There is a peculiar alchemy required to transform a sprawling television series into a video game, and Star Trek: Voyager — Across the Unknown understands that the raw ingredients are not plot points but pressures. Developed by Gamexcite and published by Daedalic Entertainment, the game does not merely replicate the 1995 show’s premise of a starship crew stranded seventy years from home. It rebuilds that premise as a survival-strategy experience, one that borrows the structural DNA of episodic television to generate something that feels less like a licensed product and more like a active participation in the show’s own flawed, scrappy, often ridiculous charm. Like Voyager itself, the game compensates for its rough edges with a persistent, almost defiant sense of invention.
The timing of the release was personal. The writer, having grown up with The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, had never seen the Kate Mulgrew-led spinoff until this year. That meant the episodes were fresh, the characters unweathered by nostalgia, as they embarked on their own journey to lead the USS Voyager home. The game presents itself as an opportunity to relive the show’s events and, more pointedly, to revisit the occasionally controversial decisions made by Captain Janeway: the alliance with the Borg, the restoration of Tuvix from his merged state, and the original choice to condemn the crew to a seventy-year journey through the Delta Quadrant.
Gamexcite built two major systems to ensure these choices carry weight. The first is the relentless pressure of survival. Unlike other Star Trek series, Janeway’s decisions were always made against the backdrop of scarce resources and existential threat. The game’s resource-juggling mechanics force players to evaluate each decision not as a forum debate but as a concrete lever that either eases or compounds their logistical burdens. The second system, and the one that deserves the closest inspection, is a narrative framework designed to compress nearly two hundred episodes of television into a coherent, systems-driven experience. That framework is Across the Unknown‘s secret weapon: it recreates the episodic feel of the show while turning narrative decisions into mechanical consequences that ripple through the entire playthrough.
The Three Layers of Storytelling Events
Across the Unknown selects roughly thirty episodes of Voyager and distributes them across three distinct categories: main missions, side missions, and random events. The game’s structure is organized around twelve sectors, each named after a Voyager episode, and each sector converts that episode’s plot into a multi-stage mission. These missions blend space combat, dialogue choices, and away missions in which the player sends three crew members with specific skillsets to succeed or fail at various objectives. Failure can result in injury, death, or a full game-over condition, which keeps the stakes immediate and personal.
Nine of the twelve sectors include optional side missions, also named for Voyager episodes. Two of these are miniature versions of the main quests: the player must navigate to a specific planet to trigger them, and they follow the same structural pattern. The player can also leave a sector without triggering them at all, which introduces a meaningful layer of agency. Both main and side missions borrow dialogue directly from the show, allowing the developers to selectively recycle Voyager‘s scripts with surgical precision.
The third category, random events, recreates episodes that trigger unpredictably. These contain no away missions and are resolved entirely through text-based dialogue trees. They are the wildcard in the system, ensuring that no two playthroughs unfold identically. This three-tiered framework lays the groundwork for the game’s “what if” storytelling, introducing characters, research technologies, and upgrades that can fundamentally alter the trajectory of the journey.
How Randomness Reshapes Narrative Authority
What distinguishes Across the Unknown from most narrative-driven games is its willingness to cede control to chance. Success and failure are often determined by randomly generated outcomes. The player’s primary challenge is not to memorize the perfect dialogue path but to balance the ship’s resource needs and prepare the crew to face missions whose results are probabilistic. Choices are presented with different success probabilities, tabletop-role-playing style, and the player must decide which risks are worth taking.
Missions can be undertaken simultaneously, and this overlap creates organic narrative surprises. If a player begins a mission that renders a character unavailable, and then starts another mission where that character would have been advantageous, the absence reshapes the rewards and outcomes in real time. The unintended consequence of this system is that it recreates a fundamental structure of television storytelling: the A-plot, B-plot, and C-plot. By weaving several narrative threads together, the game reinterprets Voyager‘s episodic structure through the lens of interactive fiction, where the player’s logistical decisions become the equivalent of an editor’s cuts.
The bulk of the player’s choices are left to the whims of fate. Only a very few specific decisions represent hard branching forks over which the player has absolute control. Allowing players to guarantee success by memorizing dialogue trees would undermine the survival-strategy pillars of the game. This restraint also enhances the value of rewards earned through failable quests. Because those rewards cannot be guaranteed — even progressing along the “correct” path requires a favorable die roll — they can be designed to be more powerful when they appear. For instance, it is possible to save the character Kes, who died in the show after actor Jennifer Lien was let go in 1998. But it is not guaranteed, even if the player makes every “correct” choice. If Kes remains with Voyager into later sectors, she can significantly improve the player’s odds of success. Because there is no reliable way to keep her alive, her impact becomes both a narrative reward and a systemic advantage.
This dynamic generates cumulative surprises even for players who have the show memorized. But sometimes, leaving the story to chance is not enough. Occasionally, the designers needed to restructure entire episodes to unlock their potential within the game’s framework.
Combining, Rewriting, and Recontextualizing Episodes for Gameplay
The narrative framework of Across the Unknown is impressive, but there is another major achievement hiding beneath the surface. The team at Gamexcite had to carefully rewrite many episodes of Star Trek: Voyager to compress hours of television into compact text boxes. Sometimes that meant blending entire episodes together so their stories fit the format.
A revealing example is the combination of “Collective” and “Child’s Play,” two season-six episodes concerning a group of Borg children, particularly a young character named Ichib. In the show, “Collective” introduces the children and the process of freeing them from the Borg hive mind, while “Child’s Play” deals with the attempt to return Ichib to his family, only to discover that his family genetically engineered him as a bioweapon against the Borg. The television format gave the audience weeks between episodes to develop an emotional attachment to Ichib. The game does not have that luxury, so it restructures the story: it first introduces the player to Ichib’s parents, then sends them out to rescue the children from the Borg. Already aware of Ichib’s homeworld, the quest then tasks the player with returning him there. Restructuring these two episodes as a traditional fetch quest is a deft piece of game writing that preserves the show’s emotional stakes without compromising Across the Unknown‘s open-ended gameplay.
The structure also grants the player more freedom in how to end the story. They can ignore the mission entirely, attempt it and fail, or choose to abandon Ichib. Each of these choices folds back into the survival-strategy experience. The task is all the more impressive when one considers how deeply the language of television storytelling overlaps with games: both are highly structured, designed to be executed efficiently under constraints, and shaped by the rhythms of commercial breaks. Identifying what is transferable — and what can be left behind on UPN — requires careful thinking and strong writing skills.
May Inspirations: A Reading and Viewing List for Storytelling Analysis
Recently, a friend outside the games industry asked for resources on how to better analyze and understand media. It is easy to forget that not everyone understands what a match cut is or why themes are relevant beyond eighth-grade book reports. The following list is offered not as a definitive canon but as a starting point for anyone who wants to deepen their understanding of how stories work, especially in relation to games.
In the Blink of an Eye by Walter Murch. This 1992 book is part history lesson, part masterclass on the art of film editing. Murch’s exploration of the technical and artistic aspects of editing is a fine framework for assessing the difference between logical and emotional elements in any creative work.
David Lynch & Twin Peaks: FIRE WALK WITH ME (video essay by Maggie Mae Fish). How does one analyze the famously inscrutable work of a filmmaker who refused to contextualize his own art? Fish demonstrates that it is not actually that hard. Her work offers a model for studying one’s own emotional responses and the context of other works when engaging with difficult art.
The history of Tyrian Purple (BBC Future article). Sometime in the Bronze Age, an enterprising individual discovered that mucus from a specific sea slug produced a rare shade of purple. This is not because of some deep spiritual interpretation of the color between red and blue. It is a clear, plain example of how material conditions shape the production and meaning of all forms of art, including video games.
That is the list for May. And as Janeway might remind the crew: keep your shirt tucked in, go down with the ship, and never abandon a member of your crew. Across the Unknown understands that survival is not just about resources and hull integrity. It is about the stories the crew tells along the way, and the willingness to let randomness, failure, and reinvention write a new chapter in a familiar universe.
