Warning: Spoilers for the main quest of Starfield’s Shattered Space DLC lie ahead.
STOP. Can you NOT touch things in here and maybe just THINK about p**sing off? They keep telling me this, in pretty huffy tones, their spooky ghost people faces made of slightly wiggly light scrunching up into cyber-frowns.
It’s not enough. I hunger to wander into the places. I yearn to touch the things. This is what I am, it’s all I can ever be, and my curse is that nothing can stop me in my being this way.
I am the stuff interacter, and I am doomed to fondle the universe’s inanimate objects, relentlessly and forever.
I’m not sure if they get it. I’m not sure if I get it, to be honest. But, as I pull out my gun again, after asking them if I can just have the thing, I’m starting to think that this might be the closest we’ve come.
I kill them over again. I move on, because there are things to be touched, but not felt. This time, in Starfield, on the far flung planet of Va’ruun’kai which houses the Shattered Space DLC that I’m working my way through, the thing to be touched is a thingamajig. The entities trapped in here with me, the great and terrifying interacter, don’t want me to touch it, to take it into my possession, to continue building the world’s most depressing Katamari and rolling it about a bleak galaxy.
I have to touch it. Sadly, that is how these things work, and it feels like Bethesda might finally have realised that, and started to play with it in an interesting manner here. It’s probably not the first time it’s happened, during this quest, but in my return to a game I once roleplayed as Santa in, for some reason it sticks out more than usual.
Starfield is a game about hoarding. That’s nothing new. We’ve all hoarded things in it and previous Bethesda games, and the litany of other titles guilty of giving you an imaginary – or literal – backpack and allowing you to pick up stuff to fill it with. Useful stuff, useless stuff, it all goes in the bag and gets carried about, just in case you need it. We all rightly laugh about it, giggling as we realise ‘oops, I’m over encumbered again’, and we’re right to, because it can’t be helped.
There are other things going on too, both in Shattered Space and in the base game. Lots of other things, designed to suit whatever you might want to do, but rarely given much depth, or exploration of the meatier human elements behind them. That’s the thing though, none of that’s the point. It never has been. Starfield, rather than being a game that doesn’t know what to say, that doesn’t know what tale it wants to tell, has been busy telling an anti-tale.
It lets you, the player, do things, because things must be done. It doesn’t judge you any more than it has to. It’s got to try, just to maintain the illusion a bit. But it can’t get quite as far as setting things up in a way that’ll make you properly care about a lot of the stuff that’s going on, aside from the occasional bit of marvelling at a detail that its developers have clearly put a lot of research into. It knows you’re just doing what you’ve got to do. A lot of the time, it’s a video game about the act of playing a video game.
This Shattered Space quest, Exhuming The Past, a simple mission about going to a dam and retrieving a science thing because you’ve been told it might be useful to the putting together of a pile of stuff that’ll allow you to get into a currently magic barrier sealed-fortress that’ll assuredly contain more stuff, is the point. There’s some story going on, about a guy who’s voice you can hear. He’s been trying to talk to a giant snake. It’s an inherently interesting concept, but I’m still struggling a bit to feel like it’s properly hooking me in as much and as easily as it should.
As you move through the dungeon, there’s a bit of light hazard negotiation as you figure out how to make your way past floors flooded with acidic water. As you progress, and get closer to the thingamajig, the ghosts – a few House Va’ruuners who’ve been turned into spectral energy guards for the place by experiments that happened there – keep stopping you and telling you to stop being in their place, touching their place’s things.
Every time, there’s one more to deal with, as things gradually escalate. They really don’t want you to touch this thing. But you have to. Eventually, you do. You touch their thing. As it turns out, there’s another thing to touch, if you feel like it. One of them tells you that if you touch it, some bad stuff might happen to some farmers. If you’re anything like me, you touch it anyway, just to see what that stuff might be. It kills the ghosts. Their corpses flop into being on the floor in front of you, like discarded action figures.
There’s some fairly decent loot on them.
Then, you leave. On the way to deliver the thingamajig to the entity that dispatched you to investigate the dam and see if there were any useful thingamajigs – or thingamajigs with useful info about thingamajigs – there, if you’ve picked the choice I have, you’ll be given the option the check on the nearby farm. One of the farmers there will tell you they’re not very happy because their town’s now flooded, thanks to you.
It’s one short conversation, and it doesn’t exactly do much to emphasise why what you’ve done is so catastrophic. Actually going there at all is an optional objective. Then, you head back to the main city, and go on with finding more things to touch. Admittedly, I’ve not quite gotten to the end of Shattered Space as I write this, so there’s a chance someone might pull me up on it further on in the main quest. I really hope they will.
Rest assured, I’ll let you know if that happens, but regardless, I think Exhuming The Past is my favourite quest of the DLC so far. Whether accidentally or on purpose, it’s a fun bit of commentary on what so much of Starfield feels like, outside of those brief moments when everything sings and meaning doesn’t feel a bit lost in the game’s struggle to feel like it’s offering an experience that accomplishes the tough task of properly capturing something tangible and human.
It’s a game about doing things, as all of them are. And it’s nice when stuff like your weird ghost parents are telling you to keep your grubby space toddler hands to yourself in this shop they’ve ended up in is there to bring that to life a bit.