Off-world colony builders delight in forcing their rock and ore-gathering settlers to live subsistence lives in search of catastrophe: a crashed spaceship or cryogenic malfunction leaving them no choice but to survive on a hostile rock. Star Trek: Outposts Unknown, announced yesterday and already equipped with a demo, is different. Your team of explorers is not trapped; in fact, if they’re anything like mine, they’ll be heading back to the mothership at dinner time.
It’s indeed a happier, less threatening version of the colony sim, in that (and in keeping with Trek’s hands-off policy) you don’t even run a colony. Starfleet has made a deal with a recently first-contacted exocivilization to help them resolve a system-wide radiation storm problem; your colony is a mutually agreed upon research station, with all the benefits of sanctioned mission support. That means an Enterprise-like ship in orbit, with soft beds, hot meals, and a medbay where crew members can retreat at night, as well as occasional resource resupplies and new personnel.
It’s not entirely safe: my ground team was quickly attacked by whipping and warping vines, and buildings (or people) left outside the protective barriers will take damage from periodic bursts of radiation. Morale, rest, hunger, etc. are also tracked for each recruit, so it is likely possible that one of these gauges will empty. However, as a starting point, it’s one of the most relaxed introductions to a resource management builder I’ve ever played. Within twenty minutes, I had a shuttle landing pad up and running, returning the crewmates to the ship at sunset – probably for a hot bath and a bit of holodeck yoga – before dropping them off for the morning shift.
As a determined 17-hour finisher in real life, I should support my expedition’s comfort and work-life balance. Unfortunately, that’s not real life. He’s a sci-fi colony builder, and if I know anything about other sci-fi colony builders, it’s that nothing gets done unless I can impose backbreaking labor on sleepless underlings. At least three times during my time with the demo, I quietly said “Where are you going?!” while my security offices and metal processors sat unfinished, redshirts worked out of tools and returned to the ship for their nightly banquets and cold dives.
To apply cold Vulcan logic, the ship being a separate, functional space adds at least a small extra layer of strategy. Its food reserves will run out without being replenished, and over-enthusiastic recruitment could leave a few poor people without bunks sleeping in the dirt. And the strategic layers are something that Outposts Unknown will want to keep – even when my crew was earning their keep, it seemed a little too easy for me to end up sitting idly by myself, watching and waiting for a supply chain to do its thing before I could progress.
I hope this is just the initial difficulties of the tutorial and/or my own inability to play these kinds of games without degenerating into incompetent tyranny. You can try the demo for yourself on Steam; this should also help buy some time until we see or hear more. other Star Trek game from Not E3 2026, Bloober Team’s “psychological thriller” Star Trek: Shadow Frontier.
