Paramount Has Plans for Bolder Star Trek Video Games

June 8, 2026 - 14:57

It is not exactly breaking news when an executive at a major entertainment company looks at a popular franchise and decides they could do more with it in video games. But Shawn Kittelsen, a longtime games writer and designer who now leads creative and production at Paramount Games Group, makes a decent case when it comes to Star Trek.

Many recent Star Trek games have been niche, he recently told me. A lot of 4X strategy games. A lot of PC-first titles. There was a VR game that Kittelsen really liked, 2009's Star Trek Bridge Crew, but it too stayed on the fringes.

"There haven't been a lot of bigger console releases, especially in recent generations, for Trek," Kittelsen said.

But as his job dictates, he is now pondering a world where there are.

First up will be Star Trek Shadow Frontier, announced this weekend, from horror game specialists Bloober Team, the studio behind the Silent Hill 2 remake and Cronos the New Dawn. It is slated for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X and S. It is pitched as a haunting action-adventure featuring Ro Laren, a cult-favorite character who has appeared in Star Trek TV since 1991's Next Generation episode "Ensign Ro."

In the game, she crash-lands on a mysterious planet. The marketing copy describes it as a spaceship graveyard where nothing is as it seems. As she explores the corrupted surface and crosses paths with other survivors, she must face twisted creatures, a hostile ecosystem, and an entity that seeks to envelop her body and mind.

Kittelsen says players should expect a game that is less grim-dark horror like Dead Space or Resident Evil set in Star Trek, and more of a psychological thriller akin to Ninja Theory's Hellblade games.

"There's plenty of Star Trek episodes in which a character really goes deep into a conflict within themselves," Kittelsen said, promising a Bloober take on that. He called the game an opportunity to go deep with one character and make a character study, which he thinks gives them a chance to explore aspects of the lore that have not been developed in games before.

Kittelsen believes there is commercial promise around combining psychological thriller, survival horror, and action adventure, more so than making another 4X strategy game. He said he loves 4X strategy but thinks you can overserve that genre.

Another way Kittelsen put it is that Star Trek Shadow Frontier is meant to show an unusual side of Star Trek, a different side than the standard Trek that has been showing up in games for a while.

"This is an exploratory opportunity for Trek fans to see what we can do with a game that doesn't try to be the right down the middle version of Star Trek," he said. "We wanted to do something that's more interesting and engaging and will get people's attention."

Bloober Team began developing Shadow Frontier before last year's formation of the new Paramount Games Group. It is now a central project to that amplified push for games. Kittelsen regards Trek as one of Paramount's "big four" franchises to build up in games, along with Avatar the Last Airbender, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Spongebob Squarepants.

Earlier this spring, one of the more unusual Trek games in recent memory, the story-driven Star Trek Resurgence, was pulled from digital storefronts after publisher Bruner House's rights to sell the game expired. It had only been released in 2023.

Given Paramount's priorities, I asked if Kittelsen's team had plans to bring the game back.

"No plans to re-list Star Trek Resurgence at this time," he told me. "Kevin Bruner and the team at Bruner House put a lot of love into the title, but it struggled to find an audience. I'll never say never to bringing a game back if there's enough demand, but right now we're focused on new Star Trek titles."