Owlcat Games chose the biggest stage in the business to show off its next adventure. During tonight’s Golden Joystick Awards ceremony in London, the studio debuted a brand-new mission trailer for The Expanse: Osiris Reborn, and it is not the quiet, careful kind of reveal you might expect from a story-driven RPG. This one is about a rescue run gone sideways: pirates, a maze of dead rock, teenagers on the run, and a secret that has three factions fighting over a single kid.
The Expanse: Osiris Reborn is Owlcat’s story-driven action RPG set in the universe of The Expanse, the acclaimed science-fiction saga that ran for six seasons on television and began life as the novels by James S.A. Corey. It is a standalone story rather than a retelling of the show, which means newcomers can jump in cold while longtime fans will spot familiar faces along the way. The game is coming to PC via Steam, the Epic Games Store and GOG, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S in spring 2027, and tonight’s trailer is the clearest look yet at how it will actually play.
A Rescue Mission in the Belt
The mission at the heart of the new trailer starts simply enough: a group of teenagers has escaped a pirate base and is hiding in an abandoned asteroid mine deep in the Belt. Your job is to bring them home alive. Nothing about the Belt is ever simple, though, and the trailer shows why this rescue is anything but routine. The mine is a derelict labyrinth of rock and rusted metal, the pirates want their prisoners back, and every corridor looks like a trap waiting to be sprung.
What turns a rescue into a powder keg is the secret one of the teenagers is carrying. The youngster has secretly received a nanobot implant that lets them interface directly with ships and space stations — the kind of technology that changes the balance of power in a solar system where control of a ship is control of everything. That makes the teenager a target for everyone: the pirates who want their property back, the OPA, and the UN. Suddenly the rescue is not just about getting a group of kids out of a mine. It is about keeping the most valuable person in the system out of the wrong hands, and deciding who you can trust when every faction in the Belt has a claim on them.
The trailer shows the mission from several angles at once. There is zero-gravity combat, with the player drifting through open space and trading fire in the dark between the rocks, and there is close-quarters fighting on foot inside the mine itself. Owlcat is clearly leaning into the feeling that space in The Expanse is not a backdrop — it is a hazard, a weapon and a puzzle all at once. The way you approach the rescue is yours to choose, and the trailer hints that the choices you make on the way in will shape what is waiting for you on the way out.
Companions Who Talk Back
You will not be making those choices alone. The trailer introduces twin brothers James and Ian, who will fight alongside you as companions, and Owlcat is making a point of how alive those companions feel. The game is fully voice acted, and its characters react to your decisions as the story unfolds — approving, arguing and remembering what you did. Ian even speaks in Belter Creole, the distinctive language of the Belt, with English subtitles carrying the meaning for the rest of us. It is a small detail that says a lot about the care going into this adaptation: the studio wants the Belt to sound like the Belt.
That attention to language is something Proven Gamer has already covered in depth. If you want to know how Owlcat got the dialect right, read Speak Like a Belter or Get Spaced — How Owlcat Nailed Belter Creole in The Expanse: Osiris Reborn. It is the same commitment to authenticity that runs through tonight’s trailer, from the battered look of the asteroid mine to the way the crew talks to each other under fire.
More Languages, More Players
Tonight’s announcement came with good news for players outside the English-speaking world. The Expanse: Osiris Reborn will now include Brazilian Portuguese subtitles, a direct response to requests from the community. The game’s subtitle list now covers English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. For a story-heavy RPG, that kind of support matters — it means the writing, which is the whole point of a game like this, will actually reach the people it is written for.
Why This One Matters
Owlcat has earned the right to be taken seriously when it says it is making a story-driven RPG. The studio built its reputation on Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous and Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, two of the most ambitious role-playing games of recent years, and it is currently also working on Shadow of the Road. With a team of more than 160 people across studios in Armenia, Cyprus and Poland, Owlcat is one of the few developers in the world whose name alone tells you what kind of game you are getting: long, choice-driven, and built around characters you will argue with for a hundred hours.
The Expanse is a perfect fit for that approach. The novels and the show were never really about the spaceships, as beautiful as they were. They were about the people caught between Earth, Mars and the Belt, and about what happens when ordinary people are asked to make impossible choices in a system that does not care about them. A rescue mission in an abandoned mine, with a teenager carrying a secret that could change everything, is exactly that kind of story — small, human and dangerous.
Spring 2027 is still a way off, but tonight’s trailer does what a good trailer should do: it makes the wait harder. A new mission, a new corner of the Belt to explore, and a crew worth fighting for. The Expanse: Osiris Reborn is shaping up to be one of the most interesting RPGs on the calendar, and after tonight, it has our full attention.
For the full picture of the night the trailer debuted at, see our rundown of the winners in Resident Evil Requiem Sweeps the Golden Joystick Awards — Full Winners List for 2026. Source: the mission trailer announcement from Owlcat Games via Games Press.
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