Why You Liked … The Expanse: A Telltale Series

James S. A. Corey is not a real person. It is in fact two real persons, Voltroning their skills together to create one of the best sci-fi book series in history. Or, was it best TV shows? Either way, it’s now also one of the best games, but you need only apply if you’re a fan already. If you don’t know what an Expanse is or why you should care, you need to start with the show. Or, book. 

When I read Leviathan Wakes in 2011, I didn’t know what to expect. No friends had read it before me. The cover was kind of sci-fi without being specific. The jacket text was dope, but it spent time talking about a dude named Holden, the XO of a ship, and another dude named Miller, a drunk with a badge. I got cyberpunk vibes. Maybe a little Firefly.

I didn’t expect Aliens.

Those who’ve journeyed with the crew of the Rocinante will know that this series is one of the best in sci-fi. Grounded at a sort of Wikipedia level of science, it’s accessible to both the people who understand how starships work, and others who want to see montages of them blowing up. The character work is off the chain, and it’s this character work the TV show adaptation extended and enhanced. The book doesn’t replace the show, or vice versa. They’re different, mutually confirming takes, and if you enjoyed seeing Amos Burton brought to life by Wes Chatham as much as I did, you almost certainly loved Cara Gee as Camina Drummer.

Drummer’s a long-time fan-favourite character. She’s a badass, but she’s our kind of badass. She has heart, both the kind that lets her punch above her weight, and the kind that lets her understand the place for waifs and strays, even if they’re likely to get put into a protomolecule-shaped Mouli.

Well, the good news is that she’s now got her own damn videogame.

Walking Simulators Need Not Apply

The Expanse: A Telltale Series is an episodic adventure game. The good news is that, in the year of our lord 2026, you don’t need to wait for each episode to ship; you can inject them right into your veins on a schedule of your choosing. Each episode is about an hour long, and including the Archangel DLC, will take you just under seven hours to close out.

The Telltale series of games has attractors and detractors. Some people love how they tell stories, giving you a feeling of agency with characters or settings you know and love. Some people hate the feeling of a glorified walking simulator, a life-on-rails theme park ride where you pilot a marionette through an adventure that doesn’t have a lot in common with Call of Duty.

What’s missing from this argument is that The Expanse is more like a show that you play. While I was managing the controller, my wife enjoyed watching the story unfold. Sure, there are some weird moments for a consumer of the screen where button prompts appear, but for her, it was a rolling adventure, complete with excellent character work, desperate moments, and a we’re-in-space-now tableau. We watched the TV show together, but she was never too into the books; this Telltale adventure put her right back into seven hours of a show she’d thought lost to the devilry of production. Or perhaps it was those sexual assault and harassment allegations surrounding a cast member.

Who really knows? What we do know is that the Expanse is so back.

Speaking of Production

One thing the OG fans of the show knew, back when it roosted on SyFy, was how … conservative it was. In the books, various people swear like sailors, and just to prove this isn’t restricted to space nautilism, a major Earther, Chrisjen Avasarala, swears more than the rest combined. When Amazon liberated the show, we got the swearing consultants back on board, and they never left when Telltale picked up the pen.

The thing about swearing is that it’s not really about how many C-bombs you drop. It’s the way you use language, the realism of a moment between people who are rough, or perhaps in a rough situation. Telltale lets the cast of their Expanse game flex narratively in the same way as the later series of the show, and just like the entire book run.

The game starts shortly before the show-slash-series. We follow a slightly younger Drummer, but not one any less fed up with your bullshit. She’s XO on a scavenger ship, crewed by a few roughnecks who specialise in finding valuable garbage. Is it illegal? Only if you get caught. Things start to go from wrong to more wrong when they’re caught up in the messy politics of Earth and Mars. While the general thrust of the overarching plot is significant, the game focuses on the human stakes.

See, on Drummer’s ship is the ex-Martian soldier Maya. Or maybe there’s the twins, Arlen and Rayen. Perhaps you enjoy the backstory of the Earther medic Virgil. Whatever your poisoned chalice, this ship has cups overfull. Drummer’s never been known for her skills in politics. She’s a captain’s hammer, an executive officer who needs to get the ship to the salvage, and the salvage to a buyer. And within this, the language of the story unfolds.

Yes, there will be swearing. But it will be good swearing, and it serves to ground these characters in what they’re going to do, and where they’ve been. Virgil’s past won’t let him unclench, but Arlen’s past leaves him as loose as a leaky faucet.

There is also a nod to the show’s other characters. Cara Gee is absolutely sublime in her reprisal of a younger Drummer, but Shohreh Aghdashloo’s Avasarala is just as caustically necessary as we need her to be. There’s a nod to the books and show’s future timeline with Florence Faivre making a return as an idealistic Julie Mao, the right kind of person to teach Drummer the wrong kind of lesson.

But Drummer learns it anyway. She learns all about what really happens between the little people caught up in the grinding gears of Earth, Mars, and the Belt. And through it all, we can’t help but wonder: will this version of Drummer, our one, make it through? It’s less whether she’ll get the girl, and more whether she’s worthy of her. And you get to decide.

The Power of Choice

One of the critically cool components of the game is how this power of choice elevates the story over just reading or watching a show. Watching a show allows you moments to dick about on your phone if the pacing drags. You can skip ahead in a book. A game doesn’t allow that; it needs to be with you in every moment, or that next time you save and quit might be the one where you never come back.

I think the way Telltale games in general, and The Expanse in particular get this right is through how they provide choice that leads to a feeling of… let’s call it ‘earned agency’. There’s a moment earlier on where you have this opportunity to fight with one of the crew. It’s not a bad fight; you’ve been training this person to fight in zero G, and for all intents and purposes, Drummer’s been beating them like we wish someone would beat Andrew Tate.

During this fight, the game allows various input expressions. For sure: you can fight back, but … do you pull that punch? How do you deal with the consequences of the fallout of either path? Is this person going to respect you for being the teacher more than the master? All these questions bubble up after the moment has passed, because in the moment, you don’t have time for reflection. You only have time to be Camina Drummer, and the best version of her that you can be.

Afterward, as your relationship with that person gets a new set of scaffolding influenced by your choices, you feel what it’s like to put your thumb on the scales of destiny. You wouldn’t have felt this simply watching Cara Gee be a badass on the show, or reading dialogue between her and Naomi. You are Drummer, and you are manifesting as that ultimate badass.

That’s earned agency. Not the illusion of choice, not three differently-coloured endings dressed up as consequence. It’s the feeling that your Drummer and my Drummer went through the same fires and came out shaped differently by them… and both versions are valid. Both versions are her.

Pick Your Airlock

If you’ve made it this far, you may still have some lingering questions about whether The Expanse: A Telltale Series is for you. Have I hit your activation phrase based on where your boggle comes from? Because I’m a recovering IT geek, I’ve broken this into personas.

Persona 1: The Lapsed Expanse Fan. I see you at the front. Maybe you watched the TV show, dared to love it, but haven’t touched a game in years, if ever. Maybe you drifted away after one of the world’s wealthiest companies cancelled the show while still shovelling coin into The Rings of Power. You’re nostalgic, and you’re going to want to know if this feels like the Expanse. Is it authentic? Is Cara Gee’s Camina Drummer the real deal, or a cardboard cutout? And critically, did Telltale make a worthy use of the IP, or is this a cash grab?

The answers are, respectively, yes, yes, and yes. This is going to scratch the Expanse itch you’ve been trying various creams for. Maybe it was getting into gaming with Mass Effect, or perhaps you dreamed Corey’s latest Captive’s War trilogy would fill the gap (spoilers: it does not). Cara Gee’s performance is an exact reprisal of where it was in the show. It feels directed the same way, and that Gee was able to dip back into the same creative well. And yes: this is a hell of a use of the IP. It’s the Expanse, from its poorly maintained Belter ships through to the Mars/Earther frostiness.

If you’ve been wanting permission to care about this fictional world again: I’m giving it to you. The game respects what you loved, and gives it to you in interactive form. Same high bar of acting, same damn intelligent storytelling.

Persona 2: The Narrative Game Devotee. You’re the person who’s finished every Telltale game, even at the time they were cranking them out about one title every two weeks. You’re on the Life is Strange methadone drip, maybe even fired up Disco Elysium just so you could feel something. You’re the kind of person who played Firewatch and loved it so much you started making plans to move to the woods. If I totally cock up this review, you’re going to be letting me know in the comments (please don’t forget to like and subscribe). You want to know if the choices matter, or if this is going to be the three differently coloured endings of Mass Effect 3. Did Deck Nine bring a new cool over from Life is Strange that changed the formula? Is the environment used to tell the story so that it’s believable?

Your answers are sort of, not so much, and hell yes. Choices in this game must arrive at a conclusion, but how they get there can vary. During my playthrough, I didn’t make the perfect calls for all the crew. People die, man, and sometimes that’s on you. The credits will roll, and roll with a conclusion that feels a little preordained, but the people on the podium will change based on how effective a commander you were. Deck Nine’s take on a Telltale story doesn’t feel much different to other Telltale stories, while also acknowledging that they’re all usually deeply connected to their source material. Tales from the Borderlands wears a different suit than you find on The Wolf Among Us. Finally, the environment: it’s deftly used. The story will have you in zero G and simulated gravity, and these can be cleverly disorienting while hiding mission-critical findables in places gravity wouldn’t allow. 

The zero-G sections are where this gets clever. Most games use environmental storytelling to reward exploration. You know the recipe: find the lore note, understand the dead crewman’s last moments, maybe hear an audio clip. The Expanse does that, but it also uses the physics of the environment as a narrative umbrella. When gravity’s optional, how you get results changes. Things that would normally be out of reach are right there at your fingertips. Secrets aren’t hidden around corners; they’re hidden above you. Floating through a space is different to walking through it. It’s less corridor, more palace, even when everything’s on fire.

Deck Nine also lean into the quirky moments of future technology. It’s not all iris scans and space suits. There’s one moment where you need to open a locked door. To do that, you need a biometric key. Crewmate Maya suggests getting a senior officer’s corpse, but lugging something so cumbersome would be difficult to do. Drummer? She just notes you don’t need all of him to open the door.

If you’ve burned through Telltale’s back catalogue, there’s a safe haven for you here. It’s different enough that it will pull you in, while also wrapping you in the comforting embrace of statements like, “Virgil will remember that.”

Seriously, though: Virgil is so judgy. That man needs to take a look in the damn mirror.

Persona 3: The Curious Outsider. You neither know nor care what an Expanse is. You clicked because you’ve heard this is the place to talk about story-driven games, or because the thumbnail was dope. You come at this with skepticism born of triple-A studios and live service games treating you like an infant that doubles as an ATM.

Your critical questions are whether you can enjoy the game without understanding the show or books. You’d like to understand if this is an action game or a political thriller. Is it a character drama? And is it worth the time and money as a standalone experience?

You ask a lot of questions, is all I’m going to say, but let’s give it a shot. No, sort of all of them, yes, and yes. If you don’t know what the Expanse is, this game is not going to define it for you. It would be hard for me to balance my knowledge of the books and show against a newcomer’s open mind, but I’d hazard a lot of the nuance of Earth vs. Mars vs. the Belt will not make a huge amount of sense to you. The game comes at you as a political- and character-driven intrigue set against the backdrop of our near-future solar system. It’s not a hard game, requiring no special reflexes honed by playing against your kid nephew’s almost-pro Fortnite league. I personally think it’s worth the asking price, but I’d suggest you try reading the first book or catching the launch season of the show before diving in.

Here’s your crash course. It’s the future. Humans colonised Mars and the asteroid belt. Earth’s still top dog, Mars wants independence, and the Belters (the people who actually live and work out there in the dark) are caught between two powers who treat them like equipment rather than people. That’s it. That’s the whole political engine. Everything else is just people trying to survive inside the gears of that machine. Now: can you enjoy the game without knowing the backstory? Mostly yes. Will some of the texture be lost on you? Absolutely. But if the premise I just described made you straighten in your chair, even a little, you’re going to be fine.

If you want to understand the world quickly, you’re going to find no training wheels out there in space. It’s interesting, and has cool characters, but you won’t be able to click through story montages and expect the game to catch you up.

Persona 4: The Fellow Creative. While YouTube tells me a little bit about who watches my videos, it doesn’t have a slice labelled, “Authors.” However, I suspect writers, aspiring game designers, and other YouTubers will be interested in this review because you dig craft. You want to know if the game talks about Drummer through her actions or some janky Blade Runner exposition monologue. Maybe you dig on Belter patois and want to see if it’s used to take the worldbuilding to greater heights. Does the prequel structure create enough tension even though we already know Camina survives? And does the Artemis crew function as foils or mirrors for Drummers values?

Well. We’ve sailed past yes/no questions, but I’ll do my best. Drummer is the Drummer you make her to be. We know that the Drummer-to-be is pretty hard, a station commander whose field of fucks is completely barren on issues like saving the whales. You get a lot of options on how you slot her into this pre-Leviathan Wakes story, though. Are you a leader who encourages, or one who punches down? Do you lead with conviction or by commands? That’s all here, and reflects well on the consequences we touched on earlier. Belter patois is alive and well in the game, but I wished there was more of it. To be fair, I thought that in the books and series, too – it’s such an interesting idea on how speech could evolve in space, hand in glove with sign language (see what I did there?). As to the narrative structure, without spoiling anything, all I’ll say is that the stakes are very high based on who the game makes you care about. I’ve said it before: people die. It’s on you. And you’re going to be having high-five moments right alongside contemplating a noose and a chair. 

As for the crew… well. These people are so well written because they’re neither foils nor mirrors. It feels as if they existed before the game started, as all good characters do. It’s up to you as to how you meet them where they are.

If you’re after a framework to borrow, something to use in your own work, then I think you’ll be pleased with what’s on display. The writing team did not phone this one in.

Failure is Perfection

So that’s who this game is for. But there’s one thing none of those personas quite captures: the game is also for people who are okay with getting it wrong. Garden rake to the face wrong. And I mean that as a compliment of the highest order.

As I’ve spent more time doing circuits of the sun, I’ve realised that failure states are not inherently bad. They’re only bad if they’re badly written. I know that Larian talked a good talk about how failure in Baldur’s Gate 3 is something to enjoy, but I can tell you that it doesn’t feel entirely that way when you’re actively trying to influence a specific outcome.

The Expanse provides enough signposting for those outcomes that you can understand what’s coming. It’s a story built on and around people, and if you’ve spent any time at all around people, you start to understand how they work. The Expanse isn’t trying to trick you, to give you false moralising like older BioWare titles, or to show you that everything is grey (or simply bleak black, and yes I’m looking at you, House of the Dragon).

There were times I failed at something in The Expanse. The rake-face moments I remember weren’t reflex tests, but empathy ones. And I didn’t save-scum these outcomes, because the game always became more interesting regardless of the choices I made (failures and all). It’s one of the few games I’ve played where you can have a really good story, perhaps even surprising yourself through the failures as much as the victories.

The Archangel in the Wings

The game ships with DLC these days, a brief single episode of Chrisjen Avasarala as she’s stationed in a bunker. That one episode deserves its own damn review, and while we really don’t have time for that, I will say a few of things about it.

• You should play it. It’s not Cara Gee, and it’s not Drummer, but it is Shohreh Aghdashloo, and it is Avasarala. Avasarala is one of the S-tier characters of The Expanse, and that’s not just because she swears worse than I do.
• The story is both more grounded and more speculative than the main episodes featuring Drummer. It’s grounded because it’s ultimately a story about Chrisjen’s family, and it’s more speculative because it’s her political puppetry of the Earth/Mars situation.
• The ending stands a good chance of making you cry, not just because of what happens, but because you will gain a new understanding of what the strongest metals look like when they shatter. Aghdashloo, like Gee before her, does not phone this one in.

So, What?

I’m an Expanse fan, but I’m no apologist. The show ended in ways I’ll never fully make peace with, for reasons both narrative and human. But the books kept going, and the characters I loved kept living in them. Every so often we get really lucky, and this is one of those times, because one of them got her own videogame.

What makes The Expanse: A Telltale Series stick with me isn’t just that it’s good. I mean, it’s good, but it’s also that it trusts you. It trusts you to make bad calls. It trusts you to feel the weight of them. It trusts you to find Drummer through your choices rather than despite them. The Drummer you arrive at by the final episode is yours in a way Cara Gee’s TV performance, outstanding as it is, could never quite be. The game hands you the controls and doesn’t step in when things get complicated. In games, stories, and in life, that’s rare. Most things asking for your trust hedge their bets. 

The Expanse doesn’t hedge.

I’ll replay this. I re-read the books and revisit the show not for new information, but because they make me feel things. And no valley that dark is without light somewhere at the end of it. The Expanse game was a very bright light I thought we’d lost.

Thanks, Deck Nine. Thanks, Cara Gee. We’re signing off from the bridge of the Artemis… but only because Tycho Station’s waiting, and we all know how good that future is.

Thanks for watching.

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