Honestly one of the most galaxy brained moments in a commercial branching narrative I've ever seen.
At one point you have to do something on the computer. In Star Trek, whenever someone needs to do something serious on the computer (eg, change ownership of a spaceship, activate the self-destruct, enable the Helvetica Protocol, etc) they usually say something like "voice authorization: Riker, Beta Six Foxtrot" and that acts as their authentication to make the computer do something.
So in this story moment, the game actually gives you three choices – you're picking what your voice authorization is. And your character will use whichever combination of glyphs you decide is your voice authorization. You even pick one glyph at a time, so there are 9 possible combinations you can end up with.
Now, from the gamer brained perspective of "choices should matter" this is ridiculous, right, it obviously doesn't alter the plot in any way. And from the slightly more sophisticated perspective of player self-expression, it also does nothing; you don't really have expressive agency here, a voice auth of "delta six whiskey" is not different from "alpha four x-ray", it says nothing different about the character; it's not like when the game asks if your 'go to warp' catch phrase is 'engage' or 'make it so'.
HOWEVER
Where this IS effective is simply in the very specific agency-mode of player-character alignment. The game is asking you what your character's voice auth is because of course you know, you're her. This game is actually full of moments that are doing this – you are often asked to choose whether to fire phasers or torpedos, for example, or pick between attack pattern alpha or delta. None of those choices do or mean anything objectively, there has never been a reason in Star Trek why the captain fires torpedos or phasers, but the fact that you are given this choice imposes a perspective of being a person who knows those things. It's roleplay in the same way that you can swing a sword in a LARP under the roleplay that you are a skilled swordsman even though you don't know anything about actual swording.
I think this is genuinely quite clever, and clearly the game's designers thought so also as they went the trouble of setting it up so that the voice lines could vary accordingly.
Very much this! I think allowing players to help impose that perspective, even when the choice "matters" relatively little (although in Resurgence's case specifically it comes back in a cool way), is really at the heart of the Telltale "formula" (developer Dramatic Labs being made up of ex-Telltale folks who survived its implosion).
That formula got kind of a bad rap in the heyday and decline of Telltale as people soured on its approach to making sure that, for the most part, characters and situations ended up in broadly the same place from episode to episode. IMO it works well in Resurgence because it's a one-and-done game (so far, at least), so even when you're familiar with How Telltale Games Work and are looking for the hidden "rails", it comes across as more genuine.
