Larena

Mild spoilers for some potential outcomes in Star Trek Resurgence

I’ve never been a big Star Trek fan. Growing up, Star Trek never stuck to me like other sci-fi franchises. The most recent entry into the franchise that I’ve (ugh) engaged with is the 2009 JJ Abrams film. In high school I watched a lot of The Next Generation when nothing else was on TV, or when I was waiting for the new episode of Doctor Who, as it would often air the hour before on BBC America. I found the sounds of the Enterprise’s halls and decks, and the often very soft-spoken dialogue of its characters very soothing, but I was never very engaged (god damn it) with the plotlines or characters. At my current age when I’m at my meanest, and it’s at its worst, I think I would say my lack of interest is because Star Trek is built on a type of neoliberalism that I find kind of naive at best. When I was a teenager I probably would have just said it's boring.

All this to say, I greatly enjoyed Star Trek Resurgence, the first game from Dramatic Labs, a studio that is one of the two currently ongoing attempts to salvage some sort of phoenix-like resurrection from the ashes of… temporarily defunct studio Telltale Games.

The game has you playing as two parallel protagonists – a trend I am always in favour of seeing be done more in these cinematic choice-based adventure games (can someone make a name for this subgenre already please) Commander Jara Rydek is the new second in command of the Starship Resolute, after its former XO was killed in a disastrous “experiment” you don’t get many details about. Meanwhile Petty Officer Carter Diaz is an engineer working the lower decks. Immediately you get a good sense of the differences between both characters. The game is choice-based, so a decent bit of either character’s personality can be decided by the player, but Carter will always be kind of the star player of the engineering team, helping out and being obviously popular among the rest of the people in his department (possibly excepting his boss) and Rydek will always be an up-and-coming officer who has to deal with a bit of distrust from the rest of the bridge crew, and potentially her immediate superior, Captain Zachary Solano, along with being a “Kobliad” (half-Kobliad? Her DNA scan is 50% human, I dunno how Star Trek works) who has to take regular injections of a particular mineral to live.

The relationships you build with the rest of the crew are essentially the most important consequence you’ll feel from the choices you make throughout the game. I’ve only done one playthrough, so I’m not entirely clear on the extent to which certain events can play out differently, but for the most part it seemed to be that if you make a choice someone doesn’t like – or one they do, they will remind you of it at the most dramatic moment. This sounds slight, but it’s also kind of always how these games have worked. In The Walking Dead, the choices you make still inevitably get you to where that game ends. Certain characters can die earlier, or later, if they get put on the chopping block. But ultimately the consequences are felt through how many friends Lee still has in the game’s final chapter. It’s a system that works well enough for me – depending on how it’s executed, honestly maybe even moreso than a game’s plot taking a wildly different path depending on your choices. I’m gonna feel it more if I piss off a character I like because they feel like I haven’t listened to their advice than something like the Witcher 2 having an entirely separate second act based on if you’re racist or not.

And the crew of the Resolute is good. A few fade into the background – Commander Urmott is the first character you meet and he… really did not leave an impression. Which honestly made me feel worse when late in the game I passed him up for promotion, and he chewed me out. Sorry bud, but the acerbic science officer Westbrook voiced by Keith Silverstein who I was able to play out having a fun enemies-to-friends arc with Jara just left a stronger impression. Standouts of the crew are Carter’s partner in engineering, Nili Edsilar – who as a nonfan I was very surprised to learn late in the game was apparently an alien called a Trill the whole time and not just a human with sick cheetah spot neck tattoos. Her relationship with Carter, as I played it, is very sweet. It’s unfortunately still exciting and surprising to me to see two characters of the appropriate genders for a heterosexual romance just be… completely platonic. Carter’s actual potential romantic interest, Miranda Maris was definitely not as interesting. Which is a shame because, avoiding spoiling too much, some Stuff happens that could have been fun and weird, but ultimately just fell flat for me.

The remaining notable characters on the bridge crew aside from the aforementioned Urmott and Westbrook are Tactical Officer Araxi Bedrosian and Captain Zachary Solano. Bedrosian has an… interesting arc. She starts out trying uh… very hard to be a good ally about Rydek being a Kobliad, and tells you how much she looks up to Rydek for overcoming adversity. Which I chose to… humor, and it thankfully did not come up much going forward. Overall I tended to agree with Bedrosian’s tactical advice when it was given until a point late in the story where her advice was… understandable, but kinda whack, and that basically destroyed our relationship and made her resign from the crew by game’s end. And Captain Solano… just kinda sucks. He opens by giving you a speech about how you need to trust his judgment as the captain when it comes down to it, and I immediately countermanded a bad order he gave at the first opportunity, so my Rydek did not have a strong affinity with him.

Where the game first started to fascinate me was the inciting incident of its central conflict. Early on you bring everyone’s favourite space elf Spock aboard the ship, now an ambassador (I dunno how long that’s been a thing for his character) and he briefs the crew on an erupting conflict between two species who aren’t part of the Federation. The Alydians are a nascent space empire who have subjugated their neighbouring species, the Hotari, and put them to work mining the Hotari moon. Unfortunately, the Federation have been making use of the Alydian’s exploitation of the Hotari, buying a portion of the minerals mined from the moon. I was pleasantly surprised that Bedrosian immediately points out how fucked this arrangement is, and Rydek likewise has dialogue options to point out that the Federation is culpable for the exploitation of the Hotari.

The meeting continues and you learn that the Hotari recently rebelled against the Alydians, and took the mines for themselves (hell yeah, workers rise up). But curiously the Alydians have not brought their superior military might to bear against the Hotari, even though they could easily crush them to dust. This resolves into Spock informing Rydek and Solano that he and the captain will descend to the Hotari homeworld to meet with their queen and attempt to negotiate a peace treaty, while Rydek tries to surreptitiously gather intel on what exactly is going on.

And unfortunately this isn’t just a story where you help support a worker rebellion, you do uncover there’s some shady business going on with the Hotari, and that quickly unravels into the game’s central plot being centered around dealing with the body-snatching Tkon Empire (apparently a semi-obscure one-time villain from the same episode that introduced the Ferengi? And… gotta say, the Tkon should have been the ones that stuck around, they’re interesting and scary and not an antisemitic caricature) But the introduction of the worker rebellion isn’t entirely forgotten. The situation between the Alydians and Hotari eventually concludes a little too cleanly for my liking, but to my thoughts about Star Trek’s neoliberalism, Solano and Spock end up representing that in the negotiations in a way I’m still not sure where the game is landing with them. They, to me, end up feeling a little out of touch, trying to talk past the Hotari’s concerns to push for some sort of “compromise” with the Alydians. But as Rydek I was given multiple opportunities to say, hey, no, the Hotari shouldn’t roll over for the Alydians, they suck and the Hotari deserve total sovereignty. And it doesn’t feel like the game thinks that’s an unreasonable position. The final time it comes up is with the Hotari Ambassador, Tythas – who ends up being really close with Rydek and I can’t believe the game doesn’t let them kiss but whatever it’s fine – who through the circumstances of the plot ends up working on the Resolute alongside Alydian soldiers who also end up there, and starts to think peace is possible. When I made the choice to caution her to remain wary of the Alydians, she smiled and said “I’m optimistic, not naive.” And that isn’t much, but it’s more than I expected?

As for the Tkon, and the main plot of the game, I ended up just finding it to be an excitingly escalating thriller. The beginning of the game is so sedate, and much like I remembered the soothing episodes of The Next Generation to be, but by the end I was biting my nails, bracing with dread about what would happen to characters I liked and even nameless NPCs, and crying over what happened to some specific characters. I think the ending… felt a little abrupt, and I don’t think I connected to Rydek proudly and poetically speechifying about standing tall and remaining “resolute” over a funeral for her fallen crew after what, to me, felt like a hell of a tragic victory. But that’s where the Star Trek of it all just doesn’t work for me, I think.

Regardless of the ending, however, the excitement and intrigue of the story, and my affection for the characters more than made up for the uh… gameplay. Most of the game is standard Telltale-esque fare, walking around, clicking on things, making dialogue choices, doing puzzles and minigames. But... sometimes the game tries to be pilotwings? Or a stealth game. Or maybe worst of all, a third person shooter. The first two modes really aren’t awful, the segments are just a little too long, and not very interesting. But god the shooter parts… the game gives you all the appearance that you are playing a cover shooter akin to Gears of War or Mass Effect, but it is so much worse than either of those. In those games, and in this one, your character is vulnerable while you’re shooting. So you want to stay behind cover and pop out when you see a safe opportunity. But in actual cover shooters you can, move the camera around while you’re behind cover. So when you pop out your reticle gives you a bead on an enemy you want to fire on and you can do it quickly and duck back down. Not so in Star Trek Resurgence. You can not move the camera at all while Carter or Rydek are ducked down. To aim you have to do a very long animation to stand up, and then try to quickly move your extremely overtuned cursor around and just really kinda blindfire and hope you hit something. And then… guess when you’ve spent enough time out of cover before you duck back to safety. I think there’s supposed to be a smoke effect or something to tell you when you’re about to get shot? But I could never make it out over all the phaser fire and just general franticness of trying to kill – sorry, stun? I think? – my enemies before they killed – definitely not stun – my friends.

At the end of the day I loved this game, though, it isn’t perfect, and I don’t think it truly avoids anything that’s kept me away from Star Trek for so long. But I enjoyed my time with the crew of the Resolute, trying to make sure my friends stayed alive and didn’t hate me. Maybe my actual biggest complaint is the game’s lack of epilogue. There’s the aforementioned speech, attempting to summarize the game’s themes and show you some consequences, but I want more time to see the new shape of the crew after all they went through. Maybe Dramatic Labs will get the greenlight to make a sequel, I’m not gonna hold my breath for that too much, but if they do… let Jara and Tythas kiss pleaseandthankyou.