Owlcat Games revealed a new trailer for Warhammer 40,000: Dark Heresy during IGN’s Fall Fan Fest 2025, confirming an alpha build for Q4 this year. It’s the studio’s next tactical CRPG after Rogue Trader, this time centred on the Inquisition’s internal wars: rooting out corruption in a diseased Imperium instead of profiting from its ruins.
Set during the Noctis Aeterna and tied to the mystery of the Tyrant Star, Dark Heresy puts you in command of an Inquisitorial warband built from loyal Imperial agents and tolerated xenos. Early companions include a Catachan Guardsman and a Kroot mercenary. Owlcat describes the project as a full rebuild of their previous framework: new systems, classes, interface, and dialogue structure. The shift reflects lessons learned from Rogue Trader, which was ambitious, overextended, and technically broken at launch.
Gameplay mixes turn-based combat with investigative structure. You’ll interrogate suspects through cracked teeth and forced confessions, collect evidence from corpse-strewn hab-blocks, and build cases through moral compromises that stain your record. Combat introduces morale checks, destructible limbs, and improved line-of-sight logic to avoid the clumsy melee of Owlcat’s earlier games. Investigations are designed to carry equal weight with battles, shaping how the Inquisition views you: puritan, radical, or heretic marked for termination. The writing pushes ambiguity hard, favouring choices that feel necessary in the moment and cancerous in hindsight.
Owlcat says every character is fully voiced, and tactical encounters will use smaller, denser maps. The tone is darker, closer to political thriller than adventure. They’ve dropped most of the baroque excess of Rogue Trader in favour of steel corridors slick with condensation, candle-lit interrogation cells where screams echo off rust-eaten walls, and voidships held together by prayers and desperation. You’re not exploring new worlds here. You’re cleaning rot out of old ones that should have died centuries ago. That shift gives the 40K setting a different kind of gravity: less spectacle, more the slow crush of decay and blind obedience.
For the 40K audience, Dark Heresy looks like the first game in years to take the Inquisition seriously. Rogue Trader let you skirt the edges of Imperial law. Dark Heresy buries you inside it, crushed by its contradictions and watched by eyes you’ll never see. You’ll work through the same moral labyrinth as the tabletop RPG it’s named after: dogma enforced by burning flesh, corruption festering behind gilded aquilas, fear that turns good men into monsters, and quiet rebellion that ends in shallow graves. That appeals to players tired of endless bolter fire and looking for something that uses the setting’s theology and politics as game mechanics instead of window dressing.
It also rebalances the wider 40K games scene. The past few years have been defined by blunt, action-first releases like Darktide, Boltgun, Space Marine 2. Dark Heresy moves the opposite way, leaning on dialogue, tension, and the paranoia of knowing anyone could be tainted. It’s risky. Owlcat’s reputation for unstable launches could kill momentum fast. But if they manage a clean release, this could be the studio’s first game to match its ambition with execution, and the first time a 40K title lets you think your way through heresy instead of just purging it with fire.
Owlcat also announced Rogue Trader for the upcoming Switch 2 at the same event. Combined with continuing updates for Darktide and Space Marine 2, plus ongoing development of Mechanicus II, Dawn of War 4, and Space Marine 3, the next year looks like the busiest stretch for 40K gaming in over a decade.
