Star Trek - The Devil Went Down to Pollux V

Written by Joe Pranevich

Star Trekkin’ across the universe...

“Space… the final frontier…” Star Trek: 25th Anniversary begins exactly where it should: with the famous introductory lines and a computer version of the opening theme. It’s a nice way to get us in the Star Trek mindset. The game itself opens on the bridge of the Enterprise just as Captain Kirk receives orders to participate in a readiness drill. Captain Patterson and the USS Republic are here to engage with us with mock combat. Uhura receives a message that our opponent is in position. Spock suggests that we raise our shields and arm our weapons. The game is on!

Or… it would be if I knew how to do either of these things. We start in a ship-to-ship combat mode and moving the mouse steers rather than allowing me to talk to any of my bridge crew and ask them to get ready for the battle. I pause the game and look through the manual. As I alluded to last week, there are a lot of keyboard shortcuts. In this case, we have to press “S” to raise shields and then “W” to arm the weapons. It’s a good thing this is a training fight because a firefight is not the right time to be learning the controls...

The real Captain Kirk didn’t have to memorize keyboard shortcuts.

What else can I do? I can talk to Uhura with “U”, but she doesn’t have much to add immediately. Spock can be reached either with a “T” or a “U”. The former allows Kirk to ask his science officer for advice. In this case, Spock advises that we should save photon torpedoes for close range attacks. The latter is the way that we (through Spock) access the library computer. It has a simple search interface; I look up “Patterson” and the game gives me details about his service record. That’s pretty cool! I’ll be sure to look up things as we go.

While we learn the controls, we are also being shot at. I go back to the manual and discover that the blue console just in front of the captain’s chair is the targeting computer. Our enemy is the green dot and all we need to do is turn in the appropriate direction to get him on the forward viewscreen. Now that weapons are armed, we can fire phasers with the left mouse button and photon torpedoes with the right. If you aren’t familiar with Star Trek weapons, think of “phasers” as super-lasers while “photon torpedoes” are explosive charges that we fire at the enemy. Phasers are a lot faster but torpedoes pack a punch. Before I work it all out, I get a message that our warp engines exploded and we’re all dead-- or we would be if this were an actual combat situation. We’re just simulation-dead.

Also, we’ve been eaten by grues.

The Admiral coordinating the skirmish comes into the viewscreen and chides Kirk for his performance, but there is no time for a re-do because he has a mission for us: travel to Pollux V to aid Federation colonists there. Aliens resembling demons have attacked the colonists near a mine. Our orders are to investigate and resolve the situation without harming the colonists. We also learn that they are part of some religious sect. While part of me wants to get on with the story, I restart the game. Let’s win the combat!

I won’t bore you with the details, but let it be said that I died again and again and again. This is partially my fault because I’m playing the game on a laptop with a touchpad rather than a 1990s era PC with a two-button mouse. Even so, the controls are pretty difficult. As the Republic flies circles around me and shoots, they are frequently able to take out individual ship systems like the viewscreen (it becomes gradually more filled with static until you can’t see at all) and weapons (they stop firing). The manual says that I can have Scotty repair individual systems by pressing “D” and selecting the system to repair, but it’s slow going and he doesn’t always get anything fixed before I blow up. It takes me around five deaths to figure out a big part of what I was doing wrong: I was a sitting duck! We have just been sitting dead in space and I have to set the ship’s speed by using the number keys: “1” is the slowest and “0” is the fastest, with the keys in the middle being graduations between. A backtick (“`”) moves the Enterprise in reverse. I gradually work out some strategy, make sure to turn away and run like hell when the enemy comes straight for us, and keep taking potshots whenever I get lucky enough. Targeting while moving is extra hard because you have to lead into the shots but eventually I get lucky enough and win. Hooray!

I’ll dive deeper into the flying controls into the next post or two. There are aspects that I haven’t figured out yet like the target analysis (“A”), emergency power (“E”), and a few others. This isn’t near the complexity of contemporary space combat sims like Wing Commander, but it’s an awful lot of stuff to think about for minigames. I’m sure I’ll get the hang of it before long.

My, what pretty ribbons you have...

With the Republic defeated, I get a congratulatory message from the admiral then receive the same orders as before. Now what do we do? I check the manual and learn that we have to tell Chekhov to navigate to the correct star system. There isn’t a hotkey for talking to him and my mouse is still controlling the weapons. Once again, I crack the manual to see that I need to press the “tab” key to toggle modes and select the other crewmembers. With that, I can click on the navigator and get taken to a view where I have to select which star system to travel to. It’s copy protection!

Which of these is Pollux V?

The manual contains a matching star map except that the individual planets are labeled with a key. It’s easy to find the right one and select it. We get a brief cinematic of the Enterprise warping away and we’re in the Pollux system. I have Uhura hail the planet and High Prelate Robert Angiven appears on the screen and invites us to beam down down. But how do I do that? One more trip to the manual and I learn that we have to first put the ship in orbit, one of Sulu’s tasks. I select him and the right icon and we get another visual of the Enterprise pulling next to the planet. Using the transporter is in Kirk’s little menu and with just one more cutscene we are down on the surface. All this feels a bit mechanical, but I think I’m nearing the end of the things I need to constantly check the manual about.

It’s Transporter Chief Kyle! Hello!

We come in peace for all mankind.

Our landing party consists of Kirk, Spock, McCoy and “Ensign Everts”, a bright eyed redshirt that seems excited to meet the colonists and shares that this is his first time seeing snow. Way to humanize the cannon-fodder! For those of you less familiar with Star Trek, let’s just say that whenever you have a new character wearing a red shirt participating on a mission, it usually doesn’t end well for him or her. The planet is heavily forested and Dr. McCoy remarks that he wants to investigate the flora for medical purposes. Is that a hint?

I click around to get used to the interface. It’s not exactly what I expected, but it’s easy enough to figure out. Left clicking moves Kirk around and the other members of the landing party will follow. Right-clicking takes me to an image-based context menu where I can select to look at, talk to, or pick up things, plus access my inventory. I want to play some more before I talk about it in detail.

Who ya gonna call?

The next surprise is a welcome one: dialog options! When we talk to the prelate, Kirk can choose to greet him formally, act religious, or be rude. Kirk is a formal kind of guy so I take that approach. We learn that the colonists, all belonging to a religious sect, were mining ore in a nearby mountain. As they dug deeper, they found strange minerals but they kept digging anyway. Didn’t we read this in a fantasy novel? Brother Kandrey discovered a mysterious door but at that point the demons attacked and caused a cave-in. He’s still trapped in the collapsed mine and the demons are guarding the entrance. Angiven suggests that I talk to the other brothers in their chapel for more information.

They picked a very nice planet!

There are two buildings to choose from and I choose the wrong one initially. I find myself in a museum of sorts with an “ancient” computer and mining equipment, plus a case filled with minerals and bones. Is the joke here that they are technologically averse (similar to some real-life religions), but the technology is still more advanced than ours? I don’t have anything obvious I want to do with any of that stuff yet so I pick the other building instead.

Not sure how you could tell this is a chapel...

The other building looks more like a storage room than a chapel, but there are several colonists here to talk to. One of the colonists was injured in a battle with the demons and I have McCoy check him out. Unfortunately, he’s not doing okay: he has a serious infection that we cannot cure without “Hyper-Dytoxin” but the Enterprise is all out. Fortunately, Brother Stephen reveals that some berries near the mine entrance can be used to make the medicine, but we’ll only be able to get at them if we face down the demons. This seems a bit contrived, but we can roll with it.

Wait. You aren’t who I was expecting.

The mine entrance is only one screen north of where we beamed down but we don’t find what we expect: there no demons, only Klingons! They immediately kill my redshirt guy, but we are able to stub them quickly enough. McCoy remarks that they “don’t make Klingons like they used to”. Is that a hint? I restore back a bit and replay the scene, this time making sure that Kirk shoots first and we are able to survive with our ensign intact. The phasers in this game (as in the show) have two settings, green for stun red for kill. Since I want to interrogate our Klingon friends, I choose the stun setting.

With the enemies down, we realize that they are not real Klingons after all! In the melee, one of their hands fell off to reveal that they are really advanced robots, although perhaps not very reliable ones given that they are completely incapacitated by the stun setting. I pick up the severed hand because you never know when one of those will come in handy. We also find the miracle berries and head back to camp. Brother Stephen makes the antidote for us in his lab (the building that we explored first) and we deliver it to the injured colonist. With his life out of imminent danger, the rest of the settlers are willing to talk to us.

The first thing we discover is obvious in retrospect: not everyone saw the same demons. The humans all saw Christian-style demons, a Tellarite saw a wolf-shaped demon from his own culture, and we all saw Klingons. Everyone sees the things that they fear. We also show Brother Stephen the severed hand and he examines it in his lab. It has some micro-circuitry on the fingertips that he is able to repair for us. I think I can see where this is leading us.

Did anyone bring a bell, book, and some candles?

Our next stop is deeper in the mine, but I should clarify that at this point the game is very minimalist on screens. The cave-in is the next screen from the entrance, which is the next screen from the settlement, etc. We find the site of the cave-in but no additional “demons”. I have Spock scan it with his tricorder and he suggests that we can clear the rubble if we use our phasers and fire from the top down. We start at the top right, but that was a bad choice: a loose boulder on the left comes crashing down and kills our redshirt. I restore and make sure to blast that boulder first and he lives again! Is the conceit going to be that our security guards will just keep getting killed in amusing ways and we have to keep preventing it? Once the rubble is clear, we find a body with weak vital signs. I send in McCoy to patch him up and he’ll be fine.

The door conveniently has a handprint scanner. Raise your severed hand if you saw that coming! (Too soon?) I use the hand on the scanner and the door opens. Time to go deeper!

Hello? Any demons in here?

The next room is a bit strange. Most of the north wall is made up of machinery. There is a diagram of a solar eclipse above some levers plus a strange slot. If I get the levers right, will something pop out of the slot? Spock scans and discovers that the machine is waiting for the gravitational pull of a solar eclipse to be activated but the planet’s moon was destroyed thousands of years ago. Are the levers a manual override?

The ancient symbol of “Pac-Man”.

This puzzle is tough. It consists of three colored circles representing the sun (yellow), the moon (red), and the planet (blue). Each of those has a certain portion shaded, although the yed sun seems to be in the shadows and not itself shaded. I’m not sure what to make of that. There are also three matching power bars (with six illuminated sections each) and three matching control levers. But other than that, there’s no clue what to do. When I move the levers, it adjusts the meters on the left, but not how you would expect: if you start with the yellow on the bottom and move it up, it will gradually have less yellow lights lit until it gets to around the middle and then they will all gradually light up again. The three fractions don’t seem to help much: the sun is either full or half, depending on whether that shadow is supposed to be meaningful or not; the moon is one half, while the planet is five-sixths. I try to align the levers that way or try to make the meters line up that way but no dice. There is no feedback except to say that nothing happens, nor any other clues that I can find. Brute force will be impossible because there are either 125 possible positions if the lights on the left are what matter or more than a thousand if the possible positions of the levers do. Eventually, I give up and return to camp.

I explore everything again and discover that the computer in Brother Stephen’s lab is running a simulation of that long-gone solar eclipse. It feels like there’s a hint there, but I can’t find it. Now that Stephen is in the room-- he wasn’t when I came here at the beginning-- he’ll happily chat with me about the objects in his museum case: an animal skull, two different chunks of ore, a shell, and a strange piece of metal. He tells me that the metal suggests there was once intelligent life on this planet, but I suspect the shape-changing robots are probably the better clue. He offers to let me take the museum pieces, so I grab them all. This is the only “new” thing that I find so eventually I give up and return to the underground room.

The Pollux V natural history museum is just getting started.

I use the metal rod in the slot and discover that it’s actually a key! Unfortunately, we mere humans aren’t strong enough to turn it and I am left with the sliding lever puzzle one more time. It’s either difficult or stupid and I don’t see the answer.

In the end, I get it but completely by accident. I deserve no credit. If you place each lever such that the meters are on their lowest settings-- that is, you put them roughly in the middle position-- the machine activates! I suppose that during an eclipse that the power would be lower? But they explicitly said it measured gravity rather than solar energy so something doesn’t feel quite right. I spent close to an hour mucking with these dials and I’m peeved about the solution, especially that I didn’t get it by “solving” so much as “fiddling”.

We just met, but sure! Join our union.

The machine turns on and an elevator rises out of the floor to reveal an insect-like creature. He explains that he is a “Nauian” and that he and his race were put in stasis to survive meteor impacts and an expected ice age. They had programmed the system to wake them during the next lunar eclipse but the meteors must have destroyed the moon as well. They have been sleeping longer than anticipated. We get some dialog options again and I pick all the ones that seem nice and diplomatic to our new friends. The Nauian promises to disable the defense robots and I give him the key to do it. We also get a shred of character development for Kirk: the computer plucked Klingon opponents out of his brain because that is something he fears. Is that a plot point? The Nauians also seem to know all about the Federation and ask to join; Kirk offers to send a diplomat. We all beam out, satisfied of a job well done.

How many commendation points do I need for a prize?

On the bridge, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy engage in a bit of light-hearted banter about how demons have pointy ears, just like Spock does. We also get contacted by our admiral friend who tells us that we did a good job: 97% performance rating with 3 commendation points. Does anyone know what 3% I missed? Will it be a big deal? Will I miss the best ending if I do not get 100%?

This game seems pretty fun so far, but except for the puzzle with the levers, it was a pretty simple area. This feels like something that could have been on the original series and all the little character moments really sell the story. Let’s find our next adventure!