LOS ANGELES—Up until this week, the space-exploration video game No Man’s Sky has existed mostly as a promise of infinite possibility. Years of teaser videos and excitable ramblings from lead designer Sean Murray have hinted at a game that looks beautiful and seems incredibly big—but which might not add up as a game. You get into a spaceship, and you fly from one procedurally generated planet to the next. And then… what?

On Tuesday, Murray and the rest of the Hello Games design team brought their game’s near-final build to a trippy Los Angeles studio space, intent on answering that very question. They were forthcoming with more gameplay and more details than ever before—including the announcement of a June 21st release date on both PlayStation 4 and Windows PCs—and they even handed controllers to us to explore the game however we saw fit.

Yet while our combined hour of chaperoned demos and free-to-roam gameplay was illustrative, it was also frustratingly distant. The more we learn about this game, the more questions we have.