Star Trek: Resurgence blends of dialogue and action, Telltale-style

Fans of Telltale Games’ style of story-focused games may have been disappointed when the studio closed back in 2018. The studio was revived later with several in-development projects including The Wolf Among Us 2A game that is based on The Expanse. But Telltale’s style lives on beyond Telltale itself, thanks to Dramatic Labs’ Star Trek: Resurrection.

Playing a game of Star TrekResurrectionThree scenes were sampled and I was left with the impression that the game is very similar to Telltale, but it differs from the Telltale experience. The developer said the game has more action than the Telltale formula.

In a post-Telltale world, the former Telltale designers at Dramatic Labs have switched to Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 4. They credit Epic’s engine with letting them build bigger environments and set pieces with more direct action that don’t consist entirely of quick-time events. In addition, they’ve updated their philosophies around familiar Telltale game tentpoles like dialogue, removing the “stay silent” option in order to force players to actively engage with the game.

“When we looked at what you get from a Star Trek experience, we wanted to deliver on every angle of that,” said Dan Martin, Star Trek: Resurgence’s narrative lead. “So while a huge piece of the franchise is people sitting around talking, debating heavy issues, there’s also plenty of action and other types of scenes: mystery, investigation, […] everything you think of as Star Trek, you’re going to get a piece of that with this game.”

Image by Dramatic Labs

Star Trek: ResurgenceThe following events are the basis for the creation of. Star Trek: The Next GenerationThe players play the role of Jara Rydek, first officer and Carter Diaz, engineering ensigns. Together, they will, according to Dramatic Labs, “unravel a sinister mystery involving two civilizations on the brink of war.”

Three scenes from Star Trek: Resurgence that we played at Summer Games Fest last month differed significantly from one another, but they also shared the similarities that you’d expect from a Telltale game. Rydek, Diaz and their crew members chatted about each other before they reported to the captain. Faced with the dilemma of being respectful or ignoring their superior officers, I decided to do the opposite, exploring the boundaries of Star Trek’s unremarkableness.

Next I traveled to an alien planet in order to oversee negotiations between two races of aliens: the Alidians and Hotari. The two race were created for this game, even though Dilithium is a well-known Trek legend. This scene showcased Spock, who’s being skillfully voiced by Piotr Michael in The Resurgence. Martin said that writing for an iconic character at a period of time previously not explored was a joy.

My attempts to select the most offensive option in every conversation, to make sure that neither side would get offended, led to the negotiations going south. Although these games can sometimes give the appearance of players having influence on things, they are often largely misguided. However, I definitely managed to earn Spock’s disapproval, which admittedly did not feel good.

The demo’s final scene featured me piloting a slow-moving spaceship while my characters talked to a superior officer. My game gave me waypoints, and the shuttle continued to drift slowly toward them. Although it was nothing exciting, the intensity of the action seems to increase as the game goes on.

Image: Dramatic Labs

“It’s not going to redefine the genre, but we have a lot of third-person, over-the-shoulder exploration [and puzzle-solving],” Kent Mudle, the game’s cinematics lead, told me. The Resurgence will feature phaser shootouts utilizing an arcade-style cover-shooting system, as well as shuttle-piloting scenes that are more hazardous than the “tranquil” (as Mudle put it) experience that I played.

“There’s some actual parts of the game that are not just dialogue choices and clicking on things in a sort of free-walk section,” Mudle said. “There’s action of a type that isn’t just quick-time events. We have some of those too, but we also have some more, like, a little light twitch reflex kind of stuff.”

Mudle as well as Martin, both of whom worked for Telltale before joining Dramatic Labs. They said that they’ve always wanted to expand their games in these directions, but didn’t always have the time, resources, or tools.

“Unreal Engine definitely helps,” Mudle said. “I think it’s also just a desire to do that kind of stuff from the jump. We’ve made a lot of games of this type and we’ve wanted to make them more ‘gamey’ for quite some time to provide more varieties in interaction, different ways to sort of sell being immersed in the story. And we were kind of, just through time and previous engines, not necessarily able to do that without devoting a lot of resources to it.”

Image from Dramatic Labs

As for the removal of the “stay silent” dialogue option found in previous Telltale games, “You’d be surprised how many people didn’t use it,” Martin said. “There was occasionally the rare silent option where something really interesting happens, but most of the time, somehow the other characters in the room just continue to talk around you and the story keeps going.”

“We’re trying to ask a little more out of the player, to actually be involved and participate,” he added. “Non-participation is not as much of an option as it [used to] be. We’re trying to make you get in there and have to pick a rail, because that results in a more interesting playthrough.”

Based on my play Star Trek: ResurgenceTelltale fans will feel at home. But it’s the improvements and refinements that the developers spoke of that have me excited to beam into Dramatic Labs’ take on the final frontier.

Star Trek: ResurgenceIt will be available on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 and Windows PC.