A Star Trek horror game could work, but not Bloober Team's

Bloober Team is making a Star Trek game that will feature Bajoran Ro Laren, and yes, it’s a horror game. The announcement was a surprise, and it landed with a familiar frustration: Star Trek is fertile ground for games but has been underutilised, leaving only a meagre handful of strong adaptations.

Horror isn’t in Star Trek’s DNA, and Bloober Team’s usual brand of pessimistic, psychological horror sits uneasily alongside the franchise’s unrelenting optimism. That tension makes Ro Laren a sensible protagonist—one of the least Starfleet characters to don the uniform, more a lone wolf action hero with a chip on her shoulder and designed as the opposite of Starfleet ideals—but she is an outlier.

There have been Trek moments that veer into horror, from the Borg Collective to attempts to make the Gorn terrifying, and First Contact remains horror-adjacent while still cushioning those beats with classic Trek.

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