I Did My Best to Completely Spoil the ‘Star Trek: Voyager’ Pilot

When we first heard about Star Trek Voyager: Through the Unknownwe were addicted to its killer principle: you take control of the ship Traveler after being thrown 70,000 light years into the Delta Quadrant and are responsible for making the decisions to keep the ship in one piece. Manage resources, broadcast or engage in conflict, monitor your crew’s morale, assign teams where every choice matters: who lives, who dies, will you get Traveler 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 strap on my combadge, brew a cup of Janeway’s favorite, and try it out for myself. But even though there’s still a ton of promise in Through the unknownits first moments are a bit Also guided to really let the game shine.

Through the unknownThe demo takes you through the game’s extensive tutorial section, based on the events of TravelerThe pilot for, “Caretaker”. There are some acquiescent pauses in this story to teach you Through the unknownthe mechanics of – specifically resource management, scanning planets for places where you can acquire new resources, and then managing a variety of systems on board Traveler itself, from electrical capacity to crew morale, research into new technology and manufacturing, and, in the most interesting twist of the series itself, treating the ship’s 70,000 light-year jump as a catastrophic event disabling the ship, forcing you to slowly but surely clear the ship of debris and rebuild the facilities as you and your resources see fit.

But for the most part, you’re following the events of “Caretaker,” which means you’re pretty insulated from the choice-based narrative decisions that are one of the most interesting things about gaming at large. The general flow of this hour-long slice of play is like any other. Hiking Fans already know this: you get zapped into the Delta Quadrant, there’s a mysterious group filled with strange people who play the banjo and lure you with lemonade, crew members disappear, you discover said network’s connection to a neighboring planet called Ocampa, you meet Kazon (the Kazon-Ogla, to be precise!), and then you have the choice to destroy the network to prevent the Kazon to get your hands on it or use it. to return home to the Alpha Quadrant.

For my first playthrough of the demo, I opted to try to keep it as true to the events of the original episode as possible. On the away missions, I assigned people who actually went on these 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 make the most of the various skill tests you face during these missions (largely told via an LCARS-like window system, rather than in a particularly cinematic – early perhaps, to the point where the game currently lacks any type of mission. of voice-over dialogue, but Through the unknown is definitely more a game about spreadsheet management than particularly sumptuous settings). When I was presented with choices, like whether I tried to save Chakotay or Torres from the Caretaker Matrix’s lab storage, or ultimately whether I destroyed the Matrix or used it to get home, I made those choices.

As the demo ends after this choice, you can’t really continue to see the consequences of your actions up to that point, nor how Through the unknown I will then balance it out by introducing other classics Traveler stories throughout 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 less about choices and more about handrails. Your impact on individual away mission choices, whether you succeed or fail, didn’t yet seem like it could significantly alter the narrative. The only crossroads of choice regarding who you try to save on the board simply means that you either get Chakotay and Tuvok as characters in your “hero” board who you can send on missions or assign to various areas of the ship for efficiency bonuses (and Harry disappears, as he does in the series), or you get B’Ellana and Tuvok (and Paris disappears instead).

While the resource management and survival game layer of Through the unknown shone from the start, even in this phase of play (the space combat leaves a lot to be desired so far though, 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 do TravelerThe journey home truly yours just didn’t feel like it was still there. So when I left “successfully” Traveler in the Delta Quadrant at the end of my first race, I jumped in and made a decision: I was going to try to be the worse Captain Janeway, it’s possible.

I deliberately neglected to manage the ship beyond the bare minimum of energy and deuterium resources needed to run it – without assigning senior staff to workstations, destroying crew morale by denying them more than emergency rations in the mess hall, or not even building emergency rest quarters (but not too far away – without having enough fuel for the warp core to operate outside of the ” “gray mode” or by lowering morale to a certain point, which leads to possible states of failure). Whenever I could, I made an aggressive decision, seeing how far I could stray from the events of “Caretaker.”

On away missions, I would try to send the least equipped people and make them make decisions that would lead to an almost guaranteed failure on a skill check. Especially if it was a check indicating that it was a high-risk choice, and failure to do so could result in injury or even death to the visiting team. So when poor B’Ellana, Harry, and Neelix teleported to Ocampa, got hit by a desert storm they couldn’t shelter from in time, aggressively made contact with the local Kazon, and then carelessly staged a tactical retreat after Neelix saved Kes. Before.

Instead, I was simply hit with an immediate “Away Mission Failed” screen and asked to reload my save. Which I did only reluctantly and this time I was less overtly determined to fail, looking for enough money to get back to Traveler in one piece so I can continue to replay the events of “Caretaker”. Ultimately the only thing that changed in this run was that I chose to use the array to send Traveler at home, which leads to a great little dark sequence where Chakotay berates you for betraying his trust and abandoning the Ocampa, and you can then quickly decide whether you want to arrest your Maquis “allies” or even whether you’ll hint to Tom Paris that he’s going straight back to his penal colony (I did both, because once again, worse Captain Janeway (race). But in the full game, it will likely end like the demo does: ending your run prematurely and asking you to simply reload the game and give it another try.

Obviously, this is only a small part of what Through the unknown will have to offer when it is released on PC and consoles at some point (the release date is still undecided). But I left wanting to have a better idea of ​​his approach to choice outside of the particularly restrictive constraints of the first tutorials. As it stands, it’s hard to say how much spinning the game will actually allow you to do. TravelerIt’s the destiny of, even with teasers that we’ll eventually be able to do things like let Tuvix live or use Borg technology to shorten the return trip.

There are still many interesting systems under this narrative layer that still give Through the unknown a ton of potential as a survival and resource management game. But if you are a Star Trek A fan who wants to play God with the premise of a series that never could live up to its own potential, the jury is still out until we get our hands on more games.

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