Black holes are phenomena so special and unique in the universe that not even light can escape them. Unless, of course, you are the character of Matthew McConaughey in Interstellar, no living being will really know what is inside them.
In my explorations of No Man’s Sky, I was immediately excited when the game indicated that a black hole was a few light years away from me.
Up to that point, my experience with the Hello Games launch had gone from an exciting initial glimpse and discovery, as you can see in the first impressions post, to the dull and repetitive doldrums it became over time.
They are planets that are not attractive to explore, with structures repeated in every new system and always the same resources to collect and continue the journey. A black hole was just what the game needed to get interesting again.
Finding Black Holes In No Man’s Sky
In No Man’s Sky, black holes can appear from time to time and serve as a shortcut to get faster to the goal at the center of the universe, making the player jump a few hundred light years (which makes them serve as a hypothetical Wormhole).
Just as many players have built huge expectations on the game over the last few years, I was again euphoric and curious to see how No Man’s Sky would represent traveling through black holes.
The least I wanted was to experience something similar to what we saw in some scenes of Interstellar, but more interactively: fascinating, yes, but also frightening and almost magical.
Inside A Black Hole In No Man’s Sky
One of the most exciting phenomena in the universe is a screen with lights going by like a rave party: a disguised loading where the game could have played with so many things.
In the same way that Christopher Nolan had his poetic-scientific freedom to represent them in the film, Hello Games could have made this interaction the most memorable and impactful.
But the experience is not at all exciting. It represents everything wrong with No Man’s Sky, which has the entire universe and its incredible phenomena as a scenario. Still, it only turns this exploration into something as dull as a science teacher reading a book in the classroom, making everyone fall asleep.
With more than 100,000 light years to the center of the universe, I can’t see anything that would make me want to keep playing No Man’s Sky, especially after this disappointment.