The game places you in the role of Ember, a small creature who wakes up in a mysterious forest, and has to figure out how he can get back home. Along the way, he finds the remains of other beings like him, and by solving puzzles he helps their spirits find peace. It’s a game that’s ultimately about the search for meaning and hope when things seem particularly rough — so it couldn’t be more fitting for  the state of the world today.

Hello Games

Even though it was developed by a team of three — Burgess, Chris Symonds, and James Chilcott — The Last Campfire doesn’t feel like a small game. Its environments are colorful and richly detailed, and every screen is distinct in some way. The instrumental score and gentle narration also makes Ember’s journey feels like something out of The Lord of the Rings. In many ways, The Last Campfire couldn’t be more different than No Man’s Sky — it sets you down linear paths, and there’s little room for exploration. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing, as it makes the game feel like an interactive storybook.

Sean Murray, the founder of Hello Games, tells us that the company also approached The Last Campfire’s controls with touchscreens in mind first. “With Joe Danger, we’d come from doing a console game, and we rebuilt it pretty much completely to make it feel at home on the phone,” he said. “This time around… I think we’re at a point where the controls feel really intuitive and at home on a touchscreen.”

The Last Campfire, the new game from No Man’s Sky developer Hello Games, comes out on August 27th. It will be available on Apple Arcade, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Windows — where it’ll be exclusive to the Epic Games Store. 

Beyond a Nintendo indies showcase, we haven’t seen much of the title following its announcement in 2018. But in a post over on the PlayStation blog, Hello Games co-founder Sean Murray provides a couple of hints on what we can expect. “It’s a game about loss, hope and empathy,” he said. “You play as Ember, a lost soul in a charming but dark world. On your path you find others like you, some of whom have lost their way and turned forlorn.” 

You can take on these gauntlets solo or with a bunch of friends. Hello Games introduced cross-play last month, which means you can play with anyone on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC. No Man’s Sky was updated with VR support last year, too, if you really want to immerse yourself in the role of a scavenger.

Abandoned freighters will also contain items that you can use to beef up your own cargo-hauling starship. They’ll somehow “reflect the history of ships you’ve scavenged,” ensuring you never forget that time your best friend was trapped in a room with five alien nests.

Desolation, contains a host of smaller upgrades, too, such as better bloom lighting and lens flare, rebalanced combat, unique player titles and new missions at the Nexus on the Space Anomaly.

The free patch is the latest chapter in No Man’s Sky’s remarkable comeback story. The game underwhelmed at launch, in no small part to the dizzying expectations that the developer and its marketing materials failed to quash. The studio has stuck with the title, though, and delivered numerous updates that have won back community support and, in the eyes of many, realised the vision that was promised so many years ago.

Hello Games describes it as “a brand new adventure … The Last Campfire is the story of a lost ember trapped in a puzzling place, searching for meaning and a way home.” In the trailer, the pillow-shaped protagonist, Ember, has to light a campfire and brave an intriguing land that presents puzzles, peril and giant frogs. In one touching scene, he arrives at some kind of altar and encounters a deceased friend. The trailer is set to Lamb’s haunting As Satellites Go By.

The trailer didn’t show much gameplay, but rather emphasized the artwork and style of the world. As mentioned, it’ll arrive in the summer of 2020 on Switch, PlayStation 4, Windows PC and Xbox One.

You can also expect new deep space encounters, new lifeforms and “mysterious objects.” There will be some appreciable variety even if you don’t care for the update’s main hook, then.

The Living Ship update reflects a recent change in strategy for NMS that has seen Hello focus more on smaller but more frequent updates instead of monolithic packs (like Next and Beyond) that leave people with the same material for several months or more. Arguably, the studio can afford to put out these more modest expansions. NMS is in much better shape in the Beyond era than it was before, and it’s now more a question of refinement than taking care of any glaring omissions.

As part of a related salvaging system, you’ll also be able to break down any ships you no longer want into scrap materials or augmentations that allow you to increase the inventory capacity of one of your other spacecraft.

The theme of this update is quality-of-life improvements. Hello Games has overhauled the player inventory system, making it both easier and faster to use by allowing you to simply drag and drop items to switch their place in your inventory. The studio has also added a new feature that allows you to save multiple different outfits within the game’s customizer menu, so that you can then switch quickly between them when you want.

Additionally, the update brings feature parity to the VR and non-VR versions of the game. If you play the game in virtual reality, you’ll now be able to access No Man’s Sky photo mode, as well as ride creatures. For those on traditional platforms, you can now pilot an Exocraft in first-person. To top it all off, Synthesis also includes close to 300 bug fixes.

The update is available today on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

Few games in recent memory have had a complete turnaround like No Man’s Sky. When it initially came out in 2016, both critics and players came away disappointed after years of hype. However, to Hello Games’ credit, the studio stuck with No Man’s Sky. And for a lot of people, Engadget staff included, the game’s recent Next and Beyond updates were the turning point: No Man’s Sky had finally become the game it had always said it would be. The even better news is that it looks like Hello Games still has a lot of improvements planned. “Right now we’re working on some really impactful future updates,” the studio said in a press release. “But we had a whole host of improvements and changes that we knew the community would be excited about.”

It includes several big updates, including support for PSVR and other virtual reality headsets. That’ll let you experience all parts of the game in VR. Beyond will also greatly expand the social and multiplayer options, helping you meet and play with other people. Though No Man’s Sky is adopting some MMO-style gameplay, it won’t ask you to shell out for a subscription or microtransactions — the update is free for all players across PC, PS4 and Xbox One.

All of these games, No Man’s Sky included, were not particularly well received at launch. However, each team kept the updates rolling in, and they eventually found themselves on awards lists the world over. Fortnite added battle royale and transformed into a multi-billion-dollar franchise; Rainbow Six Siege embraced esports and DLC, and garnered 40 million registered players; Warframe chased an aggressive content-release schedule and listened to its core audience, and it’s now one of Digital Extremes’ most successful games.

No Man’s Sky rolled out a steady stream of updates to deliver the features that fans really wanted (and expected from day one), and climbed its way up from “cautionary indie tale” to “Best Ongoing Game award nominee” in just two years. Today, it’s a universe-sized astronaut simulator packed with quintillions of planets, absurd creatures on land and sea, plus crafting, mining, building, flying and oodles of exploration. This summer, the gigantic No Man’s Sky Beyond update goes live, bringing three major features to the game, two of which are public knowledge: MMO-style mechanics and, announced just last week, VR support.

Hello Games is bringing No Man’s Sky to every headset on the market via Steam VR and PlayStation 4 for PSVR (with an exclusive physical edition as well as a digital offering). No Man’s Sky VR isn’t a separate mode; instead, it incorporates virtual-reality players into the existing game. VR players can join games with non-VR friends, and they’ll receive all future updates. Same game, new input method.

“It feels very comfortable to me in terms of a fit for No Man’s Sky,” Murray said. “If I’m honest, we’re supporting VR because we want to. Genuinely, I think it’s creatively led more than necessarily commercially or anything like that. It just feels like a good fit.”

After spending 15 minutes with the game in full VR glory, I can’t help agreeing with Murray. No Man’s Sky makes sense in VR, putting you directly in the space suit — jetpack, multi-tool, inventory and all. The multi-tool, which mines minerals, blows holes in the terrain and builds towering structures out of nearby organic matter, lives in your right hand, while inventory can be pulled up as a hologram on your left arm, streamlining the crafting process.

Walking involves a teleportation system that serves its purpose just fine, though there are a handful of other ways to navigate new planets and the surrounding interstellar sea. First, there’s the jetpack, which is loads of fun yet slightly disorienting in VR, with the most potential to cause headset-related nausea. However, No Man’s Sky VR also has vehicles, swimming and — this is the big one — spaceships.

It takes two hands to steer the ship, pressing and pulling the throttle with your left hand and using a joystick to direct with your right, and the entire process is visceral in a way that only VR can provide. Flying a ship in VR — racing over mysterious planets and up, out of the atmosphere in a tunnel of light and space dust — is an absolutely fantastic feeling. Then, the hyperdrive clicks off and the galaxies finally come into focus. Asteroids loom like mountainsides, and flying between them is smooth, thrilling and profoundly peaceful. Planets sit, suspended in the ink of space, impossibly large. Everything is frightening and gorgeous in equal measure, shining a light on the incomprehensible size of the universe, the planets, the space rocks, the ship, yourself.

This sense of scale and immersion simply can’t translate on a 2D screen.

If the goal of No Man’s Sky is to make players feel simultaneously miniscule yet deeply connected to a network of atoms that stretches in all directions, forever — if the goal of No Man’s Sky is to make players feel, full-stop — then VR is the best way to play. This sense of scale and immersion simply can’t translate on a 2D screen.

Murray has had a long time to think about interstellar scale. His parents traveled a lot when he was young, and at one point they ended up running a million-and-a-quarter acre ranch in the Australian outback. At night, Murray would stare at the dense blanket of stars and dream about their depths; by day, he would play Elite, devour everything sci-fi and program his own games. No Man’s Sky VR is the unique result of decades of stargazing and coding.

“If five-year-old me could see that you’re putting on a headset and being in this world, he would be very excited about that,” Murray said.

No Man’s Sky VR doesn’t lock virtual-reality fans in a mode of their own, but instead incorporates VR players into the existing game universe. VR astronauts can join games with non-VR friends, and they can expect all the same updates that the core game receives in the future.

No Man’s Sky Beyond is a three-part update hitting the game this summer, and VR is the second tier. The first big change, No Man’s Sky Online, adds new social and multiplayer features to the game. Beyond is designed to infuse the game with a deeper sense of immersion and, important for a game as big as the universe, scale.

The third arm of No Man’s Sky Beyond remains a mystery, but Hello Games promises to talk more about it soon.