The first game I’ve been playing for my Year of Gaming challenge is Star Trek: Resurgence, an adventure game developed by former Telltale Games employees. On paper, this game seems tailor-made for someone like me (i.e. someone who loves single-player, story-driven games and is also a massive nerd!).
So, how does the Telltale formula work in the Final Frontier? And does this new company have what it takes to compete with their former studio? Let’s find out!
Reminder: For the Year of Gaming Challenge, I have to play a brand new game (one of the many games I bought in Steam sales and never got around to playing), give it a fair chance and write up my thoughts by the end of each month. (That may not sound like much of a challenge, but as a father with a lot going on right now, it will be hard to fit it in!)
Star Trek: Resurgence
Star Trek: Resurgence is… well, a Telltale game! It’s basically a twelve-hour-long cutscene where you occasionally have to complete quick-time events, play minigames or select your responses in conversations, all of which affect the story and other characters’ opinions of you. It was released in 2023 by Dramatic Labs – a company made up of former Telltale devs.
I acquired the game when it was free on the Epic Store (so much for playing through my Steam backlog!). I played it for nearly 12 hours and was able to complete the story.
Story
The game follows the crew of the starship Resolute, specifically new first officer Jara Rydek and lower-decker Carter Diaz. You switch between these two characters throughout the story, which is an interesting idea that I haven’t seen in this kind of game before.
Your crew is sent to settle a dispute between two rival factions, and – without going into spoiler territory – things quickly escalate until you find yourself facing a threat to the entire Federation. Your job is to face this threat while looking after your ship and managing your relationships with the crew. I’m not sure exactly when the game is set; the technology and uniforms are from the First Contact/DS9 era – the best era! – and it features an inevitable cameo from Captain Riker (and the Titan).
In general, the writing is really good. I wouldn’t say it’s a particularly original story, but it fits well into the world of Star Trek. Again, I don’t want to spoil, but I will say that it chooses an odd episode of the Next Generation to call back to, but they manage to craft an interesting tale about a hinted-at-but-unexplored part of the franchise, and I admire them for that. Sometimes, it felt like there was only one “Starfleet” response, but a lot of the time, choices were more difficult and nuanced – if sometimes deliberately contrived to cause conflict between you and the other characters. It feels like some of your choices will affect – if not the actual outcome of the plot – then the fate and loyalty of certain key characters.
Craft
Usually, at this point, I talk about the graphics (and I am going to), but I want to pivot slightly and talk about the general well-made-ness of the game, which is not one of its strongest points.
They say the best sound design is the kind that you don’t notice. I noticed A LOT when I was playing this game! The sound mix was off during the opening cutscene, making it hard to hear dialogue over music and sound effects, even after I adjusted them myself! Some dialogue lines are much louder than others, and this happens even during scenes where there’s no player choice, like Ambassador Spock’s briefing at the start of the game. (Here, I do have to shout out to Piotr Michael for his excellent Spock impersonation!) Then there’s the music. I didn’t really notice it until one action sequence when some horrible MIDI music started playing. It sounded like something from Star Wars: Dark Forces (a 30-year-old game!). After that, I noticed a few more atrocious MIDI sequences, as well as a number of moments with no music at all, which ruined the atmosphere during several key story beats.
Then there’s the graphics. I like the art style, in general. The characters (the main cast, anyway) look great; their faces are well-animated with good lip-synching. Most of the environments look great too, but then there’d be some metal with a distracting reflective material, with ghosting and jittering, which looked horrible and ruined the scene for me. There was also some janky animation, low-quality textures and one sequence where there was no lighting in a key scene.
There were a few moments of truly great cinematography, but then some transitions didn’t make it clear whether it was continuing immediately or whether time had passed, making it feel confusing, jumpy and detached. I also have a complaint similar to the one I had with Star Wars: Outlaws. You’d walk up to someone, then the characters would be standing in a completely different location or awkwardly shuffle into place before delivering their lines.
It wasn’t bad for the most part, certainly not enough to spoil the whole experience for me, but it was definitely janky during certain sequences.
Gameplay
Remember that this is an ‘interactive narrative experience’, so there’s not a lot of actual gameplay. This makes it even more frustrating that what gameplay IS there isn’t one of Resurgence’s strong points either. When you’re not watching characters talk or choosing conversation options, there are a handful of activities you have to complete, including combat and stealth.
Stealth is trivially easy if you’ve played any video game ever! I didn’t come close to getting spotted once, and I rarely had to use the distraction tools that were available. At one point, I walked right past a guard I don’t think I should have been able to. He didn’t even notice me, and I’m pretty sure I bypassed an entire section of the level.
Combat, on the other hand, is a pain in the arse! There are a handful of occasions where you have to hold the line against waves of enemies while protecting your allies. Two of these, I failed multiple times, took the option to ‘retry in story mode’, and then STILL failed a few times before finally beating them. And that’s not the worst part. When you get killed, you don’t just restart the encounter. You have to sit through unskippable cutscenes (and sometimes replay several quick-time events). And I’m not convinced everything resets properly. There was one fight scene where the first time I attempted it, the enemy could only attack from the middle and one side, and then burst through a barricade on the other side during phase 2 of the battle. When I died and had to start THE WHOLE SEQUENCE again, they were attacking from all sides! On top of all that, the game included one of my pet peeves: a sequence where you had to protect a character – and would fail if they died! – only for that character to get killed in the very next scene!
But there’s more to it than that. There are sequences where you’re given control of the character for a few seconds to walk across the room to trigger the next scene. Some actions, like pressing buttons on the (gloriously rendered) LCARS consoles, are clunky and awkward. I’m wondering if it would have been better to play with a controller. Repeatedly dragging the mouse from one side of my desk to the other, just so the character’s hand will move a few inches to the only interactable button on the console, is not exactly thrilling! It’s not always obvious what you’re supposed to scan with your tricorder, and a lot of these activities boil down to “press X to advance the plot”, but some of the other activities are more fun, or at least, not as annoying.
I found it weird that there’s no reason to explore the game world. Sometimes, there’ll be a character to talk to for some extra flavour text, but most of the time, there’s no reward off the beaten track, which seems odd in a game about being an explorer! I’d settle for some collectables or audio logs or… just, something to give you a reason to do anything other than march along the linear corridor with nothing else to do but trigger the next cutscene.
It’s by no means bad. It’s a passable attempt at the Telltale formula, but it doesn’t quite compare to their greatest hits.
Final Thoughts
Despite its flaws, I enjoyed my time with Star Trek: Resurgence. The budget clearly didn’t match the scale of the story. It lacks polish, and the presentation and gameplay leave a lot to be desired, but the story and writing carried it enough for me to see it through to the end. The dialogue and voice acting – especially for characters like Spock – are great, even if the sound mix lets them down.
I would recommend the game, particularly to Star Trek fans or people who love the Telltale style of interactive adventure games – as long as you’re willing to look past the jank!