Lost in Space
Why yes, this is in fact a post about Star Trek and video games
I do most of my reading in the mornings, and sometimes unwind from writing by playing video games. My usual preference, at least when I’m not looking for simple, dumb fun, is games that are stupidly intricate, incredibly hard, or some combination of both (if you’ve ever played a FromSoft title, you’ll get the idea). That way, I’m still forced to use my brain, and the fact I’m using it for something entirely pointless is, well, very much the point.
A few days ago I picked up a brand new game called Star Trek: Voyager – Across the Unknown (which comes by way of a Hamburg-based developer that seems to specialize in point-and-click adventure games). I really haven’t played anything like this since I was a kid playing Monkey Island in the early 2000s — and probably would have preferred to play something more flashy on a console had I owned one at the time. Across the Unknown isn’t purely point and click, and nor is it a purely text-based experience in the mould of stuff you might have gotten on floppy disk in the 1990s. Essentially, it’s an adventure/survival/rogue-lite game based on the TV series Star Trek Voyager (1995-2001).
If you never watched the show, its premise involves a starship that’s been stranded on the far side of the galaxy and is trying to make its way back to Earth. Voyager, distinct from other Trek settings, is a small science vessel: state-of-the-art but also cramped and forced to navigate vast and uncharted regions of space. For reasons that are probably too nerdy to get into here, there is also a major schism in the crew that creates the potential for mutiny and thus threatens to make the situation even more dangerous.
I enjoy Voyager, and in many ways (with apologies to Scott Bakula and Enterprise, a noble effort I enjoy as well) it’s the last Trek show to fully feel like Star Trek. But I’ve also always felt the show had some unfulfilled potential, and that — despite some great characters and solid episodes — ultimately failed to take its rather unique premise far enough.
