One of the things I’m most looking forward to with Starfield is the details, I think. I’m here for the main adventure, sure, but I tend to love the small stuff in big games – the components on a rocket or a space suit, the callbacks to the tiniest pieces of real-world inspiration. I got very excited when I saw the Starfield logo in a video earlier this year, the logo against what looked like – my eyes aren’t great – a white background of space with dark stars and nebulae scattered over it. Could this be a winking reference to the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey, whose photographic plates of the heavens are always seen as negatives, the same white space, the same black stars?
Jury’s out on that one. It’s entirely possible I just need new glasses. But part of the joy of space games in particular to me is that, as a bit of a space nerd, I can look at the little stuff and wonder.
I think it would be impossible to be born in 1978, like I was, and not be a bit of a space nerd, to be honest. When I think back to the year of my birth, I always see it as being nestled between the launch of the Voyagers in ’77, and the flaming return of Skylab in, I think, ’79. What goes up eventually comes down and all that. Space was everywhere back then, just as everywhere again now, with daily updates from the James Webb telescope and all those rovers knocking about on Mars.
Games, like Starfield, have always been so good at capturing this stuff. And actually, without being able to play Starfield for myself yet, I’d say that’s never been truer than in the case of Outer Wilds. This is a game all about the glory and urgency of space and exploration – a game that doesn’t hold back the moment when you climb into your own ship and pick a destination to head to in its bottle universe. Within minutes of loading up you can land on a comet! But I love details in these games more than anything, remember, and one of the details in Outer Wilds, well… Maybe I’m wrong, maybe I’m just seeing things, but every time I encounter this moment, it makes my skin tingle. It activates the same part of my brain that saw traces of POSS in Starfield’s choice of logo background.