No Man's Sky

Hello Games' 2016 release is the most complete redemption story in the industry. It launched to enormous expectations, shipped without most of what had been described in interviews - no multiplayer, thin planets, an anticlimactic centre of the galaxy - and became the standard reference for overpromising. Then a team of about fifteen people spent the next nine years fixing it in free updates: base building, real multiplayer, freighters, planetary vehicles, atmospheric flight, factions, VR support, settlements, mechs, a fully rewritten story, and expeditions that run as seasonal shared goals. What exists now is a genuinely enormous procedural universe with eighteen quintillion planets, resource chains, ship customisation and a survival loop that works at several difficulty settings you configure yourself. It is still procedural rather than hand-crafted, so exploration is broad rather than deep, and that will always be the honest caveat. But the version on sale today bears very little resemblance to the one that was reviewed, and Hello Games never charged for any of it.