No Man's Sky was built around a single feeling: that you had stepped into an old science-fiction book cover. Director Sean Murray made it the studio's explicit north star, and art director Grant Duncan painted the universe in pulp-cover colour — a warm sun burning over an endless indigo void, skies airbrushed from orange through pink into violet.

The visual language is deliberately analogue in spirit even though it renders in real time: smooth gradient horizons, circular planet and sun motifs, and thin geometric-sans wordmarks. Nothing is flat grey. Every surface sits on rich, saturated colour, the way a 1970s Chris Foss or Peter Elson paperback never had a white margin in sight.