Tag: daedalic entertainment

Spoiler Warning: Beware spoilers for Star Trek: Voyager – Across The Unknown and for Star Trek: Voyager.

I’ve been getting acquainted with the brand-new Star Trek: Voyager – Across The Unknown over the last few days. Last year marked Voyager’s 30th anniversary – which is insane to think about, by the way, and makes me feel oh so very old! But it also made it the perfect time for a new Voyager game’s announcement, and with Across The Unknown looking like my kinda thing, I was excited to give it a try. I picked up the “deluxe edition” of the game as soon as it became available, and I’m ready to share my thoughts with you today.

Firstly, though, a couple of important caveats.

Everything we’re going to get into today is the entirely *subjective, not objective* opinion of just one person. If you have a different perspective on Across The Unknown or Voyager in general… that’s okay. I offer my take to the Trekkie community based on how I experienced the game. And in addition, Across The Unknown is a deceptively big game, with some procedurally-generated elements, luck-based mechanics that play a role in determining outcomes, and multiple pathways and even multiple endings. I have not experienced all that the game has to offer, and I’m basing this review on one “run” through the game, plus one abortive “half-run” that ended too soon.

So let’s talk Across The Unknown – or, as I keep mistakenly calling it, Into The Unknown. Remember that song? The one from Frozen II? It’s stuck in my head now.

Big-picture talk: I like Across The Unknown. I think it’s a game designed from the ground up by Trekkies, with Trekkies in mind, and it really leans into all aspects of Voyager, coming across as a true celebration of the series. Gameplay-wise, though? There are some flaws and deficiencies which hold it back a little as things stand. I’m buoyed by developer GameXcite’s commitment to acting on feedback, but there is one basic missing feature that even a first-time amateur developer should’ve known fans would want to see included, and it’s a shame it’s absent from Across The Unknown at launch.

There are also a handful of bugs that impacted my experience, including one that stopped me from navigating between the game’s three main menus, effectively soft-locking me out and forcing me to reload my most recent autosave. Again, GameXcite seem willing to continue to work on the game post-launch, with a couple of patches having been rolled out for the PC version already. Hopefully, these issues (and any others I may not have encountered) will be resolved – but it’s something to keep in mind if you’re sitting on the fence about the game right now. Perhaps waiting as little as a couple of weeks will mean the version you download and install will be a tad smoother and better across the board.

Across The Unknown is missing an incredibly basic function of video games that I almost can’t believe wasn’t included at launch: a proper save system. The game relies on an autosave, with the intention of playing like a “rogue-like” experience, complete with permanent, run-impacting choices.

The problem with that is the sheer *randomness* to too many of the outcomes. To give one example from my first run, I encountered a mission based on the episode Faces, which involved the Vidiians splitting B’Elanna into two separate people. This mission, despite me having an upgraded sickbay, the Doctor being present, being fully-equipped with resources, and – for want of a better term – doing everything “the right way,” resulted in B’Elanna’s death. This came in my first run through the game, at a relatively early stage, leaving me without one of Voyager’s main characters. I’d have wanted to go back and undo that, but doing so meant either restarting the entire sector or starting again from scratch.

I admire the intention to go for an “old-school” style of gameplay. But I’m someone who believes games should give players options. I’m on the record supporting the practice of “save-scumming,” at least in single-player experiences like Across The Unknown. A game like this, which demands hours of your time, should be customisable to an extent, and should be able to be tailored to the way you want to play. By all means, do what Baldur’s Gate 3 does and have a mode where save-scumming is disabled and players have to rely on one single autosave only. But for folks who either don’t have a lot of time to play, or who want a more relaxed approach to the game? A proper free save system is *essential*, and I find it hard to believe that no one at GameXcite didn’t raise this as an issue before launch.

Responding to this exact line of criticism, GameXcite has pledged to “find a solution that brings you there,” to quote one of their recent updates. I don’t know what the time-frame might be on something like that, but it will be a *major* improvement to the game, assuming the developers can find a way to get it over the line. I sympathise, to an extent, because this is clearly not the way the game was envisioned or originally designed. But the ability to freely save – or at least to have multiple autosaves to choose from, perhaps – is something so incredibly basic, something that has been part of video games for decades… the fact it’s missing is a glaring omission. The sooner this is fixed, the better Across The Unknown will be.

In my playthrough of the game’s demo version last year, I made note of the lack of voice acting, and how it was text-only. I didn’t mean that as a criticism, really, but I wanted folks to be aware of the kind of title Across The Unknown was before jumping in. Since then, however, GameXcite managed to recruit two of Voyager’s original cast members – Tim Russ and Robert Duncan McNeill – to reprise their roles and record a series of logs. These logs are played at the beginning of each new sector (assuming the characters are both alive and part of the crew), and it’s a nice addition.

Unlike a proper save system, I don’t think Across The Unknown would’ve felt incomplete without these logs, but it’s an example of GameXcite responding to the feedback they picked up from the demo version of the game, and it’s nice that they chose to expand the title to include this extra feature. The logs are a lot of fun, they’re very “Star Trekky,” and it’s always great when a project like this can bring back members of the original cast in some form.

In addition to the soft-locking bug I mentioned above, I encountered another, comparatively minor bug. At one point, my ship was afflicted by a “deuterium infestation,” which gradually depleted my deuterium stockpile over time. Despite taking the appropriate actions to fix this problem, the pop-up notification (which is on the left-hand side of the screen) never disappeared for the remainder of that run. I don’t know why it didn’t, and after a while, I just sort of tuned it out. But I’m pretty sure this *is* a bug, and the notification should’ve been removed after the issue was resolved.

A more serious bug soon followed. In short, if you’ve had to re-play a section of the game, or if you’ve been defeated in combat and need to re-load the sector, you have the option to choose to skip chunks of dialogue. That’s fine – good, even, because there’s nothing more frustrating, sometimes, than having to sit through an inspiring speech or villain’s monologue that you’ve heard a dozen times! But choosing to skip dialogue *after* locking in an optional choice seemed to mean that the desired outcome didn’t happen – even if it literally had a 100% chance of happening.

This next part is spoiler-y, so skip this paragraph if you really want to avoid that.

After playing through the Kazon-Nistrim/Seska storyline (which is mandatory), and arriving at the final combat encounter, Harry Kim has the idea to use holographic projections to make it seem as if Voyager has allied vessels fighting alongside her. If you succeed in this check, which, in my run, had something like a 90% chance of success, it removed two of the Kazon vessels from the subsequent fight. But if you skip the remainder of the conversation *after* choosing this option, even if the game told you you’d succeeded, the enemy ships would be present. An annoying bug, if a specific one.

There were no hard crashes during my playthrough, and compared to the demo version (which seemed to be putting a lot of strain on my CPU for some reason, making the fans work overtime to keep things cool), I’d say Across The Unknown ran pretty well on my PC. This shouldn’t be a massively demanding game; it’s less than 9GB in total, and there aren’t a ton of models or animations. But there are still characters to animate, as well as real-time ship battles. It’s nice to see a game that runs well out of the gate – not something that’s always guaranteed any more, sadly, in this age of “release now, fix later” titles and endless patches.

Let’s talk about the “deluxe edition.”

I usually don’t go in for day-one DLC, but I violated that rule for Across The Unknown. I did so primarily as a show of support for the development team, but I think it’s worth saying that this additional content… didn’t really add a lot. The deluxe edition content adds three technologies and five side-missions (all of which are based on episodes from Voyager). I didn’t get to play all of them, but the ones I saw were fun. The DLC also adds two “heroes;” named NPC characters who can be assigned to a variety of different roles. Neither are what you’d call a major character on the show, though.

I’m in two minds about this, really. I don’t really think it’s asking too much for games to be released in a complete state, and day-one DLC – i.e. content that was developed alongside the main game and fully-integrated into it – has never sat right with me. Not every game needs a “deluxe edition,” and when you compare the price of the base game (RRP £29.99 in the UK) to the price of the “deluxe edition” (£37.99 in the UK), I’m not sure the extra content is really worth it. I hope that, *if* any future DLC is planned, it will either be significantly better value, or else have something totally different to offer besides new random characters and a few basic missions. This isn’t to say the content is *bad*; it’s not. But your mileage may vary when it comes to determining the value, and if price is a concern, I don’t think you’re missing out by not paying the extra money on this occasion.

Something that came to irk me, a little, was how the game became quite pushy at insisting I advance the story and move on, leaving a sector before fully exploring and encountering everything. As above with saving, the intention behind this may be admirable, in some ways; Across The Unknown’s developers want you to feel the pressure of Voyager’s long journey home, and want you to have to make choices between exploring every corner of a sector and maintaining crew morale.

I get it.

But when, in every single sector, you’re getting pop-up after pop-up telling you that the crew are getting angsty and want you to move on… it becomes more of an irritation than anything else.

This can happen even *before* completing the main objective in a sector, meaning that you can be feeling the pressure to move on when you literally cannot move on, as that option is still locked. And you can argue that I should’ve gotten a move on and prioritised the main story! Fair point. But isn’t the point of a game about commanding a starship that you have *some* freedom to explore? In most games, I’ll try to do side-quests first, then the main mission, and go through each level that way to maximise the amount of stuff I get to explore. Across The Unknown wants to limit this… and I don’t think the way it’s implemented is quite working right.

As with free saving, I’d be fine if this was a toggleable option – if you had the ability to turn this feature on or off. But if I may propose a compromise: why not limit this so it only happens after the main mission in a sector is complete? That would still keep the pressure on, but it would give players a bit more freedom to play the game in different ways.

Speaking of freedom, one thing I was concerned about before Across The Unknown launched was the extent of player freedom when it comes to making key narrative decisions. This is absolutely *crucial* to the game’s potential replayability, and any narrative adventure – even a rogue-like experience – needs to make decisions feel impactful. Moreover, a game based on an existing story that aims to give players the ability to deviate from that story needs to find a way to balance different outcomes.

There were several places where, to be blunt about it, I felt like the game was very much on rails. These two examples are spoiler-ific, so feel free to skip a couple of paragraphs if you want.

At the end of two sectors in the first part of the game – the battle against Culluh and Seska and the Borg/Species 8472 conflict specifically – I felt like the game almost railroaded me into getting a specific outcome. In the case of the Kazon, no matter who I chose to accuse, whether I chose to pursue or let Seska escape, and whatever other choices I had… it still culminated in a conflict and a battle I had to win. And with the Borg, even choosing not to engage and trying to seek an alternate route eventually led to the events of Scorpion unfolding exactly as they did in the show. There are *smaller* differences along the way – it’s possible to recruit Seska after the Kazon war, Kes can survive the events of Gift, and Seven can die, preventing her from joining the crew, to give three examples.

The real issue, when you boil it down, is that these outcomes *still* feel pretty random. Seska’s choice to join or not join the crew was basically a 50/50. Seven’s survival odds were pretty good, if you’d completed most of the required upgrades, but it still depended on the roll of a digital dice. These storylines were mandatory, which I get, in a game like this; there are limits on how far the game could diverge from Voyager’s actual adventure, after all! But in a way, that makes offering alternate pathways and different endings even *more* important. If, for instance, Seven could refuse to join the crew if you hadn’t done something, or if she could be replaced by a Klingon or Romulan ex-Borg, for instance, there’d be a bit more interest, a reason to do things a certain way, and consequences or rewards that made a run through the game feel a bit more tailored and personal. As it is, the game pushes you down certain paths to outcomes that feel either guaranteed or totally random and disconnected from your choices, neither of which is especially compelling.

Okay, the worst of the spoilers are over for now.

Because the game does have a risk-reward system in place, practically any main character can die during a run. As I noted, B’Elanna died during my first abortive run, and I also did the “meme” thing of keeping Tuvix rather than forcing him to be separated back into Neelix and Tuvok. Both of those events unquestionably shook things up.

But… here’s the next issue. Each hero character has a backup. Lose Tuvok, you get Nunez, whose dialogue looks to be word-for-word identical. Lose Neelix, and you get a “wish.com” generic Talaxian. Lose Seven? You get her slightly less useful twin: Nine of Nine. All of these characters are functionally the same as the heroes they stand in for, but slightly worse or less effective in their roles.

This has a double-whammy of an impact: there’s really only *one* ideal set of characters, heroes that have the best skills and the best chance of surviving away missions and combat encounters. And if you lose them, you don’t even get any kind of different dialogue or new storylines involving their replacements. Voyager didn’t have the same kind of expansive secondary cast as, say, DS9 did, but there *are* secondary characters or even one-off guest stars who could and should be able to fill some of these roles – and crucially, do something a little different with them.

Suppose you choose to keep Tuvix, permanently losing Neelix and Tuvok in the process. Tuvix has some skills, sure, but he’s neither the combat expert Tuvok was nor the morale officer Neelix was – he’s demonstrably worse in both roles, *and* there’s only one of him. So, yes, you have the “moral conundrum” of killing Tuvix, as Janeway did in the story… but you can also totally ignore this side-mission, as I found myself consciously doing in my second run through the game. There were basically zero narrative or gameplay consequences to doing so, and I got an outcome that is almost “objectively” better.

And this is true with all of the heroes – at least, all of the ones I encountered during my playthrough.

This leaves the game feeling… well, tense, sometimes, if you’re worried about a hero on an away mission or during a side-mission. But also, more importantly, it feels like there’s really only “one” right way to approach the game: Janeway’s way, the way she did things in the show. This was another thing I was concerned about before launch, and it’s disappointing to see it pan out.

A game like Across The Unknown absolutely *should* have storylines and side-quests where the TV show outcome is the best one, and there should be irreplaceable characters, whose loss impacts the remainder of a playthrough. But… is it too much to ask that some of these potentially different outcomes are better? Or at least, that their impacts are neutral, with losses somewhere being offset by gains elsewhere? Because right now, Across The Unknown is great if you want to faithfully replicate Voyager’s journey as seen on TV. It’s less interesting if you feel like you could’ve done better, or that there might’ve been other approaches to certain storylines that might’ve led to verifiably better outcomes.

Because of this kind of dual impact of hero losses having a gameplay downside while also being narratively irrelevant… I found it made many side-missions unappealing. We talked about Faces and Tuvix above, where B’Elanna, Tuvok, and Neelix can all be removed from your run through the game. But those are far from the only instances where this happened, and it feels like something that’s just… built into the game at a fundamental level.

In any game with both random elements and characters with different stats, there are always going to be more optimal configurations and less optimal ones – that’s unavoidable, and not really the point of this line of criticism. My point is that, for a game that bills itself on putting you in “the captain’s chair,” it then really goes out of its way to push you down one narrative path, to take exactly the same decisions as in the TV show, and just generally feels unwilling or unable to open things up to potentially different and better outcomes.

This is not a fatal flaw. And I still found Across The Unknown fun to play. But I would argue that it impacts the game’s longer-term replayability; unless you want to go back and have basically the same narrative experience again, just with a few resources, planets, and nebulae in different configurations, then you’re kind of out of luck. The relatively minor, roll-of-the-dice outcomes – like a secondary character joining the crew, for instance – don’t make up for the fact that these storylines and practically all of their content unfold the same way each time.

Sticking with hero characters, I like how the system works at its core – but it is pretty limited. For instance, Janeway isn’t a “hero,” and can’t take part in any away missions. And while you do get some choice during away missions about which characters to use and in what configurations, there isn’t a ton of variety to this. Unless you’re deliberately trying to punish yourself, sending an away team you *know* will struggle to complete a task or mission… the worst you’re gonna get, unless you get unlucky with the digital dice, is a temporary injury to a hero.

Even then, the game pushes certain crew members into away missions, sometimes. Again, there’s that sense of being railroaded; forced by the developers to go down a specific path, even if you might’ve wanted to try something a little different. It doesn’t happen all the time, fortunately, but it happens enough to be noticeable. As above with storylines, there’s a balance to strike between allowing Voyager’s journey home to unfold the way it did on TV and giving players the freedom to explore. Sometimes, that balance has been struck reasonably well. But at other times… I felt it wasn’t.

One final point of criticism relates to the final act of the game – so skip ahead a couple of paragraphs if spoilers are a concern.

Upon returning to Earth – in two of the game’s multiple endings that I saw, at any rate – we’re treating to a (text-only) log from Admiral Janeway. And for me… this scene just felt a tiny bit underwhelming. We see Voyager *approach* Earth, but that’s it. Janeway’s log mentions Voyager being escorted home, flying to San Francisco… and I just can’t help but feel I’d have liked to see that. A short, sixty- or ninety-second cut-scene depicting other starships alongside Voyager, and/or the Golden Gate Bridge flyover, would’ve done *wonders* for making the end of the game feel just that bit more special.

I like that there are multiple endings; a game like this needs that kind of diversity to reflect player choice. But as we said above… there’s kind of one “good one,” i.e. the canon ending from the show, and at least two lesser ones. Maybe I didn’t see them all, and maybe there are other ways to make it home ahead of schedule, or with even better outcomes; I’m admittedly not the best player, even on Across The Unknown’s easy mode! But for the endings to Endgame, the ones I saw were either the canon ending, or a much, much darker one.

With all of that being said, recreating Voyager’s journey home – and tweaking it sometimes, as well as experiencing it in a new medium – was a really enjoyable experience. Saving Seven of Nine from the Borg Queen and Voyager finally seeing Earth for the first time – I won’t lie, I felt myself getting a little teary-eyed, just as I did some twenty-five years ago, when I saw Endgame for the very first time. Although the game was an imperfect experience… I enjoyed it for what it was.

I also adore Across The Unknown’s sense of humour. The game really leaned into some of the jokes and even the memes that Voyager has spawned within the Trekkie community: Paris becoming a “lizard,” in his words, Harry Kim’s lack of a promotion, and yes, of course, Tuvix, too. These little in-jokes didn’t go too far, nor did they feel like they were laughing *at* the show and the Trekkie community – at least, not for me. Instead, these light-hearted moments really hammered home how this is a game made by fans, for fans.

And that feeling extended far beyond humour. There were deep cuts to episodes across all seven seasons of the show, with outcomes that felt logically consistent with Voyager, even as the game deviated or made things up. Narratively speaking, it really was a fun time, in spite of some of the negative points mentioned above.

I suppose we should talk about *gameplay* since this is a video game! Across The Unknown has two main gameplay modes: managing the ship and guiding away missions. There are a lot of stats and numbers to keep track of – miss something, and you might have to wait longer to unlock a technology, or even miss out on one of the many missions with a time limit. It can seem overwhelming, especially at first, but in-game tutorials certainly helped.

Building rooms and getting Voyager exactly how I wanted it made for a fun challenge – even on easy mode!

Getting the right balance between tactical, scientific, and crew-focused rooms and systems isn’t easy, and one wrong move can lead to morale dropping, the ship being unprepared for combat, or that certain upgrades can’t be unlocked. There are various resources you have to keep on top of, which operate similarly to other resource-management titles, only… Star Trek-themed! You have to keep on top of things like the ship’s power level, battery banks, and even the number of crew members, too – all of these affect gameplay in a big way. At one point in my run, I found myself taking a diversion to any planet or point of interest that had a chance of giving me new crew members! That was a resource I seemed to run out of, especially as crew can be killed, or take long periods of shore leave.

It was really only when I got into the final act of the game that I felt I’d got the ship exactly the way I wanted it. I was generating just enough food from hydroponics bays to keep on top of the food supply, I had two science labs on the go for researching upgrades and unlocking new technologies, and enough quarters and cargo bays to store everything and accommodate everyone. Earlier acts of the game saw me turning off even some important rooms and systems just to keep the ship flying. You may be better at that kind of micromanagement than I am, but for me, it was part of the fun.

Both random exploration and progressing through missions unlocked combat encounters and away missions, and both of these were fun. Occasionally, I think only really in one sector, I found frequent, repetitive combat encounters that started to get stale, but for the most part, I enjoyed tweaking Voyager’s systems and trying to get the best possible balance of shields and weapons. I installed disruptors and a Borg cutting beam on my version of Voyager – and these powerful weapons made short work of even the Borg, later on in the game!

Away missions were fun, and I especially liked the “hand-drawn” art style that the game employed for these moments. Across The Unknown makes recommendations and occasionally pushes key crew members into away missions, but there’s a decent amount of freedom there, too. Missing a crew member with specific skills can make things harder, but even on easy mode, I never felt that away missions were too easy. That randomness I mentioned? That’s a big part of why, I suppose!

Unlocking new heroes gives you more freedom when it comes to away missions, and heroes can also be assigned to various rooms aboard Voyager, increasing yields and outputs. This was a fun aspect of the game, and I found myself trying to balance which heroes I took on away missions – because that’s how to level them up, further increasing their skills and bonuses. All in all, a fun element of the game.

The key to a game like this is to set your expectations appropriately. This isn’t a big-budget title with the greatest graphics, and there’s a lot of text-based conversations and clicking through menus. But for a Trekkie, and for a fan of Voyager in particular, it’s hard *not* to recommend the title, even with the caveat that updates are coming which should improve the gameplay experience somewhat.

I was thrilled to see a positive reaction to Across The Unknown’s launch. GameXcite said it exceeded their wildest expectations, and if recent reporting is accurate, the game sold more than 100,000 copies within its first few days on sale. That’s absolutely fantastic news, and kinda crazy, if you think about it! A game based on a TV series which has been off the air for a quarter of a century doing numbers like that? I guess Paramount was wrong: fans *do* want more from Voyager. Something like, oh, I don’t know… a remaster of the series?! The game’s success is, at the very least, proof positive that there’s still an audience for that incredible TV show.

I spent just over thirteen hours with the game – and in that time, as mentioned, I aborted one run after the third sector, I think, and then completed one full run. In my full run, I went back to replay the ending once, to see if I could get a different outcome. So I reckon there’s a solid eleven or twelve hours’ worth of content per run, at the very least – perhaps more, if you do more side-missions and spend more time in each sector harvesting resources and building upgrades. The length of time a game lasts can be important, and for me at least, Across The Unknown lands in that sweet spot of feeling like good value for money.

Most of my criticisms of the game – with the exception of the missing save system – arguably fall closer to nitpicks than anything else. And I always knew, going into Across The Unknown, that there’d be limitations to exploration and that the game couldn’t possibly be all things to all players. I tried to keep that in mind as I bumped up against these limits, and I hope I didn’t sound too harsh. Perhaps, if GameXcite is listening to feedback – and my points of criticism are shared more widely among players – future patches or updates can tweak the experience, at least a little.

I’m glad GameXcite managed to license the official Voyager theme music. When that announcement was made late last year, I kind of rolled my eyes; it didn’t feel like a glaring omission from the demo version, and I felt the developers could’ve spent that time and especially that money elsewhere. But you know what? I was wrong – having the proper theme music, and being careful to use it sparingly, genuinely elevated Across The Unknown in a way I didn’t anticipate, and made some of those emotional moments – Captain Ransom’s sacrifice, Seven’s rescue, and the ship making it home – feel so much more impactful.

At time of writing (less than a week after launch), Across The Unknown has had almost 10,000 concurrent players on Steam, and was number 49 in the sales charts and number 23 for most-wishlisted. Those are great numbers, and with the game also being available on PS5, Switch 2, and Xbox, that won’t be the sum total of its success. I’m really glad that the Trekkie community showed up for Across The Unknown in such a massive way. This game really does deserve all of its success.

It was a blast to return to Voyager, and to experience the long journey home in a totally new way. I loved Voyager when it was on the air, and I’ve pretty much worn out my old DVDs with how often I’ve re-watched the series over the years! I also had a lot of fun with Elite Force, back in the day, so this isn’t my first time playing a game based on this wonderful series. I really did have a good time with Across The Unknown, in spite of a few drawbacks and downsides. And it’s an easy recommendation to anyone who loves Voyager even half as much as I do.

Having completed Across The Unknown, I’m actually contemplating a second run sometime soon – there are side-missions I didn’t explore, several characters I didn’t get to unlock, and more. I’ll keep my ear to the ground about upcoming updates, and I’m not going to *immediately* dive straight back in! But I think it’s testament to the game’s success that I’m willing to go back for that second run so soon after the first.

If you made it this far, thank you so much for reading. I hope it’s clear that, despite some nitpicks and criticisms, I genuinely enjoyed Across The Unknown and recommend it to Trekkies. I’m not so sure that folks unfamiliar with Star Trek will have as much of a fun time as I did; perhaps management/base-building fanatics will find things to enjoy, though. But some games can and should be made by fans, for fans. And to me, that’s exactly how Across The Unknown felt.

Stay safe in the Delta Quadrant, friends… and Live Long and Prosper!

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Star Trek: Voyager – Across The Unknown is out now for Nintendo Switch 2, PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series consoles. Across The Unknown was developed by GameXcite and published by Daedalic Entertainment. Star Trek: Voyager remains the copyright of the Skydance/Paramount corporation. This review contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.