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Exploration and investigation sit at the heart of Star Trek: Shadow Frontier. The game asks players to move carefully through a hostile world, study it, and piece together its mysteries rather than simply push forward.
Reading the World
Using the tricorder, Ro scans and analyzes items and the environment to learn how the planet works and where to go next. The world is a corrupted labyrinth, and progress depends on observation: the design is built to reward patience, attention, and smart decision-making.
Puzzles and Pathways
Investigation often takes the form of environmental puzzles, which Ro can approach with her phaser and her wits. Solving the mysteries of the strange world is the only way to move deeper into it, and the only way for Ro to make peace with her own past. The story driving this search is told in Story and Setting.
Explore, Investigate, Survive
The game is organized around three pillars: explore, investigate, and survive. Exploration is presented as both the player's salvation and a potential undoing, since every step deeper into the world is also a step further from safety. How that danger plays out is covered in Combat and Survival and Horror.