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No Man's Sky is a perplexing game. It plays out like a slowly unraveling mystery in both gameplay mechanics and narrative. Ignoring the vast majority of the pre-release hype, the game appealed to my taste for exploration and the basic gameplay loop is relaxing enough to pair with the interstelllar exploration goal that takes up the bulk of the game. Cool Ghosts produced an analysis of No Man's Sky that I largely agree with. This game however is like the Elder Scrolls and Fallout series in that your mileage may vary. Buying in to the world is far more of a necessity in NMS than it is in a Bethesda game, but the concept is the same. That being said, Sean Murray is captain of a mysterious and terribly frustrating ship. I have no idea what to expect in terms of support for the game in the form of content patches or DLC. I have grown tired of the current iteration of NMS. I have little to no respect for absolute silence, all I need is a single tentative timeline talking about what...

I was recently reading this article by Rock Paper Shotgun 's contributor Sin Vega. I was suddenly reminded of the numerous struggles I've had when trying to convey any sense of history or meaningful presence as a Game Master in various tabletop role-playing games. Surely video games have an advantage in this arena as they offer a real physical place in relation to your character(s), which is simply impossible to maintain beyond small arenas in the tabletop realm. However, the elegance and effectiveness of purely using imagination to fill in the holes you didn't even know were present in a setting is pretty spectacular. A person... ...in a place. It's totally acceptable if a game has idiosyncrasies all over the place, but hits just enough marks to convince your brain that its setting is a real enough place. Fallout 4 is a game full of "jank" on multiple levels. In terms of believability, the skeletons that litter its world only make s...