I played the demo for Across the Unknown back in November or December. I was not impressed. The demo felt like little more than a dumbed-down mobile game that breezes through Wikipedia summaries of Star Trek: Voyager episodes. The demo was pitifully easy to play through, and the decisions didn't seem very impactful. The fact that you can choose to use the Caretaker's Array to go back home and end the game before it even starts seemed like a silly novelty at the time. I doubted that the actual in-game decisions could prove to be as meaningful.
But the game released, and I'm a sucker for Star Trek games. So I went ahead and bought it (it was discounted on release!). And I'll be damned if I didn't end up being just a tiny bit impressed!
Being able to use the Caretaker to go home and end the game prematurely
is the only major deviation from the show's overarching plot.
The platonic ideal of a mobile game?
Now, when I say "impressed", that comes with some huge asterisks and qualifiers! Remember, based on pre-release marketing and the demo, I was going into this game expecting a PC port of a mobile game along the lines of Star Trek: Fleet Command or Trexels. That was the measuring stick by which I was judging this game. I wasn't expecting it to be Birth of the Federation or A Final Unity.
Yes, Across the Unknown is a mobile game that was released for consoles and PC. It's like a combination of Star Trek: Fleet Command and Fallout: Shelters, except that it isn't a mobile game. Mechanically, it's almost the same, but it completely lacks any of the time and money-wasting pay-to-play grind that mobile games are built around. Yes, you do collect resources and wait for rooms on Voyager to be built. But those rooms don't take real-life hours or days to build; they take just a few in-game "cycles" (it's unclear if a "cycle" represents hours or days in the game), and are done in a matter of seconds or minutes of real time. And there are no "premium currencies" that ask you to shell out a credit card number if you don't feel like waiting for days to grind. Dilithium definitely seems like it could have been a premium currency, as it acts as a gate for higher tier technologies and room upgrades. There's no daily login bonuses. No ads. No "limited time only" promotions. It's just the raw game, stripped of everything that makes mobile gaming so obnoxious and predatory.
The blend of resource-collection and base-building will be familiar to anyone who's played a mobile game.
This is kind of the best possible version of what mobile games were promised to be, before they were completely co-opted by greedy corporations. This is not thoughtless shovel-ware designed by soulless corporations to prey on people who will compulsively through money at it. The player is constantly engaged with things to do and decisions to make. And those decisions occasionally have weight and consequence. And it all comes together to tell the coherent story of the entire Star Trek: Voyager TV show! Yeah, the individual encounters are abridged Cliff's Notes summaries of Voyager episodes, but they come together to tell an overarching story that adds up to slightly more than the sum of its parts.
The action is fast and fluid. It's not the kind of game, like SimCity Buildit or Trexels (or so many other mobile games), where I just do 1 or 2 things, and then have to wait hours or days to do something else. If this were a mobile game that I could play for 20 minutes on my phone or tablet, while I'm sitting on the stationary bike at the gym, or waiting for my daughter to finish her acrobatics class, or bored during halftime of a football game, then this would be great!
Across the Unknown doesn't do anything
that dozens of mobile games don't do.
But that's kind of the problem. This isn't a mobile game! This is a $40 PC and console game. I'm not playing it for a few minutes while sitting on the toilet or waiting for an SQL query to run at work. I'm expected to sit in front of my PC or console (in my case, it's my PC), and play for a full hour-or-2 gaming session.
And even if it were a mobile game, there would be problems. There were no manual saves at launch, and the game's auto-save is not designed for short pick-up-and-play bursts. The auto-save only seems to trigger after completing a story mission. This means that if it were a mobile game, and you were to pull out your phone on the bus to spend 10 minutes just collecting deuterium and building a couple of crew's quarters, then the game wouldn't save any of that when you close the app to get off the bus.
Presumably, this save system is intended to discourage save scumming. You can't simply reload the last autosave if you fail a dice roll for collecting a resource. Nor can you keep a back up save before a major decision and go back to see the alternate choice. If you want to see all the branching options, you'll have to play through the game (including the hour or 2 Caretaker tutorial) multiple times.
A manual save function and increased auto-save frequency were patched into the game a couple weeks after release. This ostensibly makes the game playable in short bursts. Maybe if I had a Switch 2, this could have been a good game for that platform?
All that being said, this game isn't completely bereft of greedy or predatory monetization. There is a set of Day-One paid DLC that feels like content that was cut from the main game for the purpose of being up-sold to the consumer.
Content was carved out for day-1 DLC.
These DLC carve-outs exist, despite the fact that there are still plenty of popular or interesting episodes of Voyager that are not represented in the game at all, and which could make for good DLC expansion events, missions, or maybe even entire sectors.
For instance, the acquisition of the Doctor's Mobile Emitter (from "Future's End") happens off-screen, between sectors. I didn't find any missions or side quests based on the episodes "Prophecy", "Distant Origin", "False Profits", "The Killing Game", or "In The Flesh", which I think would have been good episodes to include. The game also makes an explicit reference to the Caretaker's companion, but I didn't come across this 2nd Caretaker at all in my playthrough attempts.
The biggest surprise omission, however, is that the game does not feature "Year of Hell" at all. This is one of the most popular Voyager episodes, which I thought would surely make up an entire sector. Maybe it will be an expansion?
The Doctor's mobile emitter is acquired off-screen, between 2 mid-game sectors.
The unforgiving randomness of the Delta Quadrant
What really stood out to me was how genuinely difficult the game can be. The demo was a cakewalk. But then again, the demo was just the first tutorial mission of the game. Once you get out into the Delta Quadrant proper, managing all the different resources is a lot harder than it seems -- sometimes, unfairly so.
Despite feeling like I had been playing pretty well up till then, I started to really struggle around sector 4 or 5. The biggest challenge was that I was constantly running out of Deuterium to power the warp core and having to go through the tedious process of turning off rooms one at a time. I would enter a system, and there will be 4 or 5 sources of Deuterium, but I burn up almost all of it just travelling between those locations. And if I get one bad die roll, I am completely hosed and have to spend 10 or 20 cycles warping to a new system, all while morale tanks.
Repeatedly toggling rooms on and off due to Deuterium shortages became tedious.
In the meantime, there will be half a dozen planets in a system that I didn't even bother visiting because I had no need for those resources at all. I just need Deuterium and Food.
Across The Unknown isn't a constant bleed of resources and supplies; it's a nauseating roller coaster of being overflowing with resources one minute and being running on fumes the next. This doesn't feel like being punished for poor planning or management; it just feels unfair.
This is the worst part of the game's mobile influences: the randomness. This game does not seem to have any mercy rules, nor does it pull its punches and fudge its probabilities to the player's benefit. It will gladly pile on with misfortune after misfortune.
And this was all on the "medium" difficulty! There's still a harder difficulty after this, in which resources are even more scarce.
A single bad die roll can kill an entire away team -- or even give you an instant Game Over!
I eventually had to restart the game multiple times and tried to change my strategy for re-building Voyager. In my first run, I had tried to build proper Crew Quarters for everyone. But as my crew kept growing, I ended up with morale dropping due to lack of quarters. The lower density of quarters meant I was spending more power on fewer crew, and couldn't afford the power to activate life support on a new deck to build more quarters.
So in my second attempt, I focused instead on bunking everybody in upgraded Emergency Quarters in order to reduce my energy load and save space for infrastructure such as extra Hydroponics Bay, and extra Science Lab, and more Cargo Bays. This would hopefully reduce the amount of trips I would have to take to collect food and give me more of a Deuterium buffer.
This worked, to an extent. As expected, I did not have to make as many trips to secure Deuterium and Food, and was a little more free to look for Duranium, Tritanium, Dilithium, and so forth. However, Deuterium still swung wildly, and I had to spend a lot more time micro-managing which rooms and systems I kept online.
Certain rooms (like Stellar Cartography)
can be cheesed for energy-free use.
For example, I discovered that I could effectively use zero power for certain systems, such as Stellar Cartography. Since scanning does not cost energy or cycles, I can only enable Stellar Cartography when I first enter a system. Then, before moving, I can scan all the locations in the system, then immediately shut Stellar Cartography down. As long as I don't move and advance cycles, it doesn't actually consume any energy. Similar strategies (or are they exploits?) can be done with things like the Shuttlebay, and Cargo Bays can be disabled whenever you aren't trying to actually collect more resources that exceed your current limit.
I'm not sure if this level of micro-management is the intended way to play the game. Is it "cheesing" a poorly designed system? Or is it the intended optimal strategy? Either way, it sure is tedious.
Spoilers
The other big problem with Across The Unknown is just how closely it follows the plots of the TV show. Even though so many of the small, individual outcomes are randomized, the overall course of events is not. You won't be able to eschew the Delta Quadrant and travel to the Gamma Quadrant to look for the other end of the Bajoran Wormhole, for instance. There are minor variations within the show's overarching plot, such as having access to certain characters instead of others, or having different infrastructure built on Voyager, but the same quests will happen at the same points and relative places, and will have the same outcomes. These events largely do not deviate from what happened in the TV show, and so if you have seen the show (and remember it moderately well), you'll basically have spoilers and a strategy guide for almost all of the major decisions.
An early example (without giving away too many spoilers) would be that, if you've seen the show, you'll know which of Seska or Joe Carey is betraying Voyager by collaborating with the Kazon. It would be nice if the game would have found some way to randomize some of these sorts of things to subvert the expectations of fans. Maybe even make that a setting, so that you can choose to stick to the show's story, or let outcomes be more random. So that way, maybe there could be some games in which Seska is the traitor, and other games where Carey is the traitor.
Gee, I wonder who the traitor is...
It would also help if the game would have let the player spend more time with these characters. Seska and Carey should both have been "hero" characters from the start of the game, and the player should have been able to use them in away missions and assign them to jobs on the ship. That way, when they are accused of being traitors, the player might actually have some kind of investment in them as either characters or as utilitarian "game pieces". Not wanting to loose their abilities could provide a ludic reason for why the player might want one or the other to turn out to be the traitor, and could make the player feel genuinely betrayed by the eventual reveal -- especially if it turns out to be the unexpected character.
But Across The Unknown doesn't have the guts to take big risks like this. Instead, neither character appears in the game until the beginning of the quest where one of them is revealed as a traitor, and the same character is always the traitor. Choosing incorrectly simply results in the actual traitor immediately outing themself, and the remaining character cannot be recruited as a playable hero. The actual traitor won't continue to sabotage the ship or empower the Kazon, or worse yet, stay in hiding and turn everyone over to the Borg later in the game.
Even when the game isn't trying to make big plot reveals, it still feels kind of lacking in quality characterization. A great example is a bit later in the game, when the infamous Tuvix appears. Yes, the game does give the player the option to let Tuvix live (which does kill both Tuvok and Neelix), but this choice feels shallow.
The game doesn't give us time to get to know characters (narratively or ludically)
before asking us to make life-or-death decisions.
The desire to save Tuvok and Neelix is ludically incentivized by the fact that you've probably been using those character's abilities all game long. This is a good thing, as it's an example of gameplay informing narrative. The player shares Janeway's investment in both Tuvok and Neelix, in stark contrast to Seska and Carey. Unfortunately, the game sabotages this decision by never giving the player an opportunity to actually use Tuvix. At the point where you have to make the decision, the player has no idea what Tuvix's abilities and skills are. So from a simply utilitarian game-optimization perspective, it is really hard to justify sacrificing 2 very good hero characters in order to get 1 hero character of unknown quality. Sorry to all the #JusticeForTuvix, but saving Tuvix is just an objectively bad decision from a strategic optimization standpoint!
Maybe that was the point. Maybe the intent was for the player to feel like Captain Janeway. Maybe GameExcite really wanted the player to see Tuvok and Neelix as being way more valuable than Tuvix, so that we would feel pressured to make the same choice that Janeway made (albeit for different reasons). I don't know. The end result, however, is that the decision feels limp, and the game feels all the weaker because of it.
Also, the game doesn't depict all the toxic, creepy, pervy, and possessive qualities of Neelix's relationship with Kes. In the game, Neelix just doesn't have the "ick" factor that might make a player want an excuse to get rid of him. Also, in case you're wondering: no, the game won't let you refuse to let Neelix join the crew to begin with, either.
Homesick
Across the Unknown also provided the developers (and by extension, us players) with an opportunity to "fix" some of the mistakes of the show. Star Trek: Voyager has been criticized for a weak execution of its central premises. Despite being stranded in the Delta Quadrant, without access to a Starbase or supplies, Voyager does not show cumulative wear and tear. And the tensions between Maquis and Starfleet personnel are almost entirely dropped early in the series. These issues come up here and there, but only in order to create a particular plot contrivance for a single episode here and there.
This version of Voyager's trek across the Delta Quadrant feels like more of a fight for survival.
Across the Unknown sort of addresses one of these issues, but largely ignores the other. Almost the entire game is spent scavenging for supplies just to keep the engine running, the lights turned on, and the crew's bellies full. This version of Voyager's trip across the Delta Quadrant does feel much more like a desperate fight for survival, compared to the relatively comfortable journey depicted in the vast majority of the show.
When the game throws a moral or ethical conundrum at the player, you must balance your ideals against practical concerns. Like, "will my crew be able to eat next cycle?" If the answer is "no", then it's going to be very difficult to justify handing over hundreds of units of food to starving refugees.
The Maquis, on the other hand, are almost completely ignored, outside of the aforementioned Seska / Carey episode. There are a few, hand-wavy random events that pop up here and there, in which Chakotay informs us that there was an argument or brawl between Maquis and Starfleet crewmen, which may injure crew, damage a room, or destroy some resources. These are just throw-away random events though. The morale bar is shared between the entire crew, meaning that you aren't going to make decisions that might please the Starfleet crew, while upsetting the Maquis crew (or vice-versa). You don't get to make the choice of promoting B'Elana to chief engineer over Carey, and thus causing the jealousy and anger that might lead Carey to collaborate with the Kazon. You can't choose a Starfleet crew member as your first officer, instead of Chakotay, and then have to deal with the Maquis crew feeling like their voices aren't being heard. There is no threat of any kind of Maquis mutiny -- not even as a bluff.
In fact, I wish that each individual character had their own morale. As it stands, there are specific decisions that you can make which may kill a character or cause them to leave. But you cannot make a series of decisions that makes specific characters unhappy to the point that they mutiny, leave, or resign their posts.
Growing homesickness from the crew will pressure
the player to move on with the story.
One thing that I do like, however, is that the game has a persistent "homesickness" malus that decreases morale for every cycle that the crew hasn't gotten home yet. And that homesickness malus grows with each passing sector. Moreover, each individual sector has its own hidden time limit. If you dawdle in one sector for too long, the crew will grow impatient, and morale will rapidly plummet.
I like this mechanic because it forces the player to keep moving. You can't simply stick around in a sector and farm every last location for resources, or scour the map for every last side quest. If you do end up in a situation in which you need to farm some extra Deuterium or Food, you may do so at the cost of morale. A desire to extract as much resources from a sector as possible, before the homesickness kicks in, can also put pressure on the player to make riskier decisions.
Homesickness is basically the glue that holds the whole game together, and the single thing that elevates Across the Unknown above the typical mobile time-killing "click to collect resources" game. Almost all of the game's strategy comes from trying to optimize your route through a sector, minimize back-tracking, and figure out ways to minimize fuel consumption and risk, while also maximizing the resources collected. An actual [predatory] mobile game would probably lock access to the next sector behind a paywall, or force you to grind for hours (or days) on tedious tasks in order to progress, all while throwing ads in your face. Across the Unknown flips that design philosophy on its head. It lights a fire under your butt to keep going forward -- or else!
And going further is well worth it. The ending that I received, in my opinion, is a dramatic improvement over the actual TV show's finale (which I hate and consider to be a cop-out ending). The final chapter tied back into the previous chapter, paying off on a Voyager subplot in a creative way that I had never considered. Of course, that conclusion was dependent on a handful of choices that I made in the final sectors, and there are multiple different endings based on those handful of choices. So your ending may vary.
The epilogue that I received even undid some of the questionable writing choices of the Star Trek: Picard TV series! The ending I received significantly elevated my final impressions of the game as a whole.
A new genre?
In my 5-part retrospective series about Star Trek video games, I mentioned that one of the genres that is conspicuously absent of any Star Trek games is RPGs, unless you define "RPG" very liberally. Across The Unknown could probably be lumped into the category of "almost an RPG", as it has some of the hallmarks of the genre. It's a party-based adventure, in which characters go on quests, acquire experience, and level up their skills. The narrative offers players choices, some of which can have significant effects on the outcome of the story. It might be the closest thing to a single-player RPG that Star Trek has ever seen. Seems pretty RPG-ish!
Please check out my 5-part retrospective of Star Trek video games on YouTube.
But it also doesn't completely feel like an RPG. It feels like something else. More like some novel mixture of "survival game" and "visual novel", that I can't quite put my finger on. I wonder if this "elevated mobile game" might actually represent a new genre (or sub-genre) of video game. I could easily see this formula being applied to future games as well.
Honestly, I wouldn't mind if this same company were to make a spiritual sequel or follow-up that isn't beholden to the story of an existing Star Trek show. Perhaps a ship that gets stranded in the Gamma Quadrant after the Dominion War, and must make their way back to the wormhole or DS9. Or maybe a game contemporary to the Original Series about a starship that is simply exploring the frontier and can't simply return to a Starbase. Or maybe the Equinox could be an extra-hard expansion campaign? Come to think of it, "Course: Oblivion" could be a fun idea for an expansion campaign too!
Stepping outside of Star Trek, this same formula could also be applied to an adaptation of Battlestar Galactica.
I could maybe even see this studio pivot to a full colony-builder game.
Does this qualify as an RPG?
If this were an actual mobile game available for $10 or $20 on phones and tablets, then I think it would be one of the best mobile games on the market. In fact, if you have a Switch 2 or Steam Deck (or maybe a PlayStation Portal?), and you can play it on the go (as if it were a true mobile game), then it's probably a more appealing purchase. As a $40 release that expects me to sit in front of my PC or console for hours, it's underwhelming. I don't think it's "bad". It's certainly challenging, and it's serviceable as a Cliff's Notes-level adaptation of Voyager's overarching story.
The freedom of choice just isn't as free as advertised. It's more linear than advertised. There's a lot of tedious busy-work. And it lacks the narrative substance of the Voyager episodes that it adapts, while only slightly elevating the overarching "lost in space" premise as a ludic mechanic.
If you are a Star Trek fan, and especially if you are a Voyager fan, then it's a good time once you get past the initial learning curve. For non-Trekkies, it probably doesn't have much to offer.