The Expanse: A Telltale Series - Review

I’m standing in front of an airlock door, staring at someone through the glass. I – which is to say, Camina Drummer – am on the right side of the door; the someone I’m watching is on the wrong one. I have a decision to make. This someone is begging me for their life. They’re a fool, greedy and bigoted and incompetent, and a danger to everyone else on board, especially me. But this someone is promising me useful information. They’re swearing they’ll make up for their sins. Do I press the button to let them back inside the ship, locking them in the brig and hoping they won’t find some new way to screw me down the line? Or do I press the other button, vent them into space, and live with the knowledge that I took a life in cold blood for the sake of convenience masquerading as justice? 

I make my choice. I press the button. And the story goes on from there.

Not every choice in The Expanse: A Telltale Series is this dramatic, but even when it comes to small decisions, everything matters. At least, that’s what the game wants you to believe. Picking what to say to the members of my crew, opting for one solution over another, leaning into aggression or doing my best to play nice – all of it is recorded, and all of it has the potential to influence what happens next. Some of this is almost certainly an illusion – the “[CHARACTER] will remember this” notifications popping up without any clear indication of what that might mean – but the granularity is impressive, especially given how seamlessly each episode moves forward from point to point.

Even more importantly, I don’t know what decisions I make will matter, and what ones won’t. The hook of The Expanse is that it requires you to make choices in the moment with imperfect information; the twist being that whatever choice you make, the story keeps going, without giving you a chance to go back and pick something else for a better outcome. There are game over screens, but these revolve around quicktime events or movement challenges. The real meat of the game lies in exploring the spaces around you, finding information, and bonding with your crewmates, completing optional objectives to improve their lives as you work towards each episode’s main goals.

You play as Camina Drummer, a space-born badass working with a scavenger crew after being exiled from her home. Drummer is a fan favorite from The Expanse TV series (adapted from the series of novels by James S.A. Corey), and the actor who played her on the show, Cara Gee, reprises her character here. The game story is set before the events of the show, which means Drummer is the only immediately familiar face in the cast, and Gee’s voice work lends authority to the project right out of the gate. Of the cast of varying degrees of skill (no one is terrible, but not everyone is great), Gee is a standout, and fans of the show are sure to enjoy hearing her step back into the role.

Newcomers will appreciate her presence as well, although it may take them a little while to get up to speed on the rest of the story. The Expanse doesn’t waste much time in explaining itself. Much like the show it’s inspired by, it throws you into the thick of a bad situation and assumes you’ll work out what’s happening on your own. I’ve watched the show, so I was able to keep up with terms like “Belters,” “Inners,” and “the OPA,” but it’s also not too hard to figure them out based on the context. A reference guide of basic terms could’ve been a useful addition; it’s not absolutely necessary for the story the game is telling, but since what we see of events is limited to Drummer’s perspective, it might have been nice to understand what all the different factions she’s worried about are trying to accomplish.

Anyone who's played a Telltale Game should be familiar with how this one works

When Drummer isn’t talking to the other members of the crew, she’s exploring wrecked or abandoned spaceships; her ship, the Artemis, is made up of scavengers who survive by, well, scavenging. She spends a lot of time moving up and down hallways, using her magnetboots to stick to metal surfaces or using the thrusters on her spacesuit to move through freefall. The controls work well enough, and there’s a surprising amount of satisfaction in exploring the space, investigating various bits and pieces, and finding the occasional resaleable loot. The game looks great, managing a balance between cartoonish and realistic that avoids the uncanny valley, and there are plenty of wide vistas to glimpse between the corridors.

In terms of gameplay, anyone who’s played a Telltale Game should be familiar with how this one works; for those who haven’t, the conversations and occasional big moment decisions are the main mechanic, allowing you to shape the story as you move through it to varying degrees. These still work well, even if they’re familiar by now, and the writing, which takes its cues from the source material, does a fine job in both establishing the immediate danger Drummer is in, and the larger forces that shape her life and the life of those around her. The show distinguished itself from a lot of TV science fiction by making sure that viewers were always aware of the practical challenges of space travel, and the game makes an effort to follow along in that vein in a way that makes it clear how close to death these characters often are.

The other mechanics the game tries to engage with are less successful. The combat is just a series of quicktime events, requiring you to click a series of buttons based off of visual cues under a set time limit. The time limits are forgiving enough that it’s not difficult to get through them, and it’s nice to have a break in the exploration, but anyone looking for depth won’t find it. A segment that requires you to dodge around drone lasers or get instantly killed is more of a chore than anything else, and without access to quicksaves (which would make it too easy to manipulate the story decisions) or enough checkpoints, a misstep means getting killed and having to replay the whole segment over again. It doesn’t get less annoying with repetition.

It’s a problem that’s not new to Telltale: struggling to find ways to make the studio’s games more than just walk-and-talk affairs. The Expanse doesn’t succeed on that front, and about the best you could say about its non-dialogue and collecting mechanics is that they’re not as bad as they could have been. Thankfully the writing makes up for a lot. The story takes a little while to get going, but it grows more ambitious, and significantly freakier, as it moves along, and by the end of the third episode (reviewers were given access to the first three episodes in advance), it’s almost impossible not to want to keep playing to find out what happens next.