Seriously. I just can’t put the damn thing down.

There’s always just one more ridge to look over, just one more animal to scan, just one more planet to explore. It’s one of the most addictive games I’ve played in a long while.

I’ll start out with a plan in mind: say, I want to find some platinum to craft a health upgrade. But while I’m hunting for that, I come across a massive chunk of gold, so I stop to mine that. Then I’ll spot another gold chunk, so I’ll mine that too. Now I’m wondering how much gold there is in the area, so I shoot off into a cave to look for more, and before I know it I’ve spent 15 minutes just wandering the cave networks to see where they go. Then I pop out miles away from my spaceship, and happen to spot a question mark hovering over a nearby lake. So I dive down to take a look, and I find an abandoned building. But on my way back to the surface I spot some fish I’ve never seen before, so I stop to scan them. Then I realise I only need two more animals to complete the set on the planet, so I scan around for some more as I walk back to my spaceship. But my search comes up fruitless, so I decide to climb back into my spaceship and head up to a space station to sell all the gold I’ve farmed. But as I head into space I’m ambushed by space pirates, and my ship is destroyed. I respawn in the space station, and luckily I have the gold in my exosuit, so it’s not lost. While I’m selling the gold, I notice that the selling price of Dynamic Resonators is double the galactic average, so I head into the docking bay to buy up all the resonators I can from pilots who are coming to land. Then I sell them for a huge profit, and after doing this a few times, I have enough to buy a new ship. I wait around for a particularly cool-looking ship to arrive with more slots than my old one, and eventually one that looks like the Vipers from Battlestar Galactica turns up. So I buy it, and it has a more-powerful hyperdrive, and then I’m thinking about which star system to explore next…

And in the meantime, I still haven’t got any platinum. But I’m just having far too much fun exploring to care.

Quick Offloads are short posts when we need to get things off of our chests but don’t necessarily want to waste too many words on them. But please add your words in the comments below.