Captain's Log: Q Is Back in the Delta Quadrant — The Q Trials and the Equinox Just Hit Voyager: Across the Unknown
John de Lancie's Q now runs a free roguelike mode in Star Trek: Voyager – Across the Unknown, with the Equinox and Captain Ransom arriving alongside. Here's what The Q Trials change, and why the Continuum was always going to end up in Voyager's game.
Captain's log, stardate 103910.4. The Q Continuum has apparently noticed that Voyager has a video game, and has done what the Continuum does best: it has moved in and started rearranging the furniture.
On October 1, Star Trek: Voyager – Across the Unknown received The Q Trials, a free update, and the Equinox DLC alongside it. Per Screen Rant and GoNintendo, John de Lancie is back as Q to introduce the new mode. It's available on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch 2. The base game launched on February 18, 2026.
What the Q Trials actually do
The description going around is that Q Trials remix Voyager's journey through the Delta Quadrant with randomized events, changing routes and new challenges, designed so that every run feels different. The mode also gives you more freedom in how you build your crew. The example that keeps appearing in coverage is an all-Borg crew, with Q commenting on your choices.
That last detail made me laugh out loud. Q is the one who first dropped the Enterprise-D into the Borg's path in Q Who, and now the game lets you staff a Starfleet vessel with the thing he once used as a warning. Whether that is a punchline or a thesis statement depends on how many Voyager reruns you've watched.
The Equinox, the ship Voyager hoped it would never be
The accompanying Equinox DLC adds the U.S.S. Equinox as a playable ship for the Q Trials. Reports describe a smaller vessel than Voyager, with reduced crew capacity and warp power. It comes with three recruitable characters: Captain Rudolph Ransom, Maxwell Burke and Noah Lessing. Expansion Pass owners get it at no extra cost.
For anyone who needs the refresher: the Equinox two-parter is the one where Voyager meets another Starfleet crew stranded in the Delta Quadrant, and finds out what desperation did to them. That's Trek's oldest question about the Prime Directive: what are your principles worth when the road home is 70,000 light-years long and nobody is watching?
Putting that crew in the player's hands is a bold choice. The fiction asks you to be horrified by Ransom. A roguelike asks you to win. Q, of all beings, is the right referee for the contradiction.
Why Q and a roguelike suit each other
Across the Unknown is built around survival and difficult choices, and a roguelike loop is a natural fit for a premise about a ship that cannot simply call home. Q is the franchise's resident agent of chaos, the being whose whole purpose in a story is to put a crew in a situation they didn't choose and watch what they do. Randomized events and shifting routes are, in game form, exactly what Q does in an episode.
And there is a long Trek tradition behind it. From Encounter at Farpoint onward, Q's trials were never really about punishing humanity. They were about asking whether we deserve to keep going. A mode where you fail, restart, and fail differently is a decent way to feel that.
The bigger picture
This lands in a month stuffed with Trek tie-ins for the 60th anniversary, including Outposts Unknown on October 20 and the Fluxx reprints. This one has the advantage of being free, available now, and led by an actor who has been playing the same impossible being since 1987.
If you own the game, the Q Trials are a download away. If you don't, the Equinox DLC adds a reason to find out what a Starfleet captain does when the rules stop applying.
Q would say the trial is already underway. I would say: make it so.
Live long and prosper.
Sources: Screen Rant, GoNintendo, Bleeding Cool, NickALive!.
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