I had been corresponding with a friend who’d been playing a recent version of No Man’s Sky and comparing it to my experience playing it just after it’d been released. We both talked about how the added layers of “gaminess” or game mechanics affect the overall feeling of the game, and then we talked about Noctis, a much older series of exploration-only games created by a man named Alessandro Ghignola, who has since apparently become a recluse, I suppose in keeping with the dream of being utterly alone in a vast universe.