The Expanse is one of those TV shows that I've started to watch about three times now. Matthew (RPS in peace) and I keep hearing great things about it, but every attempt we make has always ended the same way. We get a couple of episodes in, determined to make it a little bit further than we did before, but there's just something about it that can't quite hold our interest long enough to properly stick with it. One day, though, I do hope to finish the first season of The Expanse, and my ideal scenario is for the episodic prequel game from Telltale and current Life Is Stange custodians Deck Nine to be just the kick up the bum I need to get through it.
The Expanse: A Telltale Series started the fortnightly release of its five episodes on the Epic Games Store last week, and I played through the first, Archer's Paradox, over the weekend. As you'd perhaps expect from a first episode, the plot scales lean heavily toward setup here as opposed to actionable 'so and so will remember that' choices. Still, its centrepiece of exploring a big exploded battleship to find some sort of money-printing macguffin is also like such a sedate, threat-free version of Dead Space that it can't help but feel a little lightweight at the same time - and that's not just because you're floating around in zero gravity for half of it. It does a reasonable job of laying down what I hope is some good groundwork for the origin story for TV favourite Camina Drummer, and her fellow crewmates are a fun, bubbling pressure cooker of personalities just waiting to spill over into conflict, but I do also worry that the game will have the same truncated fate as my attempts to watch the show.