Warning: There are spoilers for the main mission of Starfield’s Shattered Space DLC.
stop. Could you please leave this thing alone and maybe just get out? They kept telling me this in rather angry tones, their ghostly grimaces made up of slightly swaying lights, frowning brows.
This is not enough. I longed to hang out in these places. I longed to touch these things. This is me, this is all I can be, and my curse is that nothing can stop me from being that.
I am a material interactor, destined to touch inanimate objects in the universe constantly and forever.
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I’m not sure they understand. To be honest, I’m not sure I understand. But once I pulled my gun out again and asked if they could take this thing away, I started to think this might be the closest we’d ever get.
I killed them again. I kept going because there were things I could touch but not feel. This time, in Starfield, I’m exploring the Shattered Space DLC on the distant planet Va’ruun’kai, where the thing to touch is a thingamajig. The entity trapped here with me, the great and terrible Interactor, doesn’t want me to touch it, doesn’t want it to be its own, continues to build the most depressing Katamari in the world, and in a desolate galaxy Roll it.
I have to touch it. Sadly, that’s just how these things work, and it feels like Bethesda may have finally realized this and started toying with it in interesting ways here. This may not be the first time this has happened during this mission, but when I go back to a game where I used to play as Santa Claus, for some reason it stands out more than usual.
Starfield is a game about hoarding. This is nothing new. We all stocked up on it and previous Bethesda games, as well as a host of other games that gave you an imaginary (or literal) backpack and allowed you to pick up stuff to fill it. Useful things and useless things can be put into the bag and carried with you in case of emergencies. We should all laugh about it, and we giggle when we realize, “Oops, I’m so tired again,” and we’re right to do so because there’s nothing we can do about it.
There’s something else going on in Shattered Space and the base game. There are plenty of other things out there that aim to do just about anything you might want to do, but are rarely given much depth, or explore the richer human elements behind them. But, that’s the thing, and that’s beside the point. Never. Starfield isn’t a game that doesn’t know what to say or what story it wants to tell, but instead keeps busy telling a counter-story.
It lets you, the player, do things because things have to be done. It doesn’t judge you too much. Gotta try it, just to maintain a little bit of the illusion. But it doesn’t get to the point where you properly care about much of what’s going on, other than occasionally being surprised by the details that its developers have explicitly laid out. It’s knowing that you’re just doing what you have to do. A lot of the time, it’s a video game about the act of playing video games.
This Shattered Space Mission, Digging into the Past, a simple mission about going to the dam and retrieving a science thing because you were told it might help put a bunch of things together to get you into a magic barrier seal in the present There must be more things hidden inside the fortress, which is the key point. There are stories going on about a man whose voice you can hear. He had been trying to talk to a giant snake. It’s an inherently interesting concept, but I still struggled a bit to find it engaging as easily as possible.
As you make your way through the dungeon, there are some mildly dangerous negotiations as you figure out how to cross the acidic water-filled floors. As you advance and approach Thinmajig, ghosts – some of the Varuna family who became the spectral energy guardians of this place through the experiments that took place there – keep stopping you and telling you to stop at their location and touch the things in their place .
As things escalate, there’s more to deal with each time. They really don’t want you to touch this thing. But you have to do it. Eventually, you did it. You touch their stuff. It turns out there’s another thing you can touch if you want. One of them tells you that if you touch it, something bad might happen to some of the farmers. If you’re like me, you touch it anyway just to see what that thing might be. It kills ghosts. Their bodies lie on the floor in front of you like discarded dolls.
They had some pretty good loot on them.
Then, you leave. On the way to deliver the thingamajig to the entity that sent you to investigate the dam, see if there are any useful thingamajigs – or thingamajigs with useful information about the thingamajigs – there, and if you choose my choice, you will Check out nearby farms if you have the option. One of the farmers there will tell you that they are not too happy because their town is now flooded thanks to you.
It’s a brief conversation that doesn’t do much to emphasize why what you did was so disastrous. Actually getting there is just an optional objective. Then, you return to the main city and continue looking for more things to touch. Granted, as I write this, I haven’t quite reached the end of Shattered Space yet, so it’s possible someone will pull me further in the main quest. I really hope they will.
Don’t worry, I’ll let you know if this happens, but regardless, I think digging into the past is my favorite DLC mission so far. Whether it’s accidental or intentional, it’s an interesting commentary on the feel of Starfield, and aside from those brief moments where everything just sings, the meaning doesn’t feel a little lost in the game’s struggles, and it feels like it delivers An experience that accomplishes the difficult task of properly capturing something tangible and human.
This is a game, like all games, about doing things. It’s so nice when people like your weird ghost parents tell you to keep your grubby space kid hands to yourself in this store they end up in, where it all gets made Lifelike.
