The Expanse: A Telltale Series – A timid return from Telltale, but with quality storytelling

11 years ago, Telltale Games stunned the gaming world with the first episode of its adaptation of The Walking Dead. Soon the game became popular for telling a parallel story to the events told by the HQ of the same name, but with a narrative quality that was rarely seen in this market.

In addition to a very well-told story, the game also featured a system of choices where the character’s path could change depending on their decisions and their relationship with the other characters in the plot. Of course, in addition to The Walking Dead, the studio also made many other adaptations that ended up winning the taste of many players.

Now it was The Expanse‘s turn to come into focus and Telltale wants to show that it still has a lot of desire to tell new stories and show new experiences. But how does The Expanse fare?

The Expanse: Expanding the universe

Like The Walking Dead, The Expanse is a parallel story to the one presented by the TV series. Here returns the actress of the TV series, Cara Gee, who lends her voice to play the role of Camina Drummer, who despite the good speeches in the series is much more restrained here. However, the game’s setting is very well produced and, as the atmosphere is the silence of the space, it makes sense that the moods in the voices are more timid.

Here you step into her shoes as a crew member of the Artemis spaceship. You have a kind of agreement with the captain, with promises that the job will give you a lot of resources. In a very natural way, the entire crew is introduced to the player: Everyone has known each other for a long time, but the game doesn’t throw a wall of text or dialogues to try to make the player follow everything.

The developers show here the mastery of making everything happen in a way that doesn’t get tiring for the spectators, and even hold their attention to want to know what happens. The acting of the characters is also very good, with very clear facial expressions that convey the legitimacy of each one’s feelings.

The performances are very convincing and the crew has their accents, as we can make a comparison that the characters are from various regions of the world. The consequence of this is that diversity greatly expands the view of those who are watching and reinforces the good feeling of following, greatly pleasing viewers of a livestream.

However, there is a voice, that of the character Khan, which is very evident that there is a person trying to imitate the voice of a person with a little more life experience and at the beginning of the game it ends up breaking a little of the immersion of the dialogues, but in the end from the accounts, personally, I managed to get used to it enough that it didn’t detract from the experience.

The design and visuals of The Expanse are excellent and the player really feels like he is in the outer reaches of space, far from our solar system. This time Telltale chose to use more realistic graphics instead of the well-known Cel-shading. There is indeed a strange mixture where the characters have cartoonish features but with more realistic skin textures, and this is also an impact that can make some players and spectators strange.

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Exploring wreckage in the void of space

With a heavy focus on storytelling, the gameplay here is simple yet updated enough for today’s times. Here you have simple controls to walk through the wreckage of ships and collect resources for your survival on the Artemis ship.

The differential here is in the gameplay in zero gravity, where if you use magnetic boots to walk in environments without gravity, you can detach yourself from surfaces to cross passages with obstacles.

Here the problem is for Keyboard and Mouse players on the PC, as the mouse cursor is not always centered on the screen, the player in the first few hours will be faced with a confusing camera, and that can even cause problems for anyone who is watching a game stream, as the player may lose track of the vision control. So using a joystick is recommended, but the game lacks support for controls other than Xbox ones.

The game’s soundtrack does an excellent job of immersing you. The curiosity is due to the fact that the main theme of the series is also present in the game. Here she knows the right moments of loneliness, tension and moments of relief.

Journey in small pieces

A very different point from the developer’s previous games is that The Expanse has very short chapters. So far there are only two episodes available that are up to two hours long, if the player gets extremely lost trying to look for optional objectives and explore every corner of the scenarios. Those who just want to see what happens next can complete each episode in an hour on average.

I don’t see this as a problem as it may allow for a marathon of episodes for the streamer’s audience to relive the events and then catch up on what happens in the last episode.

Which here also leads to the question of the important decisions that need to be made. Because it has a shorter duration, there are also fewer decisions to make that can change the course of the story, thus generating less changes in the story and reducing the replay factor for fans of the genre.

Another problem that is generated in the short duration is that it becomes very obvious how the game is divided in each episode. Those watching will know that there is story time, exploration time, and episode completion. They are all well divided in an unnatural way, which for those who only want to see the story, the exploration parts can feel unnecessary.

But in the end, even with these detriments, The Expanse: A Telltale Series is a very good experience and deserves to be followed. The game so far has not presented any technical issues that could disrupt the experience of the player and spectators, thus not presenting any technical challenges for those who want to show the game to the public.

Katsutoshi