Aphelion Release Date Officially Confirmed for 2026

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Published Mar 12, 2026, 8:14 PM EDT

Covering the video games industry since 2017, with experience in news, articles, lists, and reviews (and I blame The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask for that).

If you are a fan of RPGs and want a third-person version: Tayná Garcia is a Brazilian journalist (but you can call her Tay) who ended up working with video games after finishing Zelda: Majora's Mask when she was a kid. With more than eight years of experience in the segment, she has been an assistant editor at Jovem Nerd in the past and is currently a contributor at DualShockers and a writer for gaming magazines for Editora Europa. Oh, and she may like Hideo Kojima a bit too much.

Keeping up with tradition, the gaming outlet GamesRadar+ hosted its Future Games Show: Spring Showcase 2026 this Thursday, March 12, delivering a packed lineup of announcements, world-premiere trailers, and fresh updates on titles set to hit the market in the coming months.

Doom Eternal on left, Bioshock on top right, Halo Combat Evolved on bottom right

10 Best Sci-Fi Games

The video game industry has given us several sci-fi games, and here are the ones that stood out because of their intriguing storyline and gameplay.

Among the highlights was a major reveal that finally tells us when we can start playing Aphelion, the next sci-fi project from DON’T NOD, the highly acclaimed studio responsible for wonderful IPs like Life is Strange (the good ones!), Jusant, Lost Records: Bloom & Rage, and many others.

The Mission to Persephone Begins This April

So we can all start marking our calendars: the folks at DON’T NOD have just revealed that Aphelion will be released on April 28, 2026, for PlayStation 5, PC, and Xbox Series X|S.

Alongside the date, a brand-new trailer for the game, titled “Persephone,” was unveiled. The video offers deeper narrative details and another glimpse of the gameplay, which looks quite ambitious as it puts you in the shoes of an astronaut exploring a mysterious alien world.

You can check it out right below:

In terms of story, the trailer reveals that Earth will soon become uninhabitable, but the discovery of a new planet (named Persephone) rekindles humanity's hope. So, in order to ensure that the location is viable, the European Space Agency dispatches the ship Hope 01 on a scientific mission with two of its best astronauts, Ariane and Thomas.

After a disastrous landing, Ariane finds herself stranded on a weird, frozen planet. Now, she must navigate rugged landscapes and shifting realities to rescue her injured partner in a sci-fi adventure filled with action, exploration, traversal challenges, and stealth mechanics – and, as you must have figured out at this point, that’s where the players come in.

The folks at DON’T NOD have just revealed that Aphelion will be released on April 28, 2026, for PlayStation 5, PC, and Xbox Series X|S.

“Discover Persephone, the last hope of humanity. This is what you crossed the universe for,” is how the developers themselves describe the game, which appears to be the studio’s most ambitious project to date in terms of gameplay.

As a fan of DON’T NOD’s more gameplay-heavy titles – like Jusant with its deep climbing mechanics and Vampyr, which remains one of the most interesting vampire simulators out there –, I’m incredibly excited to see what awaits us on Persephone.

Aphelion is already available for pre-order now, and it will be a day-one launch on Game Pass.