The aliens of No Man’s Sky, In Other Waters, and Eternal Cylinder

When we talk about exploring alien worlds in gaming, it’s hard to pick a game that represents the classic sci-fi promise of alien life better than No Man’s Sky. From its pulp paperback aesthetic to the breathless euphoria evoked by its presentation of unexplored distant frontiers, it’s as much a love letter to the foundational ideas of sci-fi as the procedural generation tech that powers it. Creator Sean Murray has often cited the ‘big three’ writers – Clarke, Asimov, and Heinlein – as key influences.

Still, the kind of exploration No Man’s Sky offers is a strange thing. There are worlds beyond counting that we seek out to experience on their own terms, but we also leave our mark on them. We marvel at their undisturbed flora and fauna and then plant a flag in the ground and catalogue their vistas and oddities. As fictional explorers, these places fill us with wonder, and so we covet them, precisely because of their untouched beauty. We observe them in awe, then stake our claim. It’s like going to a tranquil lake precisely for the lure of its tranquillity, then hurling a stone into it to mark our arrival.

No Man’s Sky is by no means alone in this approach, and its extraterrestrial ecologies still brim with marvels. But there are portrayals of alien landscapes that either lessen humanity’s importance in their stories, or remove them from the picture entirely. Human agnostic ecologies that thrive, unrecorded, bubbling with strange diversity. Recently, no other game has fit that bill better than ACE Team’s The Eternal Cylinder, an arrestingly creative spin on survival with a central premise hinging on the Spore-like evolution of an alien species called The Trebhum.

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