‚Across the Unknown,‘ the upcoming ‚Star Trek: Voyager‘ video game that puts you in Captain Janeway’s shoes, doesn’t quite live up to its promise just yet.
When we first heard about Star Trek Voyager: Across the Unknown, we were hooked on its killer premise: you take control of the starship Voyager after it’s flung 70,000 light-years into the Delta Quadrant and are tasked with the decisions to keep the ship in one piece. Managing resources, diffusing or engaging in conflict, monitoring your crew’s morale, assigning away teams where every choice matters—who lives, who dies, will you get Voyager home or will you chart another path?
So when developer Gamexcite released a new demo for the game as part of this week’s Steam Next Fest, I knew I had to don my combadge, brew up a cup of Janeway’s favorite, and give it a try myself. But while there’s still a ton of promise in Across the Unknown, its opening moments are a little too guided to really let the game shine.
Across the Unknown‘s demo takes you through the broad tutorial section of the game, based around the events of Voyager‘s pilot, “Caretaker.” There are some acquiescences to breaks in that narrative in order to teach you about Across the Unknown‘s mechanics—most particularly resource management, scanning planets for places you can acquire new resources, and then managing a variety of systems aboard Voyager itself, from power capacity to crew morale, to researching new technology and fabrication, to, in the most interesting twist from the show itself, actually treating the ship’s 70,000-light-year jump as a catastrophic, ship-disabling event, necessitating you having to slowly but surely clear the vessel of debris and rebuild facilities as you and your resources see fit.
But for the most part, you are following the events of “Caretaker,” and that by and large means you’re pretty isolated from the choice-based narrative decisions that are one of the more interesting things about the wider game. The general flow of this hour-long slice of the game is as any Trek fan already knows: you get zapped to the Delta Quadrant, there’s a mysterious array full of weird people playing banjos and enticing you with lemonade, crewmates go missing, you discover said array’s connection to a nearby planet called Ocampa, you encounter Kazon (the Kazon-Ogla, to be precise!), and you are then left with the choice of destroying the array to stop the Kazon from getting their hands on it or using it to get yourself back home to the Alpha Quadrant.
For my first playthrough of the demo, I opted to try and keep it as faithful to the events of the original episode as possible. On away missions, I assigned people who actually went on those same missions in the series—something you’re subtly encouraged to do, at least for this first tutorial arc, by said characters having the right kinds of stats and expertise to get the most out of the various skill checks you face during these missions (largely told through an LCARS-esque window system, rather than in a particularly cinematic fashion—early it might be, to the point that the game is lacking any kind of voiceover dialogue, but Across the Unknown is definitely more a game about managing spreadsheets than it is about particularly lavish set pieces).
