Who says you need a mouth-breathing psychopath in black armor and a gross, pale old ghoul in a hood to have a Death Star? No Man's Sky continues its seemingly endless parade of free updates today with The Swarm, which introduces a new threat to the universe: a massive space station called the Hive of Glass that controls an army of angry drones.

And yeah, like the Death Star, the Hive's got a really big laser, too. Here, I'll let Sean Murray tell you about it:

"The Hive of Glass protects itself by releasing swarms of robotic drones, creating an awesome spectacle of battles with hundreds of ships," Murray says. "The Hive itself is a weapon too, with the iris opening to release the largest weapon we’ve ever seen in No Man's Sky. A laser capable of destroying freighter fleets and perhaps even something as large as a space station…"

Don't expect to take on the Hive all by yourself like some kind of friendless Luke Skywalker: travellers will have to work together to neutralize the threat.

"Players are going to need a combined community effort to figure out what is going on," Murray says. "A war effort is being launched from the Nexus, with defenses rapidly being constructed, and a new bulletin page tracking progress. Your contribution to the face-off with the Hive is being logged for all to see in both the Anomaly and the Galactic Atlas. Travellers will want to keep a constant eye on which squad is contributing the most to the war effort."

If huge space battles aren't your thang, no problem. There's plenty to do on the ground too, like salvaging and researching the drones that have been shot down—and the gravity gun Hello Games added to No Man's Sky a few updates ago will come in handy there.

"There are miniature planetary swarms to defeat, and research efforts to sabotage the swarm's network. The secrets of the Hive's origins and weaknesses can be uncovered and shared with your fellow rebels," Murray says. "We can't wait to see how this plays out."

There's a whole lot more in the free update, like a new armor set, a fancy new jetpack, a sick-looking rifle, a bunch of bugfixes, and some stability and optimization improvements. The update is live now.

Director Kane Parsons says Portal 2 serves as the biggest inspiration for the upcoming horror movie based on his viral YouTube series of the same name.

"Portal would be the earliest influence," Parsons said in an interview with Letterboxd. "It's like the strongest influence over, like, everything I've done in my entire life. It's a two-game series. So, if anything, I would say Portal 2 is the bigger inspiration for me... It's inherently comedic and absurd, and that’s what I like about it. So many bleak creative choices come from an inherent humour."

Portal is a first-person puzzle game that first debuted in 2007. Portal 2 was released in 2011. In both games, you play as a test subject trapped in the Aperture Science Laboratory, taunted as you complete puzzles by an evil (but very funny) computer overseer. The lab seems to be a death trap with no way to escape – until you start finding hidden spaces where you're not "supposed" to go.

You can definitely see the influence on Parsons' viral YouTube series, which centers on a '90s company called The Complex, which is essentially a web of liminal spaces where people go missing after being pulled in.

"The general set construction of the Portal games has been in my brain for so long. I frequently have dreams where I’m just in the [game]," he continued. "By the second game, [the environment] is rotting and totally falling apart but it's vast. It feels like an eternal indoors that goes on in all directions that is just absurd in its scope. It’s very similar to Backrooms on that front. You can probably tell [those games are] special to me because I won’t stop rambling about them." You can check out the full interview below.

Directed by Parsons, the movie sees a therapist (Renate Reinsve) venture into an otherworldly dimension in search of her missing patient (Chiwetel Ejiofor). The cast includes Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell, and Avan Jogia. The screenplay was penned by Westworld writers Robert Patino and Will Soodik.

Backrooms hits theaters on May 29. For more scares, check out our list of upcoming horror movies.