The Inquisition has finally checked its diary. Owlcat Games has announced that Warhammer 40,000: Dark Heresy, its follow-up to Rogue Trader, will launch on 28 January 2027 on PC (Steam, Epic Games Store and GOG), PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. A Nintendo Switch 2 version is coming later, at a date the Ordos have so far declined to share. Releasing the grimmest setting in gaming in the last week of January, when Britain is at its coldest, darkest and most skint, shows a fine sense of occasion.
For the uninitiated, which on this website is probably three people and a servitor, Dark Heresy began life in 2008 as a pen-and-paper roleplaying game from Games Workshop’s Black Industries, later picked up by Fantasy Flight. It was the game where you didn’t get to be a Space Marine. You were an acolyte, a disposable investigator sent into the Calixis Sector to find heresy, and you could expect to be shot by it, possessed by it or burned alongside it by your own employer. Owlcat’s version keeps that premise. You play an acolyte of the Inquisition during the Noctis Aeterna, the catastrophe that plunged the Imperium into the dark, leading a warband through investigations, interrogations and conspiracies, with turn-based tactical combat built around weak points and party morale.
The warband is the usual Owlcat collection of people you would cross the street to avoid. There is Cogg the abhuman, Saro the sanctioned psyker, a Catachan Guardsman and Ra’akhti, a Kroot mercenary with what the publicity describes as a particular taste for flesh. The Inquisition is famously suspicious of xenos, so having one in your entourage who might eat a witness mid-interview is the sort of HR headache that keeps the drama going. The trailer leans into the gothic gloom, as it should. Nobody signs up for this setting expecting a jolly picnic.
Owlcat’s track record matters here. Rogue Trader has passed two million sales, and Dark Heresy was sitting on around 800,000 wishlists by the summer. The studio’s games are ambitious, deep and, at launch, traditionally held together with prayer and machine oil before a year of patches buffs them into shape. There’s a founders’ beta running now, and Founder’s Packs on the official site give access until early January, when the beta closes on 7 January ahead of launch. That’s three weeks without your warband, which the Inquisition would probably regard as a test of faith.
Here at SFcrowsnest we have a soft spot for any 40K game that swaps bolter spectacle for paranoid detective work. A cRPG about knocking on doors in a hive city and wondering whether the nice chap with the extra arm is a mutant, a cultist or just from Ipswich sounds like exactly the right use of the licence. Innocence proves nothing, as the Inquisition likes to say. Neither does a release date, but it’s a start.
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