Daedalic EntertainmentJust how hard would it be to travel 70,000 light-years from a distant part of the galaxy back to Earth? Even in the Star Trek canon, in which faster-than-light travel is common, the 1995 spinoff series Star Trek: Voyager presented this distance as a huge problem. The premise of Voyager was simple: Yes, boldly going where no one has gone before was doable, but if you were too far away, too deep in the place where no one has gone before, you’d be stuck, and the ability to share any of your discoveries with the rest of civilization would be moot. And, for seven seasons, Voyager boldly treked back homeward, in a sometimes incredible, sometimes frustrating journey. In 2026, developers gameXcite have created a new game designed to put players into that grueling journey, but since the release of Star Trek: Voyager — Across the Unknown in February, there’s been one common complaint: Just like for Captain Janeway and the crew in the series, getting back home is just too damn hard.Luckily, this hurdle is now a bit easier. Here’s how the makers behind Across the Unknown have made the intrepid trip of the USS Voyager a bit more accessible for players.Star Trek: Voyager - Across the Unknown, released on consoles and Steam back in February. It’s a roguelite strategic survival game set in the 24th Century, a sort of retelling of the Voyager series from 1995 to 2001. As in the series, Captain Kathryn Janeway and the rest of the USS Voyager’s crew end up adrift in the relatively unexplored Delta Quadrant, 70,000 light-years away from Earth. The game’s procedurally-generated campaign allows players to embark on the Voyager’s long campaign back home across 12 different levels, represented as quadrants, each with its own set of side-quests and storylines lifted from the show.While the game’s on-the-bridge approach replicates the feeling of commanding a spacecraft and making the tough decisions required by a Federation captain, many have complained that the game is perhaps just a little too hard. Particular complaints have been leveled at resource rewards and management, maintaining crew morale throughout the journey, and enemy combat encounters. There are already three different difficulty modes in Across the Unknown – Adventure, Survival, and the grueling Years of Hell – and yet still complaints persist that even the easiest of the three, Adventure, is still punishing for beginners. (It should be noted that even in the show, the “Year of Hell” world was an alternate reality that had to be reset and abandoned, not unlike starting a video game over from the beginning.)Across the Universe truly puts players in the captain's seat of the Voyager. | Daedalic EntertainmentAlthough the game’s developers, gameXcite, have stated that Across the Unknown is designed to be intentionally difficult to mimic the Voyager’s complex seven-year journey back to Earth, they're also clearly taking the fans' criticisms into account. As reported by TrekMovie.com, a recent update to the game has introduced a new difficulty – “custom mode,” allowing players to tweak specific in-game variables to have precisely the kind of quest home they want, be it exacting and punishing, or a casual story-focused adventure through the stars. With changeable factors including base storage capacity, the time it takes to accomplish certain in-game tasks and research, and enemy combat power, the game's recent update has truly given players the space to fully control the experience they have and shape the odyssey of Captain Janeway and her crew. Ironically or not, this move parallels much of the experience of watching Voyager. The show wanted to make things hard on the crew, but not too hard. Voyager was, in many ways, an attempt to make a Trek series in which things were harder for the crew than, say, the Next Generation folks, who seemed to be able to replicate tea or play in the Holodeck whenever they wanted. But the truth of Star Trek is that, even in gaming form, it generally has to feel cozy. So, if you’re playing Across the Unknown, in theory, fans can get more of a mixed experience, as hardcore as episodes like “Scorpion,” or as fun and breezy as the sweeping opening title sequence, in which it’s all about warping around the galaxy looking for coffee in the nearest nebula. Star Trek: Voyager — Across the Unknown is available on Steam.