Survival Horror At The Final Frontier

When describing Star Trek, “horror” isn’t usually the first word that comes to mind. The classic sci-fi franchise has long been more concerned with exploring both space and philosophical ideas than with scaring its audience. And yet for longtime fans, some of Trek’s most memorable moments are steeped in horror.

The very first episode of The Original Series, “The Man Trap” (1966), featured a monster-of-the-week vampiric shapeshifter that left its victims horribly mutilated. Decades later, The Next Generation delivered all sorts of horror in episodes that delved into cosmic dread, body horror, ghost stories, and many other unsettling concepts.

Star Trek: Infection on Meta Quest 3 and PC VR takes these horrors which have always lurked on the fringes of Trek and centers the fear in a way that feels especially potent in virtual reality. From the moment you step into the game, Infection is designed to unnerve you, to upset you, and even to scare you.

Story

Star Trek: Infection begins aboard a space station where you, a Vulcan Starfleet engineer, live and work. We learn that years earlier, you were held in a Cardassian prison overseen by the notorious commander Tarel Mharutt, a fugitive wanted by Starfleet for torturing prisoners. When the Federation starship U.S.S. Lumen detains a Cardassian merchant named Daryal, suspected to be Mharutt in disguise, you are beamed aboard to confirm his identity.

The plan goes horribly wrong when a brain scan detects an unknown infection in your cerebral cortex. You’re sedated and rushed to sickbay, awakening later to find the ship is in ruin and the captain dead. The crew are mutated into monsters, and something is changing you from the inside out.

You’ll spend the next six to eight hours of gameplay unraveling a complicated plot of shifting identities, while battling the infection that’s both all around you and inside of you. You won’t visit beautiful planets or comfortably stroll down pristine starship corridors. Instead, you’ll creep and crawl through the wreckage of a doomed vessel, relive the traumatic memories of time spent in a Cardassian torture cell, and evade former Starfleet crewmates who have been twisted into grotesque monsters. It all culminates in a finale truly befitting of the best episodes of Trek.

Gameplay

At its core, Star Trek: Infection is a stealth-driven survival horror game with elements of the Metroidvania genre layered atop. You’ll spend much of your time navigating throughout the U.S.S. Lumen, following clues, scanning things with your Tricorder, solving environmental puzzles, and upgrading your toolkit and abilities so that you can reach formerly unreachable areas and advance the plot.

Puzzles mostly leverage your engineering background. You’ll use tools like electric spanners to trace conduits from point A to point B in complicated circuit mazes. You’ll swap modules into and out of computer terminals. You’ll brave deep space to repair the outer hull of the ship. There’s even a tense and memorable moment in which you must defuse a ticking photon torpedo timebomb.

There’s enough variety in the puzzles that, even if they’re not technically the most sophisticated or interesting thing you’ve played in a game, they at least never become tiresome or predictable.

When not roaming the ship, exploring, or solving puzzles, you’ll mostly try to avoid patrolling monsters by any means necessary. To do this, you’ll have to move carefully and think tactically. You can distract enemies with tossed objects or wait for them to pass, slinking unnoticed. When necessary, you may dispatch them with a Vulcan nerve pinch, your phaser, or traps and weapons you eventually learn to craft.

However, you are not a powerful character. Your phaser’s “Kill” mode is extremely limited, can only hold five shots, and is charged one shot at a time by consoles which are depleted after a single use. Your “Stun” mode operates as a knockback only, and it has a cooldown after each shot. There are also enemies that cannot be killed, and these you must simply avoid.

If you have one major weapon in your fight against the infection, it is ironically the infection itself.

By eating infected “fruit” or plunging your hand into “goblets” (mutated nodes growing from the walls of the ship), you can enter a sort of powerful infection phase that allows you to shoot monstrous tentacles out of your mutated hands. These can be used offensively to kill enemies, or to grapple and pull yourself to otherwise inaccessible areas of the ship.

Of course, this ability is balanced by the fact that utilizing your infection in this way will eventually kill you. Use your new powers too often and you simply die. This reinforces the inescapable idea that even at your most powerful, you never really feel in control, you never feel like you’re out of danger.

Vibe

You’ll do everything in the game almost entirely alone. While there are (very few) other characters in the game, without spoiling anything, they are little comfort. Infection replicates the oppressive isolation and dread that has long been the defining feature of many of the best survival horror games.

That said, Star Trek: Infection strikes a balance between being scary and being playable. It’s not relentlessly terrifying, and there aren’t an overwhelming number of enemies. Nor does it over-rely on cheap jump scares or excessive gore. Instead, Infection depends on psychological tension, slow-building dread, a deeply unsettling environment, and a persistent feeling that something is very wrong both around you, and inside of you. The U.S.S. Lumen is a terrible place to be, but it’s at least bearable.

Technical Stuff

When I first played Star Trek: Infection, I was disappointed. Played on my Quest 3S, there were fairly significant performance issues, stuttering, and occasional bugs. Luckily, the devs quickly released an update that solved all of my issues, and I was able to carry on. As it stands, Star Trek: Infection is now technically solid. It runs beautifully and plays smooth.

The visuals are solid, too. On Quest 3S, it’s a good looking game. On PC VR, it’s naturally even better, with some truly stunning lighting effects that amp up the oppressive atmosphere and omnipresent dread.

Audio design is impeccable, too, with all the right noises happening at all the right times. The voice acting is almost universally excellent, with an occasional oddly-delivered line. Our main character’s voice actor, in particular, is phenomenal.

In short, it’s a good-looking, nice-sounding game that plays well and doesn’t break.

The Trouble With…

But not all is perfect. Star Trek: Infection has been billed as a horror game. I’m generally a coward, and I enjoy Infection, which may be an indicator that the team has missed the mark for players who want a truly terrifying experience. If you’re looking for a game that makes you recoil from its visceral horrors, or jump scares to trick your smartwatch into thinking you’re doing cardio, Infection may be a disappointment.

The difficulty level isn’t very high either. Monsters are fairly lenient in their detection of the player, and dying in-game isn’t all that traumatic either. The screen simply fades to black and you start again at the nearest checkpoint, which is often very kindly placed at the entry point of the very room in which you died. While this leniency is nice for a casual horror game player like me, I can also imagine some hardcore survival horror fans finding Infection to be too simplistic.

And while the team’s hotfix did indeed fix all of my issues with the game at launch, I still encountered a game-breaking bug that required me to reload a previous save state from about a half-hour earlier. For the record, this occurred when the Holodeck’s one and only door failed to unlock after a scripted event, locking me in the room forever.

Star Trek: Infection – Final Verdict

Despite a lighter touch on outright terror than some horror fans might wish for, Star Trek: Infection succeeds as both a survival horror game and a Star Trek experience. It captures the unsettling horror that has occasionally appeared within Trek and centers it to great effect in VR. It’s a tonally perfect fit for fans of the franchise, and an atmospheric sci-fi scare for everyone else.

UploadVR uses a 5-Star rating system for our game reviews – you can read a breakdown of each star rating in our review guidelines.