Silent Hill 2's Devs Turn Star Trek Into a Horror Game

Star Trek is a franchise built on optimism. Humanity has solved its problems, reached the stars, and spends most of its time making first contact and debating ethics over replicated tea. So naturally, the studio that remade Silent Hill 2 is turning it into a survival horror game.

Bloober Team and Paramount Games Studio announced Star Trek: Shadow Frontier during Summer Game Fest, revealing a third-person psychological thriller set on an uncharted planet that's become a spaceship graveyard. You play as Ro Laren, the Bajoran officer introduced in Star Trek: The Next Generation, with original actress Michelle Forbes returning for voice and motion capture. Ro crash-lands on the planet after answering a distress call and has to contend with twisted creatures, environmental hazards, and a planet-wide entity trying to consume her consciousness. The game is coming to PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Switch 2, and PC in 2027.

I love this pitch. Bloober Team's best work lives in the space between psychological dread and environmental storytelling, and Ro Laren is one of TNG's most complicated characters. She's a convict, a defector, a woman carrying decades of Bajoran trauma. Dropping her onto a planet that weaponizes memories and guilt is exactly the kind of setup that plays to Bloober's strengths. Shawn Kittelsen, head of creative and production at Paramount Games Studio, said during IGN Live that "this is not a Star Trek game like you've ever played before," and based on the teaser, he's not exaggerating. The trailer shows organic, Beksiński-style corruption spreading across what look like Romulan or Klingon ship interiors. It's a long way from the bridge of the Enterprise.

Paramount's New Games Division

Shadow Frontier is also the first major project from Paramount Games Studio, a newly formed division that consolidates Skydance Interactive and Skydance New Media following Paramount's acquisition restructuring that eliminated roughly 2,000 jobs. Kittelsen hinted at bigger ambitions during the reveal, saying "if you've been waiting for a AAA Star Trek game, congratulations you're getting one. And hopefully this is the first of many." That's a bold statement from a studio born out of layoffs, but if Shadow Frontier delivers, it could justify the investment.

Bloober's Michał Gembicki described the game as blending exploration, puzzles, combat, and cinematic set-pieces, with players using classic Trek gear like phasers and tricorders. The tricorder as a scanning tool in a horror context is a smart fit; it's basically a lore-friendly version of the detective vision mechanic every action game uses, but here it could create genuine tension if the thing you're scanning is actively trying to kill you.

Bloober Team has a stacked slate right now. Beyond Shadow Frontier, the studio is working on a remake of the original Silent Hill for Konami and Layers of Fear 3. That's a lot of concurrent projects for a mid-sized studio, and after the Silent Hill 2 remake proved they could handle a prestige horror title, the pressure to maintain that quality bar across multiple games is real. Cronos: The New Dawn already showed they could do sci-fi horror, though, and pairing that experience with a franchise as rich as Star Trek gives them a deep well of character material to draw from.

Kittelsen stressed that Shadow Frontier is designed to work for players who've never heard of Ro Laren, saying "if this is your first time meeting Ro Laren, you will walk away loving her and want to know more." Given that Forbes is providing full performance capture, not just voice work, that confidence might be warranted. Bloober's track record with protagonist performances in Silent Hill 2 was one of the remake's strongest elements, and replicating that with an established Trek character could give them something most licensed games never achieve: a lead who actually matters to the story being told.