Every Bethesda game, even with their collection of companions, feels somewhat lonely. The fantasy world of the Elder Scrolls is densely populated with foliage and creatures, but you’re also often trundling through it alone. Fallout, a series set in post-apocalypse America, feels even lonelier with its bombed-out buildings and decimated metro tunnels. But it’s Starfield that feels the loneliest.

While Bethesda continues working on Fallout 76 and the in-development Elder Scrolls 6, there’s also new content for Starfield in the works. It’s far from by most-played game in Bethesda’s library—the most-played would be Morrowind—but I’ve spent hundreds of hours exploring the multiverse through the studio’s often-slandered sci-fi RPG and the loneliness it instils.

There’s a lot of issues with Starfield, largely tied to its procedural generation and its annoying space travel, but there’s few games that manage to connect so well with how it must feel to explore a largely empty vastness of space. In a recent interview with Game Informer, studio director Anegla Browder explained that they’re scared of the vastness of space.

“When you talk about Starfield, we made the biggest thing we’ve ever done in our entire lives: We made space. I’m scared of space, I think space is really scary, but we made space!” they said. And the truth it that space is scary, and space is isolation, it’s outcast, it’s death.

I like some of the companions in Starfield, Andreja and Vasco being my companions of choice, but their presence doesn’t remove the RPG from the almost quarantine-feeling of exploring space. Touching down on a remote planet, seeing the magic of another planet brooding in the skybox and jet-packing over the mounts of procedurally generated dirt never feels like a group activity. It always feels like you’re segregated from the rest of humanity—cut off from life and social contact as you push forward into the expanse.

This is only bolstered by the complete non-existence of any other alien humanoids in Bethesda’s RPG, something that is often seen as a major criticism for the game. Humanity, largely, is all there is outside of alien animals and new plant-life, and when you’re cut off from the rest of everything there is, it feels like the universe is continuing without you. You might be important, you might be Starborn, you might leave this universe behind, but you can only leave because you are one speck in a universe of billions.

One of the best missions in Starfield revels in that feeling of a world gone by without you. Unearthed, one of the game’s main story missions, is my favourite moment in any Bethesda RPG outside of Morrowind. In the mission, you explore through a NASA Launch Facility including a museum of everything the space agency has done in our lifetime and after. As someone who grew up in awe of the moon landing and the Space Age that had already passed me by, seeing it covered in sand, dust and dirt was the most lonely feeling in the world. That’s my world—not just bombed out, but left and abandoned and forgotten.

Starfield’s feeling of a time lost, of a community broken and spread across the stars is why I love it. While some say space is boring, I find it fascinating. I feel lonely when travelling the stars in my customised spaceship—even more so when I’ve jumped from one universe to another in my impossible Starborn vessel—but I am enamoured with that feeling.

Even Elite Dangerous, which has less characters to interest with and less story to entice me, doesn’t capture that feeling of isolation as well as Starfield. I don’t even know if that was the purpose of Bethesda’s RPG, although it certainly feels like it.

Would Starfield be a better game if it had better space travel? Yes. Absolutely. But would it get rid of that feeling of loneliness? Probably not, and I don’t really want it to. That’s the Starfield I fell in love with, despite what anyone else says. It’s the Starfield I bought the controller for, the game I scroll eBay looking for that damn watch that allegedly breaks after three weeks, and it’s the game I hope others will at least appreciate at some point in the future.