You don't want to hear it, but you need to. You're not going to like it, but here it is: No Man's Sky is smarter than you.

That's right, No Man's Sky isn't actually bad. It's just that you've been playing No Man's Sky wrong. When the game was first announced, it became one of the most anticipated titles of 2016. Fans were incredibly excited to delve into Sean Murray’s procedurally-generated universe of 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 planets. They were hoping for the ultimate space-faring, open-world title, one that would allow them to trade and fight and talk their way across the universe. For a brief time, Sean Murray was seen as the herald of a new way to play video games.

Then, the title released. And though it was a genuinely new kind of video game, No Man’s Sky wasn’t the revolution everyone wanted, and gamers were righteously pissed off. They went to exhaustive lengths to castigate the developer they’d previously deified. But that's what everyone got wrong about No Man's Sky. The game is executed perfectly as is. In spite of all the bitching and the anger, and the endless number of burned Sean Murray effigies, No Man’s Sky is a gaming revolution.

You were just looking at it the wrong way.