The ‘90s were rich times for Star Trek games. Soon after The Next Generation: A Final Unity, we reach another #1 based on another ongoing new series, and there were other releases in between. The abundance didn’t last; there were thirteen Star Trek PC games published from 1995 to 1999, and just four from 2015 to 2019. There isn’t even a Lego Star Trek game. The slow mouse-based adventure game was a good fit for the talkier approach of the series, but that doesn’t mean that it couldn’t have fit with something more mainstream later. Mass Effect comes to mind as an example of the kind of thing that might have worked. In practice, though, Deep Space Nine: Harbinger is the final Star Trek game I’ll be covering bar some big future surprise.
Within slow and mouse-based games there are also a range of possibilities, and Harbinger, made by different developers, exists in a quite different place on the spectrum to A Final Unity. That game got things underway fast and placed to the forefront the experience of being the captain on the ship and the crew members on the ground. Harbinger holds you at a distance from that, giving you the role of a newcomer envoy involved in a space accident and now on board the ship and part of a slowly developing plot. It goes for two different extremes in what it has you do.
To take the worse one first, it has arcade sections where you do things like fix circuit boards (through a mechanic which is annoying to figure out and then trivially easy to carry out once you have), and shoot down drones (through a shooting gallery where they whizz across the screen). These sections don’t give the impression of having much purpose beyond emphasising that Harbinger is definitely a game. Their out-of-place nature is reinforced by the dialogue between the crew as you get put in place at the guns, which reeks of narrative convenience even by video game standards:
“But sir, Bannick is a diplomat!”
“With a weapons proficiency rating of 8.”
Your character later turns out to have security training level 4 as well, because of course he does.
The other thing that making you an outsider does is allow all of the crew into a more knowledgeable and controlled position. That means that Harbinger can tell a carefully paced and interesting story about the murder of an ambassador and really get into the detail of character and background. It also means that your role is, for the most part, to walk around the ship, rendered in flip-screen 3D, and ask very obvious questions so that the people who know what they’re doing can expound on the answers.
In other words, for the parts of the game where you aren’t too directly involved in what’s happening, you’re barely involved at all. Even as it makes it easier to tell a complex story, it undermines it in other ways. If Harbinger were a TV episode, I would spend it being suspicious of the new guy who has turned up just as things have gone to shit and has been given immediate access to everything.
