I never saw Interstellar. I’m sure it’s a pretty good movie, but something about the vibe of every trailer I saw, along with my general impression of Christopher Nolan, led me to believe that I wouldn’t like it. It was going to be a movie about space, I thought, not so much in the sense that it literally takes place in space or is concerned with space travel, but in the sense that it’s written from a perspective that sees space as an interesting literary concept in and of itself. It would use space as a device through which to view the human condition. I was sure of it.

To this day, I don’t really know what Interstellar is about, but I still believe it’s that. Probably there is a guy who, while in space, thinks about his wife and kid. Perhaps the grandeur of the universe is set against the microcosm of personal experience. Maybe there are some flashbacks that take place in a really domestic setting, like a living room where people are laughing and everything looks kind of washed out and slow motion, like an ad for detergent, but sad.

This kind of unfair mental image of Interstellar is what a lot of Returnal felt like for me.

Is that light some kind of magic? No, it's some kind of science.

Don’t get me wrong: Returnal is fun. You zip around in your spacesuit and various aliens in easily discernible categories shoot inexplicably color-coded projectiles at you, which move just slowly enough that you’re able to dodge them. It’s an arcade-like bullet hell experience, but with the polish and veneer of a much more high-brow title. Every one of the weapons feels unique and satisfying, and you quickly pick out favorites and get to know their quirks, and each run supplies a plethora of options that have you weighing risk and reward in satisfying ways.

Even the narrative, at the start, was working for me. You discover various incarnations of your own body throughout each run, making it clear that the repeated roguelike runs you take on aren’t just a game mechanic, but actual events taking place within the fiction of the game. You pick up voice recorders in classic horror game fashion, but all of them are recordings you made yourself and don’t remember. That’s an engaging start to a roguelike. Spooky stuff.

As the story moved along, though, I began to see hints that the story was going somewhere I wouldn’t appreciate as much: space. Not literal space – it started out in a spaceship, so that was clear enough from the beginning – but the kind of space featured in my assumed version of Interstellar where space isn’t space at all, so much as a metaphor for something human and terrestrial. I began to fear that the entire narrative was a metaphor, probably for trauma.

Sometimes you go in the ocean in space, which is like double space.

At first glance, it’s not clear why that’s such a problem for me. I don’t really take issue with a narrative completely wrapped around a heavy-handed metaphor, for example. I can get behind something like 2016’s The Monster, where the addiction metaphor is screamed so aggressively at the audience that even Zoe Kazan’s hated grandfather Elia can hear it in his grave. Space as a setting is fine, too. I’ve seen Aliens more than almost any other movie, and they do all sorts of space stuff in that one, even going so far as to consider blasting off and nuking the site from orbit. Taken individually, all of these factors should be fine for me.

Something feels different once you put them together, though. The heavy-handed metaphor, when combined with the space setting, stops being an idiot romp through the stars or a horrifying descent into the inky unknown, and instead becomes intentionally high-brow. It feels like it’s winking at me, shaking my hand and letting me know that we’re all very clever because space is science and science is smart. Rather than accepting it as a setting, I begin to view space as a shorthand the game is using to communicate that this is serious stuff.

Put that together with the otherwise fun gameplay, and there’s a kind of dissonance that bothers me. This is serious stuff, the game is telling me, but here I am zipping around and dodging slow-moving multi-colored alien blob projectiles like it’s Space Invaders while I wildly slap parasites all over my body because they make me do cool stuff. Can a game have it both ways?

Of course I want to put the Malicious Rotstench on my body.

Yes, obviously, it can. My point here isn’t to say that any of this is necessarily bad. Most of it stems from my own biases against this kind of high-brow space setting. For me, it conjures images of Neil Degrasse Tyson Tweets recycled from decade-old I Fucking Love Science posts lifted from Facebook, all of them pedantically concerned with the “science” part of “science fiction” when that’s the absolute last thing I have any interest in hearing about. This is deeply unfair, of course, but it’s where my head goes. I personally do not fucking love science.

I also won’t deny the importance of aesthetics here. It makes complete sense to me why this kind of setting would appeal to somebody just by nature of what it is. Show me a fantasy guy with a sword, for example, and I’m pretty much sold, no matter how stupid and awful everything else about it might be. But my personal experience is that when I see this kind of high-brow portrayal of space, I feel almost like something surreptitious is happening, like the setting itself is demanding that I elevate the narrative beyond what the narrative is actually offering.

Maybe you could just put a sword in there, I think to myself. That would be better. I don’t want to watch Arrival again. I didn’t watch The Martian, and I never will. I don’t care if the book is good. What if it had a sword, I think. That would be neat.