ben Griggs

SEED is a game that wasn’t on my radar until right before it came to early access, which may seem strange since it’s been in development for years. My only explanation is that my radar must have limited range. At any rate, when news started to trickle in about a life simulator with an always-on persistent world where your character continues to live life even when you’re not tending to them, my interest was piqued. How would this even work? How well would it work?

Throughout the ebbs and flows of my MMO experiences, I’ve found my patience for the genre slowly eroding over time as the thousandth NPC asks for help on the millionth task in a never-ending cycle of corruption, cleansing, evil incursion, and ingredient-gathering. The one exception – though it’s not immune to these tropes – is a game I seem to return to on the regular: Lord of the Rings Online. I was in this space a year ago, talking about my return to the game after nearly a decade away.

To be honest, I never thought I’d get into No Man’s Sky. In fact, my latest attempt isn’t the first time I’ve tried. On two previous occasions, I’ve jumped into my red exosuit and donned my trusty multitool, only to fade away after a few days. But this time, something finally clicked, and it clicked hard. I think the problem I’ve had in my previous attempts at the game was the same thing that irritates me about all survival games in the early stages: the tedium of the survival aspect.