New games are released every week, but sometimes one comes along that generates so much buzz it transcends the gaming community and enters mainstream discussion.

Take ‘No Man’s Sky’, for example, which we profiled yesterday (HERE) along with a trailer. Despite a few bugs and glitches it’s proving very popular, although at least one person has had to end his gaming experience because he caught a serious case of the feels.

Here’s that chap describing the game’s epic scale on TIME:

I stopped because of the way the game was making me feel.

No Man’s Sky is, on paper, a multiplayer game about exploring outer space. But because the game’s mathematically generated universe is so big — it has upwards of 18 trillion planets to explore — you’ve got better odds of your PlayStation becoming sentient than you do of finding other players…In this universe, you are truly alone…

The game so powerfully delivers that sense of loneliness that, after hours-long sessions, I felt myself carrying that emotion with me into the real world…

It’s a remarkable psychological reaction to a video game, or really any piece of media. It’s one thing for a game to make you feel excited, or anxious, or even scared (Alien: Isolation, anyone?). It’s much harder for one to make you feel so alone…

No Man’s Sky creator Sean Murray should consider this an achievement. The title is clearly an effort to extend the realm of the possible in video games, and on this note it succeeds…on a personal level, loneliness is not an emotion that I do particularly well with…

Sure, there are days when I need some alone time, as does anyone. But I don’t choose to seek it out often — and for that reason I need to let this game go.

Maybe for now, but something tells me our friend might be back online plumbing the depths of loneliness sooner than he thinks.

[source:time]