Starfield review - a game about exploration, without exploration

Starfield does not begin well. You start this game of space and exploration in an elevator, trundling down through walls of rock to a subterranean mining tunnel. In this one early place Bethesda always likes to keep things tightly coordinated, characters delivering their programmed line of dialogue to you without looking up from their job as rock-shooter and drill-watcher. It’s all so precisely on cue, as you walk by, that they feel a little like animatronics on a Disneyland dark ride, the echoes of that same line faintly echoing down the corridor as the next tour boat bobs along past Captain Jack Sparrow.

Your tour guide, mining supervisor Lin, eventually leads you to a deeper tunnel, where you’re told a little bluntly to go and pick up something giving off a weird gravitational signal from the deep. This is an Artifact, a mysterious lump of scrap metal, and it teleports you, via seizure-slash-religious-experience, to the character creator.

Clunky as it sounds, absolutely none of this stuff is a problem. In fact really, it’s actually classic Bethesda, and much as I’m being a little harsh about the cave puppets’ patter I am more than on board with this part: it’s the run-up to arguably the best moment of any Bethesda RPG, the “walkout moment”, where our typically wordless chosen one begins somewhere dark and claustrophobic – the sewers beneath Cyrodiil’s Imperial City, the prison escape through the caves of Skyrim, the vaults of Fallout (so apt, when you think about it, it’s almost like that whole series was conceived before Bethesda even had rights to it, just for the studio to have the perfect walkout scenario) – only to emerge out into the grand expanse.