Pushing Buttons: Forget Starfield – No Man’s Sky is still the space adventure where you are truly free

In this week's newsletter: Maligned on its 2016 release, No Man's Sky offers a richer, more human-centred drama than the Bethesda blockbuster's empty experience

Don't get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up here

Like several million other video game players, I spent many hours last week travelling the galaxy in Starfield, the latest adventure from Bethesda, the creator of Fallout and the Elder Scrolls. But as with a number of my colleagues in the games press, I have spent much of this time wondering what it is about the game that's not quite right, that's lacking somehow.

The consensus - summed up neatly in Eurogamer's review and this PCGamesN op-ed - is that the game adheres too closely to the well-worn structure of modern open-world games, where an inescapable main narrative is bulked up with optional side challenges that give the illusion of freedom, without any of the substance or unpredictability, or indeed actual freedom. Starfield represents a highly commodified form of exploration in which player adventures are channeled into endless fetch quests and box-ticking busywork. You're free, but you're unable to create any meaning or narrative of your own. You are there to shop, to consume; it is the wonder of the cosmos repackaged into a tract about capitalist realism.