Your journey through the cosmos begins like a dream. You manifest on an unfamiliar planet, unsure of who or even what you are. A downed starship begs for repair. Scant instructions flash across your visor, telling you about the materials you need to fix it. Walking, running and jetpacking across the landscape, you destroy plants and minerals to gather resources. You stand in awe of enormous blue trees and run from what resembles a cross between a dingo and a raptor as it nips at your heels. A blue bar slowly decreases until you realize that it is -48 degrees Celsius on this strange world. You worry your first night will be your last. Panic drives you ahead until you have gathered all of the iron, carbon, platinum and plutonium you can carry. An eye steadily fixed on your life-support systems as you march back to your wrecked vessel. Perform the fixes. Sit in the warm cockpit. Engage thrusters. Point the ship towards the stars. Activate pulse drive. And as the rushing wind changes to the light of a billion alien stars, only one thought enters your mind: fly. Welcome to the universe of No Man’s Sky.

For years, No Man’s Sky enticed video gamers with its unbridled potential. Developer Hello Games, fronted by the passionate if shy Sean Murray, unveiled their project at the end of 2013 to much fanfare. Gamers eagerly awaited delivery on the promise of spacefaring in a way no video game had before. According to Murray, players would be able to explore a virtual universe filled with procedurally generated planets, each home to unique landforms, biodiversity and remnants of alien life to discover. While many felt the final game did not warrant the years of staggering expectation when released last August, what remains is a sci-fi experience unlike most others. No Man’s Sky fulfills what many games seek to evoke but fail to, namely a real sense of traveling through uncharted worlds.

The thrill of the game is the journey. At any point in No Man’s Sky, players can hover their cursors over on-screen markers and find out exactly how long the trip to that point will be based on their current speed. When walking along a planet’s surface, this timer usually reads out as a few minutes. A recharging sprint ability and a jetpack allow you to close the gap while climbing hills, avoiding cliffs and descending valleys on your way to whatever has piqued your attention. These small trips contain all the dangers of walks through a new area without your smartphone’s GPS. You move too high up thinking the destination is just over the next ridge. You take a detour into a cavern overflowing with neon green minerals and glowing plants only to find that its exit has led you several minutes further away from your marker. When you finally arrive, your reward almost never lives up to the effort. It does not matter, because there is a new marker, just a five minute walk away, waiting to be found.

Remember that ship you fixed? When you tire of slowly walking, you can fly over a planet. The aerial view lets you find installations and life forms more easily, turns twenty minute treks into two minute flights and speeds travel up. You can also aim your ship at the sky and seamlessly fly from one planetary surface to another. One of the greatest thrills No Man’s Sky has to offer comes when piloting out of atmosphere, avoiding asteroids and hostile alien ships, seeing a planet looming in the distance and being told your flight there will take hours. Gameplay mechanics mean you never end up taking that long, but I am constantly tempted to take the plunge and float quietly through the vacuum whilst watching the undiscovered celestial body grow larger and larger.

Eventually No Man’s Sky opens up to intergalactic travel. Your scantily explained mission is to reach the galaxy’s center, but you could spend all of your time exploring the solar systems within immediate reach and never exhaust your supply. I once opened the game’s galaxy map and floated from star to star to see which had been discovered thus far. Very, very few solar systems had ever been touched by a human player, and the innumerable lights on my screen tell me that very, very few will ever be.

The fulfilled promise of No Man’s Sky, an objectively boring game with a bad title, is that you can wander from one end of a planet, or solar system, or galaxy, to another, and never see it all, never discover all of its secrets, and never feel anything but joyful for it. It provides a sense of childlike wonder evoked by the finest travel experiences. It is the virtual intragalactic embodiment of the nonpareil road trip which can only be achieved in dreams.