"we are countless, my friend, walking these worlds, yearning for friendship. no-one wants to be alone, not truly. but the closer you get to others, the more you risk hurting yourself, hurting them.

go to the stars, traveller. your friends wait for you."

It pains me to put a "No" here, but after playing this game little by little over the years, I am simply amazed that 8 years later, the GUI is identical to how it started, and equally as bad and frustrating.
The game is fun. It looks great. Cool atmosphere. But playing it through this sluggish slow UI and having to watch the same damaged machinery animation thousands of times when I'm exploring, or having to fumble through the various inventories, or the fact that every NPC tells you their entire life's story every time you just want to buy a wiring loom. The game is supposed to be relaxing, but I am nearing carpel tunnel from mashing left click through dialog and animations.

I would understand if it came out like this, but it has been 8 years, they have remade the game like 3 times, but the UI is unloved.

Heres a detailed list of my struggles with the UI, in a vague hope that a dev will read it:
1) Damaged machinery. I don't know you can get the idea of opening a loot chest wrong, but hold E, grab goo, put it in exosuit, exit the UI, wait 1 second for the interaction button to appear, hold E again, get the loot you actually want. why? just have it give me the goo and loot by holding E once. Same with the green cargo boxes. The yellow and red ones work just fine.
2) Have 2 buttons when you see an NPC. one for "talk" and one for "actions". When I'm checking my inventory and comparing stuff in a shop, since you don't have a side by side view, I have to mash through the same line of dialog from the shop NPC 5 or more times.
3) When repairing something, and I dont have a ready carbon nanotube, which I never will just have laying around, let me hold E on the grayed out carbon nanotube to craft one and use it in one action. Instead of making me exit that UI, go into my exosuit, craft the item, and go back into the UI.
4) Setting actions to "always instant" instead of "hold" applies to only about 50% of the game, and I can never tell if an action is hold or click.
5) Right click to go back is extremely inconsistent. Sometimes it leaves a UI entirely, other times it goes back to the previous menu. It forces me to repeatedly open the same NPC UI, mashing through the text again, if I want to do multiple actions in that UI. For example unlocking multiple items in the anomaly tech trees.
6) The overly dramatic achievement achievement popups that BLOCK all input until you dismiss it, constantly. This denial of service attack on my gaming experience is THE MOST annoying UI element of this game. Would a notification at the bottom right like all the other notifications not work? Do I have to watch a full screen achievement movie every 10k units I walk?
7) Changing camera view for both player and ship is tucked away in a nested menu instead of being a hotkey
8) The "x" menu is horizontal, while a mouse scroll wheel is vertical. There is no brain association between up/down and left/right.
9) What is up with owning several spaceships? They seem to appear and disappear around me like they are ghosts haunting my game. Why is there no spaceship or multitool menu like the fleet menu? The only way to select a primary ship is to go sit in it. Why are these 2 actions tied? Why do this 1000 IQ system where ships secretly appear in my freighter instead of giving me a menu to manage them?
10) Items in the discoveries menu lists fade into existence at a rate of one per second. I just want to see if I have unuploaded discoveries, not watch a list slowly fade in dramatically. Wrong place to put atmospheric animations.
11) Finally the UI in general is terribly fitted for use with a mouse and keyboard. Compare playing No Man's Sky with any MMORPG from the last 20 years, they all have much better user interfaces for mouse and keyboard without losing immersion or atmosphere for not having fancy animations on every action. I get that maintaining 2 concurrent UI systems is harder than maintaining one, but are you really ok with this?

Honorary non-UI complaints:
1) Lights don't actually light anything up at night time. If you have a building full of lights, only the lights glow, there is no light being cast, everything is still pitch dark.
2) Some sounds in the game are way too loud, like creatures fussing around and freighter hangar shutters opening/closing
3) No option to disable the horrendous scan line effect on the screen that hurts my eyes without modding the game.
4) Different missions will often lead the player to the same building on the same planet repeatedly

Just feels overall like no one play tests this game. Did none of the devs do a run in their own game? Do they all only play on console?

I hope I can change this review to a "Yes" in a future update

snowman hi