Alright, I have 2 games to add tonight, and I think I'll start with a game I picked up earlier this year due to our imminent Shiny Digital Future (TM):
Star Trek: Resurgence is a game you can no longer buy. It was de-listed earlier this year due to the Star Trek license expiring after a whole 2 years, so if you want to experience it the only way you can is through physical copies (mine came from the EU).
Created by a team of former Telltale developers, Resurgence is very much the quintessential Telltale Narative Adventure game, with all the good and bad that entails. The tech is at least 2-3 generations behind even the likes of Supermassive's Adventure games (shimmering and stuttering are abundant), the "gameplay" is so poor it makes early PS2 games look polished...and yet it's kind of balanced out by generally-excellent writing, decent cinematography, and a clear love for the source material.
Without going into Spoilers, the game resolves around the crew of the Federation Science Vessel USS Resolute as it embarks on a diplomatic mission to ease tensions between 2 non-Federation alien species in a dispute over Dilithium mining rights while an unusual Ion Storm surges throughout the area. Throughout the mission, you switch between playing as the ship's new First Officer, half-Kobliad Commander Jara Rydek, and the "Lower Decks" Engineering duo of Carter Diaz and Nili Edsilar. As you would expect, it doesn't take long for this seemingly-routine mission to spiral out of control as the game unveils the truth behind the mining uprising and a sinister conspiracy operating in the shadows that threatens the entire quadrant.
Overall, while Resurgence has the formatting of a TNG-era Star Trek show, it's definitely trying for something in the area of one of the TNG-era Star Trek movies with its story, with shades of Wrath of Khan; The Undiscovered Country; and First Contact at times. In general, though, I definitely felt the Diaz and Edsilar segments of the game were the stronger ones, as characters in them tended to act in a more consistently logical manner and everyone is a professional. It certainly helps that voice actors Josh Keaton and Stephanie Sheh are industry legends and very naturally deliver the material. By contrast, the Resolute Bridge Crew generally come off as irritating children, whining and complaining over the remotest slight just for the sake of "X will remember that" type moments where characters just will not let go of you not going with their idea several days ago. One character in particular does something insanely stupid just for the sake of impressing Rydek, only to spend the rest of the game blaming her for doing it.
The game ends on a very "Star Trek" note of reconciliation and cooperation (and one surprisingly free of walk-back "makes it easy" B.S.), and it's very clear that the developers love the franchise in a way that the creators of the more recent Star Trek TV shows clearly don't. Diaz and Edsilar's story ends on a particularly poignant note. You don't make a game that basically acts as a sequel to a TNG SEASON ONE episode if you don't care. Hell, the game makes no attempt to explain the Bajorans, and yet when the Bajoran helmsman of the Resolute is terrified, he exclaims about the Prophets. The script is full of little references like that to other Trek shows. I very much appreciated the nod to Enterprise with a character deciding to "polarize the hull plating" once the Resoute's shields stopped being effective. I do wish, though, that the game's subtitles paid more than a passing resemblance to what was being said on-screen.
So, spoiler time:
This game is basically a sequel to TNG Season 1, Episode 3: The Last Outpost. Yes, the one that introduced the Ferengi as a bunch of chittering, sex-crazed chimpanzees and featured a representative of the long-dead race The Tkon stepping in to pass judgment on everything, because apparently Q doing that already wasn't enough. It's revealed that the Miners discovered a stockpile of Tkon tech that basically resulted in their bodies being permanently hijacked by the memories and personalities of long-dead Tkon, and they are now using that tech to body-jack everyone they can find in an effort to revive the Tkon Empire and take over the galaxy once more. This eventually leads to the Resolute returning to the site of The Last Outpost to recruit Portal 63 in a race against time to find an ancient Tkon superweapon that can mass-convert entire civilizations into body-nabbed Tkon in a single shot.
On my first playthrough (I had to do 2 for the Platinum), I enjoyed the story, but on reflection I find it somewhat amusing that despite TNG-era Trek (especially Voyager) really driving the Borg into the ground, even here we're still basically doing a Borg story. Yeah, the Borg aren't involved at all, but we're still doing a story about people having the entire being permanently overwritten by an alien race, and questions about whether the original person is "still in there" and can be reached even as they point a gun at you and try to make you one of Them. That said, I really appreciate that the game didn't cop out and just magic a solution, and the writers made a particularly inspired choice by making Edsilar an unjoined Trill, which gave her some unique perspectives on the Tkon situation. The people who get "bioformed" are gone, leading to certain tragedy in Diaz and Edsilar's case.
On a really strange note, the game makes a big deal about Rydek's dependency on regular Deurideum injections to stay alive. You can just hear Chekhov's gun being loaded and put in place to be an issue right when everything goes to hell. It's never an issue the entire rest of the game, despite other characters bringing it up. It's basically just used as a pretense for Rydek to have regular scenes with the Chief Medical Officer. That's just odd.Where the game really falters, though, is with the gameplay. Most of the game features Telltale-standard walking around, clicking on stuff, and talking to characters. Frequently, you'll be asked to scan objects with your tricorder, which feels really half-baked and clunky. You basically click through viewing modes to find other things to click, and it's not terribly interesting. Hell, the text on the Tricorder is so poorly formatted it doesn't even fully fit in the Tricorder's viewing area. A couple of times, you fly a shuttlecraft, featuring the return of everyone's favorite: flying through rings!
But by far the most frequent non-QTE gameplay segments (and the ones that feel the most tacked-on) are the cover-based shooting sections. Some gaming executive always thinks that cover-based phaser shootouts are the cornerstone of the Trek experience, and it never works. At times, you'll be asked to crouch behind cover and take turns shooting at people shooting at your allies while they try to do something else. It's frustrating because you can only take a few hits before failure and it's really not clear at times when you're safe to take a shot or if you're even hitting anything. Much like the similarly-tacked on stealth sequences, I'd say it feels like a remnant of an early PS2 game, except that I'm pretty sure those did this better.
Speaking of early PS2 games, though, on an amusing final note, the characters in this game just seem to have a bizarre fetish for cocking their head and raising a single eyebrow to emote any given scene. Their faces move so mechanically, with facial features rigidly slotting into position before shifting the head and watching all those features slot into a new position like clockwork. It's like watching a Disneyland animatronic from the 1960s attempting to recreate a Sly Cooper cutscene. You can't unseen it once you notice it. I don't know who told the character animators that this was a good decision, but it makes the game unintentionally hilarious at times.
And yes, Jonathan Frakes does return to play Captain Riker.
All in all, I'm glad I set aside the time to play this one, as laughably bad as it can be at times. It's been a long time since I watched a Trek product that actually felt like someone gave a damn.
Topic: Backlaugust 2026 - (Splatoon) Raiding the Backlog (Read 10488 times)
