// PC GAMER — GAMING
A Star Trek horror game is just wild enough to work, but not the one Bloober Team is making
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Bloober Team is making a Star Trek game, we discovered over the weekend. It will feature badass bajoran Ro Laren, and yes it's a horror game. It's a combination of genre, developer and licence that could only be the product of throwing darts at a board. Maybe a drunken game of Mad Libs.
Sometimes it's nice to be completely surprised. But sometimes that surprise is 'Bloober Team is making a Star Trek horror game'.
Star Trek is one of the few media properties that I am simply incapable of being cool about, which means I end up forcing myself to play a lot of bad Star Trek games and then feeling sad about it. I have a feeling that's about to happen again.
It's weird to be protective of brands, but I confess I did feel a genuine spark of annoyance at the news. Star Trek is fertile ground for games, but it's been underutilised, leaving us with only a meagre handful of good adaptations. My knee jerk response was "This is a huge waste." And I haven't really changed my mind.
I've never gotten on with Bloober Team's brand of horror, and I don't think horror is a great fit for Star Trek, but I confess I am fascinated all the same. Videogame adaptations can be—but rarely are—a great way to explore existing TV, movie and literary properties and recontextualise them. There are so many things games can do that other mediums cannot, and that opens the door to all kinds of interesting takes.
Nobody wants to have lizard babies growing inside them.
So I'm genuinely intrigued to see what a Star Trek horror game looks like, but at the same time I do wonder who this is actually for? With Star Trek's cultural cachet sadly dwindling, who but those already invested in the shows are going to be throwing their cash at it? Shows that hardly ever dabbled in horror.
The exception to this tends to be episodes that feature either the Borg Collective or, much later, the Gorn Hegemony. The Borg Collective is pretty much the perfect Star Trek villain—a cyborg species that takes the principles of the Federation and twists them into something incredibly disturbing. The gorn, meanwhile, are kinda dumb, but Strange New Worlds tried really hard to make them terrifying. Nobody wants to have lizard babies growing inside them.
And yeah, First Contact is definitely horror adjacent, with scenes that wouldn't look out of place in a full-blown horror flick. Its status as arguably the best Star Trek film undermines my argument a bit, granted, but it also cushioned its more horror-inspired moments between classic Trek. It never fully committed to the horror because it still needed to be Star Trek.