New Star Trek games risk missing franchise's hopeful spirit, reader warns

Two new Star Trek games are coming, and they're raising an uncomfortable question: what happens when you take a franchise built on hope and remake it as survival horror?

The first is Star Trek: Voyager – Across The Unknown, developed by Daedalic Entertainment under a licensing agreement Gamexcite struck with Paramount back in October 2023. From the Steam page and early images, it's shaping up as a resource management game with roguelike elements—think Fallout Shelter meets FTL, with your damaged starship rendered in 2D as you rebuild it room by room for a 70-year journey home across the Delta Quadrant. You'll face challenges along the way, racing against time, making hard choices about what to repair first and how to survive what's coming next.

It's a clever premise, grounded in Voyager's actual history. The show was stranded in hostile space; the game literalizes that premise into mechanical pressure. But here's where the concern sets in: Voyager, when it aired, chose a different path. Yes, the ship was damaged and far from home. But the crew's instinct was always toward discovery and exploration—toward understanding the unknown, not just enduring it. The show embraced an optimistic, episodic structure where each week brought new worlds and new possibilities. A survival-focused game, by contrast, trades that spirit of curiosity for dread. Every turn becomes about scarcity, about what you can't afford to fix, about the weight of that 70-year clock ticking down.

Then there's Star Trek: Infection, a VR title where you play as a Vulcan officer aboard a derelict starship, encountering an unknown entity that mutates your body. It's horror. Pure, visceral horror. And it represents an even sharper departure from what Star Trek has always been about—humanity reaching outward, exploring, learning, growing. Infection asks you to survive monsters. It asks you to be afraid.

Neither game is inherently bad. The problem is what they signal about how the franchise is being understood right now. Star Trek has always centered on optimism about the future, on the idea that exploration and reason could solve problems. The games being greenlit instead emphasize survival, scarcity, and fear. It's a tonal inversion.

This isn't entirely new. In the 2000s, Star Trek games went action-first—Elite Force as a first-person shooter, Birth of the Federation as a 4X strategy game. They were playable but commercially unsuccessful, and they abandoned the franchise's core DNA for genre conventions. Star Trek Resurgence, a narrative-driven Telltale-style game released more recently, tried to reclaim that storytelling focus. But the pull toward action, toward spectacle, toward familiar game mechanics, keeps reasserting itself.

There's also a demographic question lurking here. Voyager aired nearly 30 years ago. The fans who grew up with it are now in their 40s. A roguelike bunker-builder and a VR horror game are niche experiences—they appeal to specific gaming tastes. It's unclear whether there's a large enough audience of Star Trek fans who also want those particular game experiences, or whether the franchise's gaming audience is simply shrinking. A new Battlestar Galactica game with a similar survivalist bent was announced around the same time, suggesting this is a broader trend in adapting older sci-fi properties.

The reader who submitted this piece—comfortablyadv—isn't hostile to the games. They're cautiously interested in Across The Unknown, genuinely curious whether the roguelike structure could work. But they're also honest about the risk: that these games are too late, too niche, and too far removed from what made Star Trek resonate in the first place. The question isn't whether the games will be fun. It's whether they'll find their audience, and whether they'll do anything to revive interest in Star Trek gaming, or just mark another chapter in a long history of the franchise struggling to translate its vision into interactive form.