Star Trek: Resolute
Just finished playing Star Trek: Resurgence: a game you can't buy anymore. It only came out a few years ago. But you know... licensing.
I actually bought it pretty much as soon as it came out on Steam. But it's been sitting in the to-be-played pile. I started it, but it's a Telltale-style adventure game, and I find those kind of stressful. I haven't really had the bandwidth for stressful.
I still don't but I decided to pick it up again and decided I'd actually roleplay it out without worrying about the outcomes. This is the correct approach. Spoilers after the cut, but yeah, while there are different outcomes, there isn't a huge variance and if you stay true to the Star Trekness, you'll be fine.
Before the cut, tho, I just want to point out the biggest thing that drew me to this game: the hero ship, the USS Resolute NCC-92317, a refit Centaur class ship.
The Centaur class was a kitbash filling out the background of some shots in DS9, with an Excelsior saucer and an oversized USS Reliant roll-bar and weapon pod making up the nacelle pylons and secondary hull. For the game (after a "refit"), they gave it a proper secondary hull with a deflector, although keeping a bit of the look of the weapons pod for rear torpedo launchers. They put some real love into the design of this ridiculous thing. It's great.
(Spoilers for a game you can't buy after this, btw).
A bunch of other ships show up near the end, which is also great. We get the usual TNG-era suspects like some Mirandas and Excelsiors, but also a couple Steamrunners and an Akira from First Contact, a couple Novas from Voyager, a couple Cheyennes, another delightful kitbash from Wolf 359 with its ridiculous four marker pen nacelles. Best of all, tho, we get an appearance of the original, the amazing, USS Titan, helmed by Captain William T Riker, voiced by up-for-anything Jonathan Frakes himself.
I feel like the Titan was done dirty by Star Trek Picard. But at least it got a feature role in Lower Decks. And it fulfils a similar role here. It's a lovely moment.
Anyway, back to the game. I'd played a couple Telltale games in the past: the Game of Thrones one, which I noped out of pretty quick, and the Borderlands one, which was actually pretty fun. The dialog prompts with countdown timers and quick-time events set me on edge. So as much as I like narrative adventure games, I've mostly stayed away.
Resurgence has all those in spades. But, like I said, I figured I'd just roleplay it and accept what happened, rather than stressing about the outcome. I kind of hate that there is actually a correct choice for a lot of the dialog prompts. That's not really how a modern, improv-informed TTRPG works. But videogames gotta videogame. And if my tactical officer is going to hate me and resign because I did my damn job, so be it.
It's not an amazing game as such, but it is a pretty great Star Trek. I needed one of those. It does a pretty good job of handling the narrative structure, and you get to have plenty of meetings, which is, I feel, something that's pretty rare in videogames, even Star Trek ones. I could complain about the stealth and combat, but all that's kind of beside the point. It's a Star Trek roleplaying game that, for the most part, understands the assignment.
If you could actually buy it, I'd recommend you do so. But it just goes to show that intellectual property law is an enemy of the people and needs some serious reform.