Star Trek Is Officially Switching Genre And Replacing Picard In 2027

Published Oct 7, 2026, 1:30 AM EDT

Nicholas Becher is a gaming journalist with an MFA in Creative Writing from FAU. With extensive experience playing video games, he covers all forms of gaming content at Screen Rant, from breaking news to the latest fan theories. Most-played games range from Clair Obscur to Civ to Elden Ring to Halo 2 and beyond. 

Star Trek's 60-year run has seen some of the most recognizable and distinct characters in science fiction history. Spock helped define the franchise from its earliest days, while later generations introduced equally beloved figures like Data, Geordi La Forge, Worf, Kathryn Janeway, and Seven of Nine. Each brought something different to Star Trek, helping the franchise evolve across decades without losing the ideals at its core.

Even among that extraordinary lineup, however, Jean-Luc Picard stands in a league of his own. Patrick Stewart's legendary captain became the face of Star Trek: The Next Generation before returning decades later to lead his own series, cementing Picard as one of the franchise's most enduring characters. His intelligence, diplomacy, and measured leadership made him inseparable from the Star Trek name.

This legendary status makes the idea of replacing Picard especially surprising. Yet in 2027, Star Trek is doing exactly that with a major new release that hands the spotlight to someone else while simultaneously pushing the franchise into an entirely different genre.

Star Trek Is Replacing Picard In 2027

Credit: MovieStillsDB

In a surprising reversal of their old dynamic, Star Trek effectively replaces Jean-Luc Picard with one of his former officers in Shadow Frontier, putting Ro Laren at the center of a major new Next Generation-connected story. Ro will serve as the game's protagonist, with Michelle Forbes returning to reprise the role she originated in TNG and most recently starred as in Star Trek: Picard.

It's an especially fitting handoff given Ro and Picard's complicated history. Picard initially had little reason to trust the disgraced Bajoran officer, but eventually recognized her potential and became something of a mentor to her. Their relationship was shattered when Ro abandoned Starfleet and joined the Maquis in "Preemptive Strike," something that deeply affected Picard. Decades later, Picard season 3 finally reunited them, allowing both characters to confront the resentment surrounding that betrayal before Ro helped expose the Changeling infiltration of Starfleet.

Now, Ro gets the spotlight entirely to herself, stranded on an uncharted planet after she answers a distress call, forcing her to contend with a hostile ecosystem, strange creatures, and an entity capable of attacking her mind, at least based on early descriptions from Bloober Team. The premise gives Ro a major promotion given her previous role serving under Picard, effectively transforming his former protégé into the star of her own major franchise release and storyline, and it's one that also takes the franchise into unprecedented new territory.

Star Trek: Shadow Frontier Goes Full-On Horror

Shadow Frontier is boldly taking Star Trek somewhere the franchise has never fully gone before: into a sustained, full-throated survival-horror experience. Horror itself certainly isn't new to Star Trek, of course, with episodes like The Next Generation's "Schisms" and "Genesis" leaning heavily into alien-abduction and body-horror imagery, while Deep Space Nine's "Empok Nor" played like a sci-fi slasher set aboard an abandoned station. Even Star Trek: First Contact turned the Borg into something resembling cybernetic zombies.

Those stories, however, were horror detours inside projects that belonged primarily to other genres. Shadow Frontier is being built from the ground up with survival-horror roots, with Bloober Team's Silent Hill 2 and Cronos: The New Dawn serving as the studio's foundational titles and templates for what fans can expect in Shadow Frontier.

Bloober describes the game as a sci-fi psychological thriller, with Ro Laren stranded on an uncharted planet that has become a graveyard for crashed starships. She'll face a hostile ecosystem, twisted alien creatures, and a mysterious entity capable of threatening both her body and mind, and this certainly won't be your grandmother's Star Trek adventure (unless your grandma is a hardcore horror fan, in which case it'd be right up her alley).

For a franchise traditionally built around boldly exploring the unknown, Star Trek: Shadow Frontier is certainly honoring that tradition in the best way possible, giving fans a new protagonist and taking them into a completely new genre to boot.

Star Trek: Shadow Frontier

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