I love a good plastic door flap. When I was a kid, the local grocery store used these big hanging curtains of plastic to separate the front area of the store from the back where the bottle return and the bathrooms were. Walking through those swinging weird rectangles was always strangely satisfying. It was a captivating and alien room transition experience I couldn’t have in my home that somehow felt like I was doing something cool.
So, every time a video game has these unusual dividers in it, I take notice! They’re the perfect sort of stupid object for a video game to show off both its graphics and physics simulation. They’re mostly transparent, often all scuffed up, and they swing around into each other. Their need to both flap into each other and also curve around a character or object makes them computationally challenging, yet almost as satisfying as the real thing.
Starfield, the hot new RPG from Bethesda, has some of these flap guys in it like ten minutes into the game — and then again occasionally throughout its comically massive world. They’re among the best plastic door flaps I’ve yet seen in a game. They perfectly distort the lighting and game world around them, and I can’t help but run back and forth through them each…
