While the fate of Isaac Clark is still up in the air, space-based survival gaming has an unexpected hero in orbit. A familiar one at that. Unable to go more than 48 hours without announcing something new, Polish horror studio Bloober Team unveiled a game set in the Star Trek universe starring a fan-favorite character.
In the brief teaser for Star Trek: Shadow Frontier, we witness a derelict spacecraft cluttered with debris, concerning growths and startling creatures. A pre-recorded audio log reveals our protagonist to be Ro Laren, the hot headed Bajoran whose rankles with authority gave way to devotion to Starfleet. Given that there’s more grease on her face than her hair, Shadow Frontier is likely set around her recent Picard appearances. The Steam page says that Laren has arrived at a planet besieged by an omnipotent entity, something that the Star Trek universe, from false Vulcan gods to the Continuum, is rife with.
It has been a very busy Summer Games Fest for ol’ Bloober. Throughout the week they unveiled DLC for Cronos: The New Dawn and their adaptation of SAW, Genesis, a multiplayer game set around World War 1. This is on top of a new Layers of Fear, expanding on their first hit series.
While tie-ins like Blair Witch have brought out the worst in Bloober, the more troubling area is the launch of Paramount Games Studio. The new AAA gaming initiative by David Ellison, whose management has run amok, made itself known this week with The Last Ronin, a title from PlatinumGames based on the gritty Ninja Turtles comic. Ellison’s ambitions of purchasing and merging with Warner Bros. would further rock the industry, as that would include their portfolio of gaming works, from Batman to Mortal Kombat.
That said there seems to be an inverse relationship between the logic of a Star Trek game pitch and the execution. Sure, a Star Trek survival horror seems out of pocket, but in February Daedalic Entertainment released Across the Unknown, an RPG based around the early episodes of Star Trek: Voyager. Despite it all, it rocks.
