Starfield – Zero Punctuation

The story begins with our faceless nobend protagonist working in a mine, where we discover a mysterious relic left behind by an advanced precursor alien civilization, and touching it makes you have a fairly nondescript mystic vision of distant galaxies, so already we’ve knocked out four squares on our space game bingo card, the rest of which get knocked out when a charismatic devil-may-care scoundrel space pilot shows up and says “Oh, you found an alien artefact? Now you get to join our superfriends treehouse club for super great explorers, random impoverished miner with snot in their beard. Here’s a free spaceship. And then to continue the plot you have to go to what looks like a Victorian era smoking room where a bunch of braying posh gits who might as well be wearing monocles and pith helmets patronize you rigid and tell you that going out and finding more alien artefacts would be rollicking great jolly hockey sticks. And I think that was the first time I realised I was the complete opposite of engaged. Vacant, possibly. I thought back fondly to the opening of Skyrim, where you come within a chaffinch’s labia of getting decapitated before a twatting great dragon shows up and atomises anything that so much as resembles a hockey stick.

Where are the thrills? Where are the stakes? Why should we care about gathering more vision-inducing alien artefacts except that they provide an inexpensive mellow high that the FDA hasn’t regulated yet? Probably for the best that James A. Starfield has the usual Bethesda RPG broad range of side content, exploration and gameplay activities, with a hefty dollop of No Man’s Sky in the middle to which everything else clings like a parasitic crab. So there’s several hundred planets with literally no end of procedurally generated landscapes every colour of the rainbow to explore and a whole seven or eight different plants. And of course you can build a base if there’s something about this one sky and its specific shade of mushy pea green that sets off your nesting instinct, and so as I’m searching a room for ammo, health packs and valuables virtually every sodding random object says “This is a crafting ingredient, don’t throw this away.” “Crafting ingredient for what?” “Well we can’t just TELL you. You’ll have to load up your entire cocking inventory space with garbage on the off chance that some future upgrade you want will call for some of it.” Ooh, I’d quite like this damage upgrade for my gun. “That’ll be 6 beryllium, one capacitor and a toastrack.” Oh just my luck, I only brought 9 chlorine, one fish slice and a light-emitting diode.

The critical path plot then took me to an alien temple where, after completing possibly the most facile minigame imaginable which involved almost literally jumping through hoops, the game unlocked my first cosmic superpower, sort of its equivalent of the Skyrim dragon shouts, only in this case one that appeared to just disturb all the polystyrene cups within a six foot radius, so I made the command decision at that point to kick the main plot in the head and indulge myself with some of that idiosyncratic Bethesda RPG pissing about. I took a side mission to survey the Tau Ceti system which did a lot to confirm that when you’ve procedurally generated one planetary wilderness you’ve procedurally generated them all, but it gave me a direction to head in and I did get embroiled in a conflict between a pirate group and the local settlers, and then I was having more fun because I was adventuring on my own terms. The space battling’s functional enough if not exactly mind blowing, and the same is true of the ground level shooting, although I did have to carry about twelve different guns ‘cos the game’s got more ammo types than a vending machine at a Texan middle school.

Still, “functional” is a big step for a Bethesda RPG, ‘cos everything else is infused with the usual jankiness. The old Bioware Face issue is very much in evidence, every NPC talks to you like a deer trying to smartmouth a set of headlights. I noticed, upon raiding the pirate base with a platoon of angry farmers, that the gap-toothed shitwits left me to deal with most of the enemy by myself while they milled around in the lobby trying to figure out how elevator buttons work. Oh, and at some point the game said I committed a crime but wouldn’t tell me what it was. I’m sixty percent certain I didn’t, but one of the factions suddenly had a bounty on my head and my helper NPC at the time got really pissy. I tried asking them what I’d done, but obviously the game wasn’t smart enough to track that so he could only talk around it. “Hey dude, why’re you so pissed all of a sudden.” “YOU KNOW PERFECTLY WELL WHY.” I really don’t, I’m trying to figure that out. “THE FACT YOU DON’T KNOW IS MAKING ME EVEN MADDER.” I don’t remember taking any flirty conversation options, why have you turned into my wife? So then I thought I’d just dodge bounty hunters ’til I could reach a police station and pay the fine, but as I tried to do so, the police kidnapped me.

And I woke up in a cell with a bloke saying “We’re recruiting you as an undercover agent ‘cos the horrible crime you committed shows you’re the perfect candidate to infiltrate the pirates.” COULD SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN WHAT I KNOBBING WELL DID? So my immersion was pretty broken by that point, if it had ever had a chance to fully assemble, it’s hard to drink in the grandeur of space travel when it seems like you spend more time navigating menus than you do in the cockpit and basically have to fast travel everywhere you go. It’s like me saying I’ve visited Singapore ‘cos my plane stopped to refuel there once but I didn’t actually get off ‘cos I’d finally gotten my seat cushion to exact right buttock proportions. So I don’t recommend Andrew Starfield, functional as some of it is, ‘cos it just bored me. One minute it’s No Man’s Sky, the next it’s Mass Effect, then it’s Cyberpunk for a bit ‘cos we’re in the one city with lots of neon signs called Neon, bet that was a gruelling brainstorming session, but what it never is is a game with any clear identity of its own. As the frustrated removals man said while attempting to fit the contents of an observatory through the front door, this is what happens when your scope gets too broad.