Exploring the far reaches of space with Starfield, playing Medium and Lies of P on a Mac computer.

Starfield is the legendary game we hoped for

I got my review copy of Starfield, a game I’ve been eagerly anticipating, last week, a couple of days before it became available to players who got it early.

It was Saturday before I got a chance to actually play the game because every time I turned around, my kids were playing it instead.

What a great way to spend the last few days of summer vacation.

Even though I’ve barely scratched the surface of Starfield, I can tell how special this game is. Betheseda Game Studios director Todd Howard has talked about the decade-long effort to imagine and realize the vision for an expansive role-playing game set in space.

There’s a debt owed by Bethesda to the developers who created the games Mass Effect and No Man’s Sky, and I’m sure Howard would admit that those role-playing games provided inspiration for what his team delivered with Starfield.

And while the space game from the developers of Fallout and the Elder Scrolls franchises is very much like those other games, it is more ambitious than anything the studio has created before. Exactly as Howard promised.

The game begins innocuously enough. You are working with a bunch of miners pulling resources out of some planet, and when you touch an artifact you’ve been sent to retrieve you have a vision of sorts.

Thus begins your association with Constellation, a group of explorers in the grand old sense of the term, who are seeking knowledge and adventure in the reaches of the galaxy.

Along the way you’ll have numerous opportunities to play Starfield the way you want to play. Fast or slow, aggressive or passive, overt or sneaky. If you’ve played a Bethesda game before, the systems you’ll use to upgrade your ship, your equipment, your abilities, and your crew will be familiar.

But the range of options in Starfield are mind-boggling. Even after only a couple of hours, the games that my kids and I are playing are remarkably different.

And people who have sunk dozens of hours into the game and have finished the main quest are talking about how “new game plus” provides an extended experience unlike anything in a game before.

It’s tantalizing enough to want to rush through the story so I can get to the secret everyone else is already playing.

But Bethesda games are role-playing games, and the best way to play them is to role play. After coming up with a look for your character and picking your backstory, figuring out what skills you want to exploit, you’ll also know who your character is and what they value. They’ll tell you how you should play the game.

There will be ups and downs, as there always is. But the journey will be unmatched. And you’ll be better for having experienced it.

Starfield is available now for Windows and Xbox Series X/S.

Two console games are being released on Mac computers with Apple silicon chips

For the past couple of years, Apple has been promoting the Mac platform as a place for gaming. So much so that the company has created guides to help developers port their titles to computers built with Apple silicon.

The Medium, available now, is a recent addition. I reviewed the game in 2021 and appreciated its split-screen approach and psychological thrills.

Lies of P is also coming to Mac computers running on Apple silicon. Being released on September 19, this is a dark version of the Pinocchio story in which you can swap out parts of the protagonist who is, after all, a puppet.