If you loved Nox Archaist, stop reading and buy the expansion. It's fantastic. The expansion layers into the game a new island and castle ruins (with its own mythology). The expansion emphasizes puzzle solving over combat (though there's still plenty of combat to be had). This layers in a fresh play style into the existing structure of the game and it's a lot of fun. One big caveat is that if you're an existing Nox player, you cannot import your existing party into the expansion. However if you don't want to restart with a new party, the devs have included a couple of premade parties that you play the expansion with right away. The expansion really does emphasize mapping (there are one or two places where mapping is essential), so get your grid paper (or RPG cartography software) out for this. #TLDR, buy the expansion now :)
I've been looking for "a game like Starflight" for 34 years now. Starflight is the benchmark that all actual Star Trek games should be aiming for. Everything is there; exploring hundreds if not thousands of procedurally generated strange new worlds; you collect and discover new life and new civilizations. You have to discover the mystery behind the cause of a galactic armageddon, with a surprise finale that is up there with the best that Star Trek ever offered. The game allows you to freely explore an open galaxy with hundreds of star systems and thousands of planets, and yet the game lays the breadcrumbs for you to find incredible discoveries that reliably move the plot along. If you've been hoping for a Star Trek game like this, I fear you'll be waiting for a long time. Star Trek games have always been so overproduced, so top-heavy with graphics and adherance to canon that it gets in the way of a game that should be all about exploration and first contact with alien species. That's what Starflight does in abundance, and better than any Star Trek game out there.
Here's the problem I've had with virtually every Star Trek game out there: the 1986 EA/Binary Systems game Starflight is effectively the best Star Trek game ever made that was not actually Star Trek. Whereas 25th anniversary was kind of a prefab Sierra-inspired adventure with a limited number of pre-rendered planets to explore, Starflight may have been the first "sandbox" with an entire galaxy to explore with hundreds if not thousands of procedurally generated worlds to freely explore. And yet layered into the open-universe was a story worthy of the best Star Trek; an impending, mysterious Armageddon, ruins scattered around the universe where you could find clues, Class M planets to discover, aliens you had to learn how to communicate with (both to decode their language AND learn the best way to respond to them culturally once you could communicate). ' ST:25 by comparison is so limited in scope, so clunky in its implementation, so stunted by its adherence to ST tropes, that it really feels more like King's Quest than Star Trek. If you haven't, go out and buy Starflight. When you create your crew, name your Captain Kirk, make the Science Officer Spock, make your Engineer Scotty, make Communications Uhura, and name your medical officer Bones. You'll effectively be playing the best Star Trek game never made.
