Nearly but not quite finished with the current expedition in No Man’s Sky. It took me a few tries to get into the groove of expeditions given I generally don’t care much for the guided parts of No Man’s Sky, preferring to just tootle around of my own accord looking at pretty things. Initially, I treated expeditions as you would a battle pass – tasks to be cleared, numbers to go up, churn through for rewards – and I hated them, approaching them like that completely ruined the experience for me. Completely joyless.

Eventually, it dawned on me that the only thing making me approach expeditions in that manner was my own brain (well, and everyone who has built these absurd compulsion loops into games in recent years to train it into that but let’s not go there right now), sure there’s stuff to be done, shopping lists to tick off but plenty of tasks invariably don’t need to be tackled in order or with any great haste. They can be a ramble, a meander, and I can still spend plenty of time mucking around doing whatever I normally do without too much concern. So yeah, that’s buggering around taking a lot of pictures and doing something to appease the videogame shopping list gods whenever.

That’s much more like it! I don’t have the energy or the patience for a game pressuring me into stuff right now, I just want peace, lasers and pretty things. And to spend ten or so minutes at a time lining up screenshots, natch. Same as I ever was, really.