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). When offered choices to make, like whether I attempted to rescue Chakotay or Torres from the Caretaker array’s lab storage, or ultimately whether I destroyed the array or used it to go home, I made those choices.
As the demo ends after that choice, you can’t really continue to see the consequences of your actions up to that point quite yet, or how Across the Unknown will then balance introducing other classic Voyager stories into the rest of the game as you make more and more decisions. But overall, unsurprisingly for a tutorial-heavy section of the game, this largely felt like less about choice and more about handrails. Your impact on individual away mission choices, whether you succeeded or failed, didn’t feel like it could overwhelmingly alter the narrative yet. The one crossroad of choices about who you try to save on the array simply means you either get Chakotay and Tuvok as characters in your array of “heroes” you can send on away missions or assign to various areas of the ship for efficiency bonuses (and Harry goes missing, as he does in the show), or you get B’Ellana and Tuvok (and Paris goes missing instead).
While the resource management and survival game layer of Across the Unknown was shining early on, even in this hand-hold-y phase of the game (space combat, however, leaves much to be desired so far, largely based on you deciding which enemy subsystem you want to shoot at and occasionally pressing a cooldown on an ability), the opportunity for you to make Voyager‘s journey home truly your own just didn’t feel like it was quite there yet. So when I “successfully” left Voyager in the Delta Quadrant at the end of my initial run, I hopped back in and made a decision: I was going to try and be the worst Captain Janeway possible.
I deliberately neglected managing the ship outside of the bare minimum power and deuterium resources needed to keep the ship going—not assigning senior staff to workstations, nosediving the crew’s morale by denying them more than emergency rations in the mess hall, or not building even emergency rest quarters (but not too far—not having enough fuel to have the warp core running outside of “Grey mode” or lowering morale to a certain point leads to an instant fail state). Whenever I could, I would make an aggressive decision, seeing how much I could break myself away from the events of “Caretaker.”
On away missions, I tried to send the least-equipped people and made them take decisions that would lead to almost guaranteed failure during a skill check. Especially if it was a check that stated that it was a high-risk choice, and failure to achieve it could lead to the away team being injured or perhaps even killed. So when poor B’Ellana, Harry, and Neelix beamed down to Ocampa, got hit by a desert storm they couldn’t shelter from in time, aggressively made contact with the local Kazon, and then sloppily staged a tactical retreat after Neelix rescued Kes, I looked at all my failure states and these injured away team members and wondered who would get a Kazon phaser bolt to the back and not make it to transport, and how that would change the narrative going forward.
Instead, I simply got hit with an immediate “Away Mission Failed” screen and was asked to reload my save. Which I only begrudgingly did and was less overtly set on failure this time, eeking by enough to make it back to Voyager in one piece so I could continue playing out the events of “Caretaker.” Ultimately, the only thing that changed about this run was that I chose to use the array to send Voyager home, which leads to a great, dark little sequence where Chakotay lambasts you for betraying his trust and abandoning the Ocampa, and you can then promptly decide if you want to arrest your Maquis “allies” or even if you’ll imply to Tom Paris that he’s going straight back to his penal colony (I did both, because again, worst Captain Janeway run). But in the full game that will likely end as the demo does: ending your run prematurely and just asking you to load the game back up again and make another attempt.
Obviously, this is just a small slice of what Across the Unknown will have to offer when it comes out on PC and consoles at some point (a release date is still undecided). But I came away wishing to have gotten a better picture of its approach to choice outside of the particularly railroaded constraints of the early tutorials. As is, it’s hard to tell just how much the game is actually going to let you twist Voyager‘s fate, even with teasers that we’ll eventually be able to do things like let Tuvix live or work Borg technology to cut the trip home down.
There are still a lot of interesting systems underneath that narrative layer that still give Across the Unknown a ton of potential as a survival and resource management game. But if you’re a Star Trek fan who wants to play god with a show’s premise that never quite could live up to its own potential, the jury is still out until whenever we get our hands on more of the game.
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