Spoiler Warning: Beware of spoilers for Star Trek: Voyager – Across The Unknown and Star Trek: Voyager.
A new video game based on Star Trek: Voyager, titled Across The Unknown, was announced only a few weeks ago. I didn’t think we’d see it until at least next year – but to my surprise, I received a notification that a demo version is available on Steam. I jumped into the game as soon as it had finished downloading, eager to try it out for myself, and I thought it could be fun to preview the upcoming title together.
I enjoyed the demo for the hour or so that it lasted, and playing through a modified version of Voyager’s premiere – Caretaker – was generally a fun experience. I think Across The Unknown still has work to do – there were a couple of issues that I picked up on in my brief playthrough – but by and large, the game seems poised to deliver more or less what I’d been expecting.
That idea of expectations, though, is going to be important to how you approach Across The Unknown. The tl;dr is this: this isn’t a big-budget, high production values, “triple-A” type of game. And if you go into it expecting ultra-sharp graphics, fully-voiced characters, detailed cut-scenes, and the like… you’re going to be disappointed, because this isn’t that type of game. What you get instead is a strategic starship management game, one with a tech tree to unlock upgrades, rooms to build, crew members to move around, and so on. There are no voiced characters; Across The Unknown is text-based. And while there are some starship cut-scenes and a pretty fun combat system, most of the time you’ll be treated to static images to convey key storylines.
I believe that if you set appropriate expectations, there’s going to be fun to be had here. The game’s core premise of “what if you were Captain Janeway and made different choices?” is a genuinely fun and appealing one, and Across The Unknown provided several points at which I could make what seemed to be defining choices for the ship and crew.
An appropriate point of comparison is probably Fallout Shelter. The games use a similar point-of-view for managing your base/starship, and you get similar choices for where to construct different rooms, who to recruit, who to send on away missions, and so on. That’s a good starting point for understanding what Across The Unknown felt like to play.
Obviously, when you’re looking at a demo version, there are going to be limitations! So I don’t want to judge Across The Unknown too harshly based solely on the first hour-ish of gameplay. Just from looking at the tech tree and the amount of empty rooms aboard Voyager, there’s clearly a lot more to the game that I didn’t get to try out on this occasion. And I also suspect that, of all the missions/story arcs in the game, Caretaker is probably one of the most linear: certain events have to pan out in order for Chakotay, B’Elanna, Neelix, and Kes to join the crew – and that’s just for starters.
There were, however, some diversions from the story of Caretaker that felt unnecessary to me. Some lines of dialogue – particularly between characters like Chakotay and Tuvok, and Harry and Tom – felt really “off;” I know what these characters sound like, how they talk, and what they said to each other in the beginning – and this ain’t that!
In fact, I’d go so far as to say that some (but by no means all) of Across The Unknown’s dialogue reads like it’s been written by an AI chat bot. I’m not saying that’s what happened – and there could be issues with translation, for example, as the game is being developed in Germany. But that’s how some of these lines felt to me. Subjectively speaking.
The tutorial was solid, and I felt that Across The Unknown communicated some of its pretty in-depth systems in a concise and understandable way. I didn’t play the game perfectly on my first outing; I failed one optional assignment when I didn’t build enough crew quarters in time! But that failure helped me learn more about the optional assignments and how the “cycles” (Across The Unknown’s timekeeping) work, so it wasn’t a total loss. And considering that I did fail one of these optional tasks, Across The Unknown was forgiving enough that it wasn’t fatal to my playthrough – which I did appreciate on my first time out!
There are resource limitations, though. At one point, I was running dangerously low on deuterium – which is necessary to keep the ship running. I was only a couple of cycles away from completely running out, and having exhausted all of the planets and points of interest in the two available star systems, there was a bit of a time crunch to get back to the Caretaker’s Array! This is clearly part of the experience – Voyager’s journey home, especially in the early days, was one of scavenging resources where possible, and running close to the line on more than one occasion. It served as a great motivator, I found, to move the story along!
Away missions provide one of the ways to make a lot of different choices. Given that the demo is based on Caretaker, I was surprised that Captain Janeway wasn’t able to join any of the away missions to the Array or to Ocampa, and I wonder if that’s going to be a limitation throughout the game. I hope not, but I thought it was worth mentioning. I tried to use a selection of different characters when I could, just to get a different experience with the away missions that I had available.
Each away mission gives individual characters a chance to gain experience and level up – meaning they’ll be better the longer they stick around and the further into the game you get. The tutorial mentioned that some choices, if they go awry, can be fatal. That wasn’t something I experienced in the demo, but it’s interesting to know that even some named characters can, potentially, be killed off at a very early stage – or at any point throughout the run.
I want to touch on one story point that I’ve seen Trekkies talking about since Across The Unknown was announced. This is spoiler-y, so skip past the next screenshot if you really don’t want to know anything ahead of trying the demo for yourself! When it comes to Voyager and crucial choices… Across The Unknown does give you the option to use the Caretaker’s Array to send Voyager and her crew home seven years early! Obviously, this will cut off the entire rest of the game, but I thought it was a ton of fun that the option to do this was included.
And I think that speaks volumes about the kind of big decisions that we’ll get to experience in the full game. The blurb promises twelve sectors to explore – each of which, apparently, can be comprised of at least three star systems, which is neat. I would imagine each sector will provide one of these key inflection points – perhaps more than one. Being able to send the ship and crew home, though, using the Array… I gotta admit, that was pretty cathartic after all these years!
There’s quite a lot of random chance (a.k.a. random number generation) in Across The Unknown, which isn’t atypical for this type of game. You can mitigate some of that by choosing characters and actions that have a higher chance of success, or when on away missions, by combining the efforts of more than one character to increase the odds. But it’s still possible that RNG will go against you at any point, and even an option that looks statistically solid could result in a negative outcome. Again, though: it’s that kind of game.
The ship-to-ship combat was interesting. Unlike exploration, which is measured in “cycles,” and away missions, which play out through a series of decision points, combat in space is close to real-time. Phasers fire automatically, but you get to choose when to fire torpedoes and when to issue other orders to members of the crew. There are a limited number of slots for characters to participate in ship-to-ship combat – which feels like a bit of a double-edged sword.
On the one hand, this adds another element of strategy: do you want to pick Paris for his evasive manoeuvres, or Tuvok for his finesse with the phasers? It also makes each combat encounter potentially different, as you can choose a different crop of people every time. However… part of the captain’s chair fantasy experience, surely, is being able to issue orders to the entire crew in situations like this. Being able to divert extra power to the phasers by calling up B’Elanna in engineering, or telling the Doctor to prepare sickbay for casualties… that’s all part of sitting (metaphorically) in the captain’s chair. By reducing the number of characters who can participate, part of the combat just felt a bit… small, I guess.
That’s not to say it was bad. I actually had fun taking on the Kazon in my combat encounter! And after spending most of my time looking at a master systems display or a zoomed-out solar system, seeing Voyager moving around in real-time, up close… that was something special.
Across The Unknown needs some more polish. There were a few places where I saw a typo or missing punctuation, and another where Neelix popped up to tell me something before I’d even met him or invited him aboard. My PC also seemed to struggle, with the graphics card working overtime and the game still occasionally lagging – despite the fact that, as mentioned, the graphics really aren’t anything special. Performance when zooming in and out of the MSD could really use some improvement. I wasn’t even running Across The Unknown at its maximum settings.
That being said, I came away from my hour with the demo more excited to play the finished game than I was before I started. Voyager is such a great series, and it feels perfectly-suited to this kind of strategic management title. Being able to make radically different choices to those that Captain Janeway made during the show is going to be a lot of fun, and if the rest of the game is as good as the demo in terms of narrative and gameplay, I can see myself sinking many hours into it when it’s ready.
If you want to wait for the finished game, that’s a completely valid decision. I usually don’t play pre-release demos, and there are a few issues with Across The Unknown that I’d hope will be smoothed out before the full game releases. But it’s hard not to recommend a completely free demo of a game like this. It only took me an hour to play through the events of Caretaker and get a feel for what Across The Unknown is like, so if you’re like me and Across The Unknown is a guaranteed day-one purchase for you, I think trying out the demo is an easy recommendation.
I’ll end by saying that Across The Unknown is clearly a game made for fans. And that’s okay. Not every game is going to reach a broad audience; Across The Unknown knows what it is, knows who its target audience is, and seems to be leaning into that in a big way. It’s not going to blow up and win hundreds of awards, nor is it going to expand the Star Trek fan community in a meaningful way. But given that it’s Voyager’s thirtieth anniversary this year, I’m just pleased that a game like this was greenlit at all. Stepping back into that world – even with some last-gen graphics, odd facial expressions, and occasionally janky dialogue – was a lot of fun.
The demo is free on Steam at time of writing… so why not try it? All you have to lose is 6 and a bit gigabytes of disc space and an hour or so of your time!
Star Trek: Voyager – Across The Unknown will be released (in full) in the future. The demo version is available now on Steam. The Star Trek franchise – including Voyager and Across The Unknown – is the copyright of Skydance/Paramount. Star Trek: Voyager – Across The Unknown is developed by GameXcite and published by Daedalic Entertainment. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
A selection of screenshots from my time with the Across The Unknown demo that didn’t fit in the article above:
Trekking with Dennis 