The Expanse: A Telltale Series

I went in as someone who had finished all six seasons of the show and came out genuinely surprised by how much this prequel made me care about a version of Drummer I'd never met before. Deck Nine, the studio behind Life is Strange: True Colors, co-developed this alongside Telltale, and that pedigree shows in how the writing handles crew relationships. This is not a game that trusts QTEs to carry its drama; it trusts characters. That choice pays off more often than not. The setup is a five-episode prequel set aboard the Artemis, a scavenger ship working the Belt before the events of the Amazon series. Drummer starts as XO under an Earther captain, and the class friction between Belters, Martians, and inner-planet crew is baked into every dialogue exchange. Your crewmates include the Morozov twins Arlen and Rayen, the secretive lunar medic Virgil, the gruff Earth-born pilot Khan, and Martian engineer Maya, who may become something more depending on how you play your cards. Crucially, the game lets you hear Drummer's internal monologue, something the show never gave us, and Cara Gee's performance makes those inner thoughts feel earned rather than expository. The choices that govern who survives the fifth episode are set up carefully enough that a bad ending stings rather than feeling arbitrary. On the mechanical side, Deck Nine added zero-gravity traversal that actually works as a gameplay system. Toggling your mag boots to walk along walls, float through derelict wreckage, or drift between hull sections gives the exploration a physicality that older Telltale titles completely lacked. There are also scattered mini-games covering power routing, hull cutting, and drone evasion, none of them demanding, but enough to stop the pacing from feeling like a straight visual novel. The free third-person movement is a genuine first for the studio and it makes the detailed environments worth revisiting. The flip side is that the zero-g movement is noticeably sluggish, backtracking through large ship sections can drag, and the collectible salvage system adds padding without adding tension. The dialogue choices, while generally impactful in the final reckoning, tend to funnel toward obvious correct answers episode by episode, and the end-of-episode player-choice percentages make that illusion hard to maintain. For Expanse fans, this is an easy sell. The faction politics, the Belter creole, the hard-sci-fi respect for gravity, Anderson Dawes lurking in the background of episode four, and the pirate captain Toussaint arriving late to shake everything up, all of it fits the universe's tone snugly. For newcomers, the game functions as a self-contained story, but a lot of the emotional weight lands harder if you already know who Drummer becomes. The writing plays it safer than it probably should, especially given that prequel status means Drummer's plot armor is thick and the dramatic stakes need to come entirely from the supporting cast. When the story does commit to a difficult choice, though, it lands with the kind of gut-punch that Telltale built its reputation on. The whole run clocks in around eight to ten hours across all five episodes, which is honest value for a narrative game of this type, even if it leaves you wanting a second season that may never come.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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