Much has been said of No Man's Sky's missing giant sand snake, first glimpsed in an early trailer for the game. Much of what's been said is "Hey, where the hell is the giant sandsnake?" because no one, as of yet, has actually seen it in the finished game. Here's a gif of it from the original reveal trailer, to refresh your memory:
While that particular giant sand-dwelling snake is M.I.A. (along with the sand planets themselves, so far), I've managed to find something similar in Early Access survival game Osiris: New Dawn. Or rather, it found me, as you can see below.
James wrote about Osiris: New Dawn recently, notable in that it's being made by a developer who hates survival games. I've spent a couple hours, mostly uneventful ones, wandering around the game's dusty world, pounding on rocks with a hammer to extract minerals, shooting any bug monsters that got too close, and trying to find enough plutonium to build a forge so I could start crafting a decent planetary home for myself.
That's when I wandered into a crater and got eaten by what space scientists would call "a giant goddamn sandworm." As you can see in the gif, I was completely unprepared for this. It's a rare event in a game where I'm carrying a gun around that I don't immediately empty a clip into anything that twitches, because I am a huge 'fraidy cat. But here, I was so completely dumbfounded I simply had no reaction. I didn't even try to run, I just stood there like an idiotic vacuum-sealed collection of calories, the kind giant goddamn sandworms manage sustain their existence with.
I've since been eaten by that worm, and others, several times. I did shoot at one, right in its giant goddamn mouth. It had no effect. I tried to run from the others: that didn't help either. I found a dead one, as you can see above, but when I walked over to build my inflatable habitat in its skeletal mouth (I thought it would be a cool place to live) another sandworm, still in the prime of its life, promptly ate me.
I'll have some more thoughts on Osiris sometime next week, though I'm sure it's clear that my mission is to kill one of those giant goddamn worms somehow.