If the embed has jumped to hyperspace without you, the Squadron 42 trailer is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4rVtLAenmk
Every so often the games industry rediscovers space, much as a teenager rediscovers his dad’s old Traveller rulebooks in the loft. 2027 looks like one of those years. Between now and next Christmas there’s a crowdfunded epic that has been in production since the coalition government, two rival attempts to fill the hole Mass Effect left behind, a clutch of simulators that regard the word “arcade” as a personal insult, and at least one game in which you can sign on as the ship’s morale officer.
The usual health warning applies. Several of these titles have release dates in the way the Flying Dutchman has a port of call, and a couple are on their fourth or fifth delay. Here at SFcrowsnest we have learned to read any date containing the word “window” as a statement of hope rather than a contract. But if even half of them land on time, it will be a very good year to own a joystick.
The big guns, or: Hollywood finally reaches the frontier
Let us begin with the elephant in the hangar. Squadron 42, the single-player campaign spun out of Star Citizen, was pitched on Kickstarter in 2012 with a 2014 target. Cloud Imperium declared it feature complete in 2023, promised it for 2026 at CitizenCon 2024, and then, in August, pushed it to the second quarter of 2027 because Chris Roberts did not fancy launching into the media glare around Grand Theft Auto VI. If it does turn up in the spring, it will have taken nearly twice as long as the journey from Kennedy’s Moon speech to Neil Armstrong’s boot print.
Still, there are signs of life. Steam wishlists opened on 10th October alongside a new trailer, The Oath, and a group of early backers and long-serving content creators got to play the thing on 9th and 10th October. You are a rookie combat pilot in the UEE Navy, and the job splits three ways: dogfighting, first-person firefights on stations and derelicts, and life aboard a capital ship between sorties. The cast looks as if someone raided a BAFTA after-party: Mark Hamill, Gary Oldman, Gillian Anderson, Henry Cavill, Andy Serkis, Mark Strong, John Rhys-Davies and Liam Cunningham, among others. Roberts first put Hamill in a cockpit for Wing Commander III back in 1994, so at least nobody can accuse him of fickleness. It’s PC only for now, with no exact date. We will believe it when it’s on the hard drive.
Exodus trailer link, in case of time dilation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YC35xzlYrDc
The Mass Effect vacancy, meanwhile, has two applicants. The first is Exodus from Archetype Entertainment, a studio stuffed with former BioWare staff and published by Wizards of the Coast, which has a firm date: 7th April 2027 on PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC. It’s set in the far future in the Omega Centauri cluster, and its big idea is pure Joe Haldeman: interstellar travel happens close to light speed, so every mission costs your family back home years or decades. It’s Mass Effect with The Forever War bolted on, and we mean that as a compliment. Matthew McConaughey voices a character called C.C. Orlev, and Britain’s own Peter F. Hamilton is among the writers and creative consultants.
The star of the latest trailer, though, is Salt: an Awakened octopus mercenary and bounty hunter who pilots a combat mech, snipes from long range, and blinds enemies with ink-like smokescreens. That last detail is so obvious that it loops round to genius. We covered Exodus’s forty-minute gameplay demo, frogs and all, last week. Suffice to say that Paul the Octopus only predicted football results; Salt predicts where your head will be.
The Osiris Reborn gameplay trailer, should the embed drift off into the Belt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akemL0MHLg4
The second applicant is The Expanse: Osiris Reborn, Owlcat Games’ leap from isometric Pathfinder and Rogue Trader into third-person action. It’s due in spring 2027 on PC (Steam, Epic and GOG), PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, and on Game Pass from day one. You play a Pinkwater Security mercenary whose shore leave on Eros goes about as well as anyone who has read Leviathan Wakes would expect. You and your identical twin, J, escape on a stolen Protogen ship, which becomes the Gemini, and gather a crew that includes an engineer called Zafar and a gunner called Michael. Because this is The Expanse there’s no artificial gravity, so expect mag boots, zero-g firefights, scanners, drone swarms and grenades with their own little engines. An “Exploit” system lets companions in the field, and crew back on the ship, pounce on openings during a fight.
There has been one wobble. After this spring’s closed beta, Owlcat announced it was recasting the male protagonist and J, whose voice work it said had come across as “less expressive” than it wanted. A rare case of one actor losing two jobs at once. Oye, kopeng, it happens.
Below decks: the joy of not being in charge
Starship Simulator’s game overview, if the embed has been sent to the brig: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGsFa20GykM
Not everybody wants the captain’s chair, which is a pleasing trend. Starship Simulator comes from Fleetyard Studios, the husband-and-wife team of Dan and Claire Govier in Somerset, who raised £362,000 from 5,761 Kickstarter backers in 2024. Dan, a man who played Elite on a Commodore 64 at the age of five, has built the Magellan Class exploration vessel the way a naval architect would: seven decks, more than 200 rooms, and the miles of cables and conduits behind the panelling all simulated. Damage, in other words, ought to mean something burst in a particular corridor rather than a red bar going down. Outside the hull is a 1:1 scale Milky Way.
The crew roles are captain, pilot, engineer, science officer, tactical officer, doctor, morale officer and passenger. Star Trek once filled the post of morale officer with Neelix, to mixed reviews. Signing on as passenger means you can boldly go where no one has gone before and then have a sit-down in the bar. It plays single-player or co-op, VR is promised, and the base sandbox will be free. You can try the free tech demo on Steam now. Early access is officially “targeted for 2026”, which, with eight weeks of the year left, we’d gently translate as 2027.
Farlane’s reveal teaser, should the lane collapse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_gkFtcFwIk
Farlane is a smaller, lonelier affair: a single-player space adventure from Siscia Games, a one-man studio in Croatia run by Zeljko Kos, co-creator of Starpoint Gemini. You captain a Nomad-class Frontier Runner, with a crew of four, on the edge of a fading empire whose ancient farlanes, the routes holding civilisation together, are slowly vanishing into the dark. Anyone who has tried to catch a train out of Penzance on a Sunday will find the premise disturbingly plausible. There are 22 star systems to work, with bounty hunting, hauling, mining, salvage, smuggling, escort and rescue contracts to pay the bills. If “crew of four on the edge of a fading empire” has you humming the Firefly theme, you’re not alone. Kos is candid that the reveal footage shows direction rather than finished visuals or systems. It’s aimed at PC in 2027.
Newton’s revenge
Final Orbit’s announcement trailer, if the embed has missed its transfer window: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mst_T-mFpug
Then there are the games that think “aeroplanes in space” is a crime against physics. Final Orbit from Bad Sector, now down for the second quarter of 2027, describes itself as “Flight Simulator meets Truck Simulator in space”, and that is exactly what it is. Fly a fully modelled cockpit, inspired by the F-35 and built around a big customisable touch display, between hand-crafted planets and moons at realistic scale, using genuine orbital mechanics and an onboard nav display that keeps you from sailing past the Mun like a lost Kerbal. You juggle propellant, heat and power, take shipping contracts, trade commodities, and spend the profits on upgrades. Our favourite detail: your choice of insulation and radiators depends on how close to the Sun you plan to fly. It may be the first space game in which the big upgrade decision is essentially loft insulation. HOTAS is supported; VR is planned but isn’t in the current playtest.
C-Beams teaser trailer, in case of signal loss near the Tannhäuser Gate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXA3hzj7p7U
Anyone who has seen Blade Runner will spend the whole trailer for C-Beams waiting for Rutger Hauer to turn up in the rain. It’s a top-down space action RPG set in a hazardous black hole system, made by Distant Light Games, a studio founded by two friends who met at a LEGO builders’ club, one of whom is Charlie Goldberg of the LevelCapGaming YouTube channel. Hooded Horse signed it in May. This is Newtonian flight with inertia, thrusters and fuel to manage, and cargo has real mass: overload the hold and the ship gets slower and clumsier, a truth every removal man has known for centuries. You can knock out an enemy’s engines, weapons or radar, then dock and help yourself to its cargo hold. The arsenal runs from Gatling turrets and recoilless cannon to railguns, guided missiles and the eponymous beams. It’s heading to early access on Steam and the Epic Games Store, and Hooded Horse hasn’t named a date. Since the deal was only signed in May, we would be surprised to see it before 2027.
Admirals, logisticians and other people with clipboards
The Falling Frontier “Might of Mars” trailer, if the embed’s supply lines have been cut: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4zto6KRnWQ
Falling Frontier, from Stutter Fox Studios and Hooded Horse, won E3’s Most Anticipated Indie Game award in 2021 and has honoured the “anticipated” part with real dedication ever since: late 2021 became 2022, then 2023, then 2025, then 2026. It’s a space RTS fought over Mars and Titan, in which intel and logistics decide wars. You design ships, raid enemy supply lines, lay minefields, build recon stations and lurk in asteroid fields and nebulae for an ambush. The last delay brought a shift from arcade to simulation combat, with ships pumping out thousands of rounds a minute and breaking apart deck by deck. Early access is still officially a 2026 affair. We have quietly filed it under 2027 and will be delighted to be proved wrong.
Capital Command’s announcement trailer, should the rogue AI get to it first: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h36UXfGOrEc
Captain Kirk spent half of the original Star Trek talking rogue computers into suicide. In Capital Command, from Hellride Games and (yes, them again) Hooded Horse, you have to settle the argument with guns. The AI running the defences of a remote frontier outpost has gone rogue, and you have the only capital ship available. You give orders to navigators, gunners, engineers and repair teams; you fly in six degrees of freedom with proper inertia, either automating navigation or setting thrust vectors by hand; you position point-defence turrets against incoming missiles, watch the fuel gauge, and decide which damaged system the damage-control crews bring back online first. There are procedurally generated sandbox campaigns, custom battles against 13 AI ship classes, and you can commandeer an enemy capital ship if you’ve shot up your own. The Steam page now says 2027, which is five years on from the original 2022 target, but this is a Hooded Horse list and patience is the house style.
Stars of Icarus launch window trailer, if the embed goes down with all hands: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Jaxq35NIFg
Finally, for those who would rather shout at friends than at an AI, there’s Stars of Icarus from New York’s Muse Games, successor to the crew-based airship brawler Guns of Icarus Online. Crews fight 5v5 in ships ranging from solo fighters and two-seat corvettes to a three-person frigate, across more than 25 fleet formation variations, and when the ship goes down, the crew goes down with it. Every weapon and piece of equipment is available from the start. “No grinding. No pay-to-win”, says Muse, a sentence so rare in modern multiplayer marketing that we had to read it twice. It slipped from 2026 to the first quarter of 2027, and the studio has been running public playtests on Steam in the meantime. Headsets, and a forgiving temperament, recommended.
So that’s the manifest: a decade-and-a-half-old space opera with half of Equity in the cast, a sniping octopus, a stolen Protogen ship, a morale officer, loft insulation, and a team dogfighter with no battle pass. If most of this lot arrives on schedule, 2027 will be the best year for virtual spaceflight since Elite first drew its wireframes on the BBC Micro in 1984. If it doesn’t, there’s always the 2028 round-up. We’ll keep the kettle on.
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