In my first day on Proteus II I died four times. Twice because I couldn’t figure out how to patch up the breach in my spacesuit - turns out you just use duct tape. I owe my third death to a giant space crab, so it goes. My fourth death, however, was something special. I ventured a mere kilometre from my life-supporting inflatable dome to the edge of a crater. The vista was magnificent, but after pausing for a minute to soak up every last facet of the crater’s abyssal terrain I noticed something rising out of the vista. It was a giant sandworm, and it was coming from the very brink of the horizon to gobble me up. I’d have moved, had I thought for a second that this wasn’t some visual effect developers Fenix Fire had added to spruce up the game’s skyboxes. Turns out that Osiris: New Dawn doesn’t have skyboxes.

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Immediately, I’m forced to draw comparisons to its most notable competitor, No Man’s Sky. It’s not just me though: CEO and founder of Fenix Fire, Brian McRae can’t avoid the comparison either. “We have a lot of people who are extremely happy with what we're doing,” reflects McRae. “We get lots of pats on the back, like ‘Thank you for making this game', 'This is the game I've been waiting for'. We've heard a lot of, 'This is what I was hoping No Man's Sky would be like'”.