Boy, is it nice to see a gray, Intrepid-class starship cruising around space at a time when most Star Trek is aping big Hollywood blockbusters.
Announced on Wednesday, Star Trek Voyager: Across the Unknown is a new survival strategy game set in the timeline of ’90s Trek. The game puts players in control of Captain Janeway’s lost vessel, as they chart their own course back home from the unknown regions of the Delta Quadrant. Publisher Daedalic Entertainment and developer gameXcite say the game “blends exploration, ship & resource management, roguelite elements, and meaningful choices” with an emphasis on crew dynamics. The announcement trailer looks a little like FTL from back in the day.
Look, I love Star Trek, but my personal preferences are for the problem-of-the-week, futuristic-office-worker-type Star Trek. Those stories did sometimes veer into galactic war and fate-of-the-universe dilemmas, but sometimes, Odo just got stuck in a rock. This generation’s Trek is bigger and louder, with shorter seasons. So I fell off Discovery after season 1, felt bait-and-switched by Picard until season 3, never got on the hijinks-filled wavelength of Strange New Worlds, and only flirted with Lower Decks, which was a bit too manic for my beige-deck-loving self. I probably should have watched Star Trek: Prodigy, which features Janeway, but I can only watch so many animated shows about found families, and I’ve made my choices.
That’s fine — I will not yuck anyone’s yum over New Trek, nor proclaim in Toxic Fan Voice that one era is better than the others. I am even cautiously hyped for Starfleet Academy, because Holly Hunter and Paul Giamatti are legends who love Trek. But consider me hyped to click around and solve whatever time/space dilemma is plaguing Harry Kim in Across the Unknown.
There isn’t much information on how the team at gameXcite has deepened the experience of Star Trek: Voyager with the play of Across the Unknown, other than to emphasize in a news release that “familiar faces return, but their fates may differ.” But as someone wrapping a Deep Space Nine rewatch, and halfway through a Voyager marathon, I’m just relieved that it currently makes financial and audience sense for someone to develop a “niche” game like this for PC and console. The pace of the ’90s Trek is different than today’s iterations on TV. The sci-fi quagmires are different. The [Spock voice] logic is different. Here’s hoping Across the Unknown can channel the Voyager spirit — even if the show is, like, maybe the fourth best Trek series, to be honest! —onto the playable canvas. And if not, well, that’s why we have 800 Trek novels to read at our leisure.
Star Trek Voyager: Across the Unknown does not have a release date. The TV series is still streaming on Paramount Plus.
