STAR TREK: RESURGENCE

The diplomatic heart of ’90s Trek finally makes a comeback

Halfway through Discovery’s first season, I accepted that it wasn’t my kind of Star Trek. The modern series’ grim war felt tonally off for a series that’s always been about exploration and humanity, and when it did spend time on its crew, the melodrama dial was stuck at 11. Good or bad, it wasn’t my Trek.

I had the opposite experience when I played a new demo of StarTrek: Resurgence, a story-focused adventure from former Telltale developers at new studio Dramatic Labs. Within five minutes, Resurgence’s captain was lamenting a catastrophic warp core malfunction and dropping technobabble like “10,000 teradynes per second” while he stared out a viewport. Twenty minutes later and the senior officers were sitting across a table from Ambassador Spock, talking about their mission to negotiate peace between two alien races. Diplomacy was the obvious answer, but what type of diplomacy? A polite debate ensued. Good or bad, this is definitely my kind of Star Trek.

Resurgence gives off big TNG vibes, and not just because it’s set a couple years after Nemesis, the final TNG movie. A Telltale-style adventure seems like a perfect mold for Star Trek: The best episodes of the TV shows are about characters solving problems together, grappling with their own weaknesses, or solving some quirky sci-fi mystery. Character drama, lots of dialogue, puzzle solving—yep, that’s an adventure game.

The demo was just 30 minutes, which covered introductions to the main cast and not much more. I swapped between the perspectives of incoming first officer Jara and young engineer Carter Diaz, with subtle dialogue options that let you nudge their personalities rather than going full Paragon or Renegade. If you appreciated the range of emotions Jean-Luc Picard could express with a frown, you’ll also vibe with how much Resurgence is focused on capturing the nuances of Star Trek chat.

ALL TALK

The developers told me that the full game will have some actiony bits too, but in the demo I didn’t do much more than walk a few feet. I hope there’s more opportunity to explore the ship in the full game, which sounds like it’ll be equivalent to a full Telltale season, which the dev equated to a Trek miniseries in length.

Though Resurgence’s tone is exactly what I want out of Star Trek, I’m worried the developer isn’t going to have quite the time or budget it deserves here.

Dramatic Labs is using Unreal Engine and opted for a realistic art style that stumbles into the uncanny valley. The facial animations aren’t bad, but have a robotic quality you don’t see in today’s luxuriously motion captured games—they remind me of the first couple MassEffects, now well-over a decade old.

Likewise, the walking animations have an awkwardness to them that feels mismatched with the fidelity Resurgence is shooting for. These flaws stand out more in a realistic game than in the comic book style Telltale used for so many years.

Resurgence isn’t finished, of course, and there’s time left to smooth out the most noticeable flaws. But the developers said the animation is close to where they want it to be, so I’m not expecting a dramatic transformation between now and release later this year. I can look past some goofy moments if the rest of Resurgence is as promising as it seems, though—even The Next Generation open palm slammed the silliness button every few episodes. TV Star Trek may no longer feel like the ’90s Trek I loved, but Resurgence is doing its best to warp headfirst into that void.