The Expanse: Osiris Reborn Barely Understands The Series’ Aesthetic And Completely Lacks Its Subtlety

I love The Expanse. When I first watched the TV series back in 2017, I was enthralled by it. So enthralled, in fact, that when news broke in 2018 that the series had been cancelled (for the first time, at least), I dove into the books. I enjoyed Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck’s writing so much that I came to appreciate the TV series even more, because there’s a respect and admiration for the source material that adaptations of other properties often seem to lack.

The world of The Expanse is grubby and imperfect. Tech has advanced light-years beyond our own, yet humanity’s expansion retreads the same tired ground. Politicians are still useless, self-serving assholes, the disparity between the rich and the working class has somehow gotten worse, and cultural prejudice has evolved to the point that now everyone simply chooses to judge people based on which planet (or lack thereof) they were born on. The story is clever, nuanced, and unhurried—but I can’t say the same of The Expanse: Osiris Reborn.

The closed beta for Owlcat Games’ The Expanse: Osiris Reborn was released a few days ago, on April 22, 2026, and I’ve been excited to get my hands on the game ever since it was first announced last year. The Expanse: A Telltale Series wasn’t perfect by any means, but it proved that the world and lore of The Expanse could comfortably mesh with the medium of video games, so I naturally had high hopes for Owlcat Games’ bigger-budget take on the franchise.

The closed beta for The Expanse: Osiris Reborn is buggy, performance feels shaky on PC, and the combat does feel a little paint-by-numbers, but this is a pre-release build we’re talking about here, so I think it’s fair to forgive these faults at this stage in development. What I can’t forgive, however, is its shoddy, unbaked writing.

You jump into The Expanse: Osiris Reborn’s beta at a borderline-indiscernible point in the plot, as you’re informed (via pop-up text) that the player character and their twin, J, have just escaped a massacre at Eros Station, where “the entire population was infected with an unknown substance.” Fans of The Expanse will understand that this is referring to the Eros incident, the inciting event that kicks off the series’ overarching plot. As someone familiar with the source material, I should have been able to take this in medias res kickoff in stride, knowing the context as I do. Instead, however, it immediately served to highlight one of The Expanse: Osiris Reborn’s most glaring faults: none of these characters are interesting enough to care about.

The beta is only an hour long. You might be thinking that, perhaps, that’s not enough of a taster to judge the quality of these characters, who you’ll likely spend tens of hours with as the narrative progresses. Unfortunately, I suddenly have no desire to spend another second with any of them, as The Expanse: Osiris Reborn speedruns through their personalities and foibles at a breakneck pace.

© Owlcat Games

Take Zafar, for instance, the first character you meet. He comes across as wise and sullen, a character with a deep, tragic past…which is then immediately revealed to you by the NPC that runs the nearby shop, who tells you that “Zafar has a tragic past” and that “Someone died or something…” A couple of minutes later, Zafar assists you in escaping from Protogen’s mercenaries. Thanking him prompts him to say, “Enough people died because I did nothing…” We get it, man. It’s about as subtle as a brick through your bedroom window.

Zafar is just the tip of the iceberg, though. The dialogue is more comparable to that in a Fast and Furious film than it is to the compelling, intrigue-building conversations present in the books. At no point do you have to guess if a character is feeling a certain way about something, because they’ll just outright tell you. And, look, the voice actors are doing the best with the material they’ve been given, but every take feels like the first take. There’s just no feeling of cohesion between the performances, because the actors come across as if they barely understand the lines they’re delivering.

And speaking of  the dialogue, it irks me to no end that the player character in the beta, a “Belter,” is voiced by an American. For those unfamiliar with the source material, the term Belter refers to people in The Expanse who are born in outer space. They speak a language known as Lang Belta: a creole language crafted by Nick Farmer (the same man who created the Trill and Barzan dialects for Star Trek: Discovery) and influenced by Hebrew, Ukrainian, Swedish, Japanese, Chinese, and close to a dozen other languages. There are Belters in The Expanse who sound American, but even they have subtle intonations to their speech, as if English is not their first language. The voice actors in The Expanse: Osiris Reborn are just Americans who sound like they visited a made-up country on vacation once, and adopted a couple of very forced-sounding catchphrases upon their return.

© Owlcat Games

Likewise, the dialogue comes across as forced in a sort of overbearing way. When characters in the book or the TV show talk, they reference things that the reader or viewer has very little context for, like historical events and scientific phenomena. The thing is, these things are supposed to go over your head because the characters in The Expanse already have the required context. The characters don’t insult each other’s intelligence by over-explaining things just for the viewer’s benefit. I can’t say the same for The Expanse: Osiris Reborn. I get that you, the person playing the game, might not understand what the Coriolis effect is—but I know for damn sure that the person the character is explaining it to in-game does.

At the very least, The Expanse: Osiris Reborn comes somewhat close to getting the look of the world right. The Pinkwater 4 station you spend your time in during the beta is appropriately unfinished, as if, just like with every other space station in the series, its owners ran out of money halfway through building it and were forced to start cutting corners to save costs. That being said, it does all look a bit too…clean. The world of The Expanse, outside of Earth’s megacities, is a lot filthier than the station you visit in The Expanse: Osiris Reborn. Every ship and city has this feeling of grime, as if it would be sticky to touch. Perhaps Pinkwater 4 is a one-off in this respect, though, so I’ll give Owlcat Games the benefit of the doubt for now.

Look, I really wanted to like The Expanse: Osiris Reborn. But instead, I came away from the beta with very little interest in playing the full release. There’s plenty of time to fix things like bugs and performance issues, as the game isn’t out until spring 2027, but my issues stem from its artistic direction. I don’t think that’s going to change between now and next year, at least without completely overhauling things. If you’re not a fan of The Expanse, maybe it’ll be fine…but even then, I’d be worried that playing the game would sully your enjoyment of the franchise beyond it.