Seven years after No Man’s Sky’s release and its incredible redemption arc, Hello Games is back with another ambitious game. Light No Fire takes everything the team learned with its galaxy-spanning predecessor and puts it on a single planet. A single planet the size of Earth, according to the game’s description, which reads:
“Light No Fire is a game about adventure, building, survival, and exploration together. Set on a fantasy planet the size of Earth, it brings the depth of a role playing game to the freedom of a survival sandbox.”
Sean Murray joined The Game Awards last night to show off what he and a small team at Hello Games have been working on for the past five years. The trailer kicks off like a typical No Man’s Sky trailer with cuts of gameplay showing some of the game’s mechanics.
This is almost certainly gameplay, as various parts of the UI shift depending on what’s happening on the screen. The trailer starts with players swimming underwater, and we see a spear with a hook icon in the bottom right and what appears to be a temperature gauge in the bottom left.
Once the player exits the water, the spear icon changes and the player’s temperature gauge gets warmer. There’s also an icon right above the temperature that appears to show the biome you are currently in. In this case, a forest.
We then see players gathering resources and building structures.
Followed by flyable creatures.
Another cut shows what appears to be a health bar at the top left, and we see the possible biome icon shift to a grassland.
And another showing a desert.
The game’s description promises the depth of an RPG, and what we see here does look deeper than No Man’s Sky.
It took several years, but Hello Games did ultimately deliver on their vision for No Man’s Sky. The team knows what they are doing when it comes to procedural generation. I can’t wait to see how it all comes together with deeper gameplay hooks. It’s the one weakness of No Man’s Sky, especially for new players.
We will be in for a treat if Light No Fire’s gameplay can even halfway match its scope.
Sadly, we don’t have any release date yet. And while a lot of the attention immediately shifts to their newest game, Hello Games is still releasing free DLC for No Man’s Sky and will release more in 2024.