Like seriously, let's look at this: in Mass Effect the player is a high-profile military careerist who's about to become space James Bond complete with the license to kill, starts hallucinating weird portents of doom after finding an inscrutable alien relic, gets their legal murder license, follows their hallucinations to find more weird alien shit, has to chose which of their crewmates dies in a hackneyed false dichotomy, and ends with revelations about what's going on and an elaborate multi-stage boss fight.
In Starfield the player is just some random asshole who's decided to take up space mining for no clear reason, hallucinates something cool and neat after being told to grab the weird thing by their chortling coworkers, gets to join a country club of amateur astronomers who think those weird artifacts are kind of neat, goes on an adventure to look for more sort of neat artifacts and hallucinate some more, has to chose which of their fellow country club members dies in a hackneyed false dichotomy, and ends with the revelation that everything going on is fucking stupid and pointless and there's an elaborate multi-stage boss fight that's buggy as absolute fuck.
Meanwhile the aesthetics are just Mass Effect blandness taken to a whole new level of blandless. If Mass Effect was oversanitized corporate slop Starfield has been further boiled into a completely flavorless mush. Same for the overall plot: Mass Effect had a generic eldritch horror plot that pivoted from being a climate change allegory to just being "so yeah turns out the eldritch robots are just really stupid, like absolute buffoons, and their whole mission is literal nonsense and even they know it but because they're just big dummies they don't know how to stop doing galactic genocide, whoopsy!" thanks to corporate meddling, but Starfield skips the pivot and goes straight to the vapid "so yeah it's all just meaningless accumulation of pointless nothing, nothing's going on here and there's nothing at stake at all, just lobotomize yourself and join the race to accumulate meaningless accolades!" which uh, framed like that actually reads like a call for help from the writers.
The original Mass Effect had a stated visual design philosophy of "80s scifi movie" that sequels deviated from, but it's still a better aesthetic than whatever the fuck "nasapunk" was supposed to be
I think "nasapunk" is fine (but I don't like calling it that), and that Starfield was just poor execution.
I would say Prey aimed for a similar style and pulled it off. There were even actual space shuttles.
Wasn't Prey more of an Art Deco but in space sort of vibe?
It was both, but the space-y stuff is what I'm talking about:
Ah, makes sense, I didn't play it that much and I'm a huge slut for mid-20th century architecture so that was all I remembered