Star Trek Voyager: Across the Unknown Scratches the Nostalgia Itch
- aaroncynic
- 57 minutes ago
- 3 min read
If you’re a fan of all things Star Trek, you’ve likely spent plenty of time after rewatching a series wondering how things might’ve turned out if any number of characters made different choices. Thanks to Star Trek Voyager: Across the Unknown, we get that chance.
The meat of the game is resource management, ship maintenance and repair. You’re presented with a cutout side view of Voyager, much like a dollhouse. Near the beginning of the game the ship is mostly a wreck, save for a few critical areas like the bridge, the warp core, and the main deflector. A few other areas of the ship like the mess hall, main shuttlebay, weapons stations, and sick bay are pre-built but offline and require repair. Everything else like cargo bays, crew quarters, engineering offices, science labs, and other areas that keep a starship running become buildable after you return life support to a deck and clear out ruined areas. This gives you a lot of choices for what kind of ship you want Voyager to be, but you must make those carefully, as your choices have consequences.
Gameplay is divided into four main quadrants – the cross-section management of the ship, a text based storyline where you’re presented with choices of what you want the crew to do in various situations, hopping around to planets and points of interest scouring for resources and pieces of the plot via a map of procedurally generated star systems, and ship to ship combat that’s mostly automated.
Voyager: Across the Unknown has a very retro feel to it, but as someone who grew up watching Voyager when it aired, played a lot of text-based RPGs, and loved those books, that’s one of its biggest charms.
The narrative RPG with choices that move the story forward (or backward, depending on where the bar lands) and mostly automated combat make sitting in the captain’s chair feel real, as it forces you to trust both your crew and your own judgement. For those who’ve watched the show multiple times and have good memories, it makes Voyager’s story that much more enjoyable while also allowing you to chart a different course, should you want to see how things may have played out differently. I ended up with multiple B'Elannas thanks to not having my tech tree upgraded by Faces (Editor's note: Faces is S1E14's episode which sees normally half human, half Klingon Chief Engineer Belanna Torres being separated into two entities, a full human and full Klingon, by a Vidian scientist) which was a unique and interesting development. You also get to decide how you’d deal with Tuvix.
Across the Unknown is at its core, about survival. You’ve got to find and manage multiple resources that can be finite including deuterium to power the ship, duranium to build things, dilithium for both upgrades and warping to new sectors, food, tritanium, and even morale. It can be tricky to strike a harmonious balance between all of these things, making the right decisions for upgrades, warding off random attacks from various enemies, and picking the right heroes for away missions. I’ve destroyed the ship and crew multiple times thanks to asteroid fields, running out of necessary resources before I could obtain more, and faced at least one mutiny.
The game isn’t without its flaws, most notably the lack of the option for a manual save. While this seems to be a feature rather than a bug in order to prevent save scumming and increase the difficulty, I found myself having to restart the game entirely from the beginning more than once after being caught in a death spiral.
This became a pretty rough slog, as the text based portions of the story have a limited amount of outcomes. While I love and have rewatched Voyager multiple times over the last couple of decades, repeating the same parts of the story just to fix a couple of bad choices not far down the road from Caretaker became tedious. Developer gameXcite though, has said they would address this in an upcoming patch, so hopefully my future playthroughs will go a little more smoothly.
It’s fantastic that both Tim Russ and Robert Duncan McNeill reprised their roles to do voiceovers – mostly in the form of log entries – for the game, but it really would’ve benefited if we could’ve had more voiceovers from more actors on the show.
In all, Across the Unknown is a very solid game if you’re a fan of Voyager and narrative RPGs, and has plenty of opportunities to revisit more stories in the Delta quadrant. Just be sure to keep on a pot of coffee.
Comments