The Silent Hill studio is making a Star Trek horror game, and Ro Laren is back
Michelle Forbes returns as Ro Laren in a psychological thriller landing next year
Dubai: Star Trek turns 60 this year, and the franchise is marking it by doing something it has never done: a proper horror game.
Star Trek: Shadow Frontier comes from Bloober Team, the Polish studio behind the Silent Hill 2 remake, Layers of Fear, Observer, The Medium and Cronos: The New Dawn. Paramount Games Studio is publishing. It arrives in 2027.
Ro Laren, alone on a graveyard planet
The player character is Ro Laren, the Bajoran Starfleet officer introduced in The Next Generation, with Michelle Forbes returning to voice the role she last played in the third season of Picard.
Ro responds to a distress call and crashes on an uncharted planet, which turns out to be a graveyard of wrecked ships. Something on the surface has taken control of the terrain itself. Creatures spawned by that entity patrol the wreckage, and the planet works on Ro's mind as much as her body, twisting her memories and threatening to cut her loose from reality altogether.
The tools are familiar even if nothing else is. The tricorder scans and analyses, and the phaser handles both puzzles and whatever is coming down the corridor. Whether to fight or hide is left to the player.
'Not a Star Trek game like you've ever played before'
Bloober's team have been careful about the genre label. Creative director Wojciech Gembicki has described it as a psychological thriller rather than straight horror, and pitched it at two audiences at once: people who want a tense survival adventure, and Star Trek fans who want to sit with a character as prickly as Ro.
His colleague Kittelsen put the promise more bluntly, saying this is not a Star Trek game like anything played before.
The darkness, they have said, comes from Ro herself. The story digs into her personal conflicts and the consequences of decisions she made years ago, which is a reasonable use of a character who spent most of her screen time in conflict with Starfleet.
Trek has been here before, sort of
The franchise has always had a horror streak, even if it rarely committed to it. The Borg assimilation process is body horror by any definition. Various episodes across the series have dealt in parasites, physical transformation and psychological terror.
Recent Star Trek has proven unusually elastic, with Lower Decks doing workplace comedy, Picard leaning into conspiracy, and Strange New Worlds running through romance, a musical episode and puppets without breaking anything. A survival horror game is a smaller leap than it first appears.
Eagle-eyed viewers have already found Easter eggs in the reveal trailer, including a baseball and a teacup that will mean something to anyone who watched Deep Space Nine or The Next Generation.
When and where
Shadow Frontier is targeting 2027 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, and PC. The Steam page is live for wishlisting.
