Character Spotlight #68-Rafael Aguerro

Meet Rafael Aguerro

Rafael Aguerro is the chief engineer at Nishina Research Station on Freya III and one of the central characters in Starfield’s “Entangled” mission. The station’s researchers had been studying a strange gravitational distortion surrounding an Artifact when an experiment went catastrophically wrong. The resulting accident fractured reality into two parallel versions of Nishina. In one universe, Rafael was killed while attempting to deal with the malfunction, while the rest of the station’s personnel survived. In the alternate universe, Rafael survived, but the explosion, fire and subsequent destruction of the facility killed nearly everyone else, leaving him stranded alone among the ruined laboratories and hostile Cataxi creatures.

Rafael is responsible for sending the distress signal that draws the Spacefarer to Nishina, although the surviving staff in the other reality have no knowledge of it. As the Spacefarer begins involuntarily shifting between the two universes, Rafael helps explain what happened and becomes an important part of the effort to reach the Artifact and stabilize the experiment. His situation creates one of the game's more unusual moral choices: the Spacefarer can preserve the reality in which the Nishina staff survived, preserve Rafael's reality instead, or, by discovering the proper solution, save Rafael and the surviving members of the station.

If Rafael survives the events at Nishina, he later travels to New Atlantis and can be found at The Viewport, where he becomes available as a recruitable crew member at no cost. His expertise reflects his engineering background, with skills in Starship Engineering, Outpost Engineering and Outpost Management, making him useful aboard a ship or at an outpost.

Rafael's story is relatively brief, but the circumstances surrounding him make him one of Starfield's more memorable secondary characters, especially because the Spacefarer first encounters two radically different versions of his fate.

Meet Kari Loya

Kari Loya is an Emmy Award-winning American voice actor, narrator, filmmaker, educator and adventurer. Fluent in English, Spanish and Portuguese, Loya has recorded hundreds of commercials, promotions, narrations, trailers, corporate productions and other voice projects. His client history includes companies and networks such as HBO, Discovery Channel, NBC Sports, ESPN, MTV/VH1, PepsiCo, McDonald's, Delta Air Lines, Motorola and others. He has also worked on projects associated with the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics and the MTV European Music Awards. He won a New York Emmy for his narration of the television series Secrets of New York.

Loya graduated magna cum laude from Dartmouth College with a degree in History and later earned an MBA from Columbia Business School, while also building a career in education and school development.

Outside the studio, he is an accomplished endurance athlete and adventurer who has completed the New Zealand Ironman, climbed Aconcagua and cycled the TransAmerica Trail with his father, an experience he later chronicled in Conversations Across America. His video-game credits include True Crime: New York City and, most notably, Starfield, where he provides the voice of Nishina Research Station engineer Rafael Aguerro.