Star Trek: Judgment Rites
The 1990s were the decade of the point-n-click adventure, the era during which the genre was capable of being a blockbuster commercial success. While LucasArts and Sierra dominated, many others caught a piece of the action, including Judgment Rites’ Interplay, Brian Fargo’s company that would also give us Fallout, Baldur’s Gate, and a miserable legal battle with Bethesda.
In fact, this entry should probably encompass two games, both 1992’s Star Trek: 25th Anniversary and 1993’s Star Trek: Judgment Rites, given they work so well as a whole. These were Sierra-style point-n-click adventures, depicting cartoon versions of the original series’ (TOS) bridge crew, and most astonishingly, entirely voiced by the original actors. That’s right, Shatner, Nimoy, Nichols, Kelley, and Takei are all there, at a point when their cinematic stars were shining brightly, agreeing to voice the reams of dialogue for a lowly video game. (As it turns out, Judgment Rites would prove to be the very last time the original cast all worked together.)
The first game took the form of seven individual episodic stories that could each have been a proper entry from TOS, with an astonishing amount of variation in how its puzzles could be solved. The second, Judgment Rites, repeated the format, but this time with an arc storyline running through its seven chapters.
Both games contain some colossal issues, with possible paths that lead to unacknowledged dead ends due to decisions you made hours previously, but also remain absolutely extraordinary examples of the potential of the adventure genre.
It’s very painful to acknowledge that it’s now more years since this game came out than it was between the game and the original series’ airing. But it’s wonderful that at 30 years old, these are still well worth playing today.
