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Star Trek: Voyager – Across the Unknown, the upcoming survival strategy game, just peeled back the curtain a wee bit more, giving us a new trailer that shows off the sci-fi romp’s main pillars, like exploration, combat and ‘what if?’ scenarios.
The trailer appeared last week, but I was busy making friends with penguins in Edinburgh Zoo and only clocked it now. And I’ll never pass on a chance to write about one of my favourite sci-fi shows (even if it’s not quite as good as TNG or DS9).
It’s not a looker, I’m afraid, but Star Trek always looked a bit on the cheap side, at least until Discovery. I’ve been tearing through season 3 of Strange New Worlds, which is a stunner, so I’ve been a bit spoiled lately. But I still love the ugly, utilitarian aesthetic of the TNG era.
While we’ll be getting into scraps with the Borg and making life-or-death decisions, I’m more enamoured with the boring day-to-day stuff on display. Waste management, the quality of the food produced by the replicators, fiddling with the warp core—I love it.
That said, I was excited to see one of the big decisions: what to do about Tuvix. It looks like Across the Unknown will be throwing us into familiar crises, but giving us the opportunity to make different choices.
For the uninitiated, Tuvix was the product of a transporter malfunction that spliced stoic vulcan Tuvok with irritating chef-cum-diplomat Neelix, creating a new lifeform. On the canon Voyager, Captain Janeway decided to effectively kill Tuvix by splitting him up into Tuvok and Neelix again. It’s a classic episode—one that sounds like dumb sci-fi nonsense on the surface but which actually culminated in something tragic and memorable.
Crucially, though, Tuvix was annoying. He had to go.
I just love the ridiculously perfunctory way the trailer shows us the big decision. Hopefully, it’ll be a bit more emotionally resonant when we play through it ourselves.
Regardless, I’m extremely keen to see if I can do a better job than Janeway. At the very least, I won’t be falling in love with a boring Irish hologram. And that’s the real draw here: taking the familiar and letting us chart our own course through it.
Given the weird dearth of good Star Trek games, I’m really looking forward to this one.
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