A Railgun Warning Shot Across the Bow: The Expanse Is Coming Soon
A Railgun Warning Shot Across the Bow: The Expanse Is Coming Soon
Buckle up, beltalowda. It’s gonna be a wild ride.
There’s plenty of sci-fi in the universe, but actual science fiction is much harder to come by. A trace element, as it were, as scarce as precious as the compound H2O. The Expanse is a rare example of the form, and it’s coming soon to physical media (itself an increasingly scarce commodity in this galaxy!) courtesy of Telltale and Limited Run Games.
It’s only fitting for The Expanse to end up as a video game, don’t you think? The television series, which SyFy and Amazon produced for six seasons in total from 2015-22, has become a genuine cult sensation. The TV series was in turn based on the first two trilogies of a nine-novel series by S.A.Corey, aka authors Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham. And Franck, in turn, based the novels on an MMORPG setting of his own invention. So, really, this is a bit of the property coming full-circle.
Well, more or less: Being a Telltale creation, The Expanse: A Telltale Series is anything but an MMO. Rather, it’s an interactive narrative experience, light on action and heavy on storytelling, and it attempts to capture the tone and spirit of The Expanse’s universe as faithfully as possible. The game draws on both the show and the books while giving players a chance to inhabit the ships and stations of Belter society. That’s an especially noteworthy objective for this game, because The Expanse is, again, a work of legitimate science fiction. It deftly avoids the usual sci-fi tropes of “space magic” by grounding everything in real-world physics and an uncomfortably believable political framework. No one’s out there flying at warp speed, and the very relatable cultural and social tensions within the solar system are amplified by the even more real limits of physics (not to mention the sheer terror of traveling from one place to another across millions of miles of nothing in tiny, fragile, metal boxes attached to insanely powerful rockets).
The Expanse: A Telltale Series feels even more grounded than the television series, since it takes place before the events of the show. A prequel to the show focused around Camina Drummer (a background character in the show who eventually becomes a central figure in the solar system), The Expanse: A Telltale Series centers on Drummer’s experiences before human civilization is turned on its side by the protomolecule, the Ring, and the murderous ambitions of Marco Inaros. Drummer’s on-screen actor, Cara Gee, returns to lend her talents to the adventure and help strengthen the game’s fidelity to the award-winning show. Gee is joined by quite a few of her costars as Drummer’s path intersects with the factions and tensions simmering between the siloed societies of Earth, Mars, and the Belt, including—whoops, no spoilers!
The Expanse: A Telltale Series launches on Sept. 4 for PlayStation 5 and Switch. Like they say on Ceres: Xalte ere gova da diye! September 4 is only a couple of days away….