Going into Starfield, I was expecting some sci-fi twist, but I’ll admit that I was still somewhat surprised when the Starborn revealed that Starfield is a game about the multiverse.

Trepidation followed. While the idea of there being multiple universes has existed in fiction for some time, multiverse stories have seen an uptick in their popularity recently, thanks to films like Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Everything Everywhere All at Once, but some pieces of media haven’t handled the concepts as well.

Just this year alone, films like Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, and The Flash all put the multiverse front and center in their stories, to varying degrees of success. It’s a sci-fi concept that’s starting to teeter on the edge of overuse, so I was worried that Starfield would feel a bit derivative and sloppy in its own use of the idea. That ended up not being the case, though, as Bethesda Game Studios found creative ways to tie it into the thematic undertones of this game about humanity’s urge to explore space. Better yet, its actually tied into a meaningful gameplay system that forever changes Starfield once you finish the game.