A Star Trek horror game is just wild enough to work, but not the one Bloober Team is making
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A Star Trek horror game is just wild enough to work, but not the one Bloober Team is making
Bloober Team is making a Star Trek game, we discovered over the weekend. It will feature badass bajoran Ro Laren, and yes it's a horror game. It's a combination of genre, developer and licence that could only be the product of throwing darts at a board. Maybe a drunken game of Mad Libs.
Sometimes it's nice to be completely surprised. But sometimes that surprise is 'Bloober Team is making a Star Trek horror game'.
Fraser Brown
Star Trek is one of the few media properties that I am simply incapable of being cool about, which means I end up forcing myself to play a lot of bad Star Trek games and then feeling sad about it. I have a feeling that's about to happen again.
Star Trek: Shadow Frontier | Announcement Teaser - YouTube
It's weird to be protective of brands, but I confess I did feel a genuine spark of annoyance at the news. Star Trek is fertile ground for games, but it's been underutilised, leaving us with only a meagre handful of good adaptations. My knee jerk response was "This is a huge waste." And I haven't really changed my mind.
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I've never gotten on with Bloober Team's brand of horror, and I don't think horror is a great fit for Star Trek, but I confess I am fascinated all the same. Videogame adaptations can be—but rarely are—a great way to explore existing TV, movie and literary properties and recontextualise them. There are so many things games can do that other mediums cannot, and that opens the door to all kinds of interesting takes.
Nobody wants to have lizard babies growing inside them.
So I'm genuinely intrigued to see what a Star Trek horror game looks like, but at the same time I do wonder who this is actually for? With Star Trek's cultural cachet sadly dwindling, who but those already invested in the shows are going to be throwing their cash at it? Shows that hardly ever dabbled in horror.
The exception to this tends to be episodes that feature either the Borg Collective or, much later, the Gorn Hegemony. The Borg Collective is pretty much the perfect Star Trek villain—a cyborg species that takes the principles of the Federation and twists them into something incredibly disturbing. The gorn, meanwhile, are kinda dumb, but Strange New Worlds tried really hard to make them terrifying. Nobody wants to have lizard babies growing inside them.
(Image credit: Paramount Games)
And yeah, First Contact is definitely horror adjacent, with scenes that wouldn't look out of place in a full-blown horror flick. Its status as arguably the best Star Trek film undermines my argument a bit, granted, but it also cushioned its more horror-inspired moments between classic Trek. It never fully committed to the horror because it still needed to be Star Trek.
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The thing is, horror not in Star Trek's DNA. Nor is Bloober Team's usual approach to horror, with games that tend to offer a pessimistic perspective, which flies in the face of Star Trek's unrelenting optimism. That, at least, makes Ro Laren a good choice for the protagonist, as she's one of the least Starfleet characters to ever don the uniform. She's more akin to a lone wolf action hero with a chip on their shoulder.
So that's one choice Bloober Team has made that actually kinda makes sense. But Ro is an outlier. And a focus on just her exploits, this unconventional rebel, doesn't feel very Star Trek. Indeed, that was the whole point of Ro. She was designed to serve as the opposite of Starfleet's ideals. She didn't fit in, until Picard started mentoring her and she eventually put her ego aside—temporarily.
If we go back six years, though, I wouldn't have been particularly optimistic about a Star Trek comedy show—especially after The Orville fumbled the brief, at least initially—and now I'm mourning the end of Star Trek: Lower Decks, one of the all-time best Treks.
(Image credit: Paramount Games)
The show's writers found a way to celebrate Star Trek and tell new but classic-feeling yarns through the lens of sci-fi absurdity. It still felt Trek, and it still felt properly canon, all while doing something dramatically different. This suggests that Star Trek is actually broad enough to support dipping into wildly different genres—but Lower Decks, just like First Contact, also featured so many of the critical components of a great Trek show.
Maybe some horror would actually be good for Star Trek.
We got the adventure of the week format, the focus on teamwork, loads of high-concept sci-fi nonsense, quality inter-personal drama—something that took Star Trek a bit of time to figure out, but when it did it went hard—and countless other elements.
So I guess there's no reason the same couldn't be said for horror. Maybe some horror would actually be good for Star Trek. But this specific kind of horror? Ro's flying solo, stranded on a deadly alien world, which just doesn't sound like it's going to leave much room for the things that make Star Trek what it is, rather than just a setting you can slap any old story onto—like Star Wars.
A 45 minute episode? Sure, I could see that. A change in pace, a wee detour, but then back to the Enterprise next week, where the crew is addicted to a rubbish VR game or Picard's belting out some Shakespeare while he's on the phone to a ferengi. Hours and hours of it, though? I'm sceptical.
(Image credit: Paramount Games)
I think Ro Laren's great. I'm excited for more Ro Laren. And I'm totally here for studios doing deep cuts, delving into specific characters who weren't really part of the main cast. I'm just not convinced Bloober Team is the studio for the job. Despite how well regarded Silent Hill 2 Remake is, without the bones of another game to fall back on, I fear a return to cheap jump scares and trite pschological horror.
The good news is that this isn't Star Trek's only hope. We showed off Star Trek: Outposts Unknown, a colony builder, during the PC Gaming Show. And we've always got Star Trek Online, which continues to be brilliant (if a bit creaky). The final frontier is still spitting out adventures, even if Ro's excursion to a cursed world ends up being a bit of a stumble.
