It’s been a month since Gamescom 2025 lowered its shutters and sent ninety thousand nerds squeezing into the tiny Cologne tram station outside. In newsworthiness terms, a month’s time is roughly equivalent to five millennia, so this roundup of all the games I played at the show (but haven’t already covered elsewhere) comes with an admission of tardiness.
Also: excuses. Who knew Silksong would come out while I was still unpacking?
Despite the modern graffix and newly discovered third dimension, I was surprised by how much Super Meat Boy 3D feels like the precision platformer that so easily exasperated my 2010 self. It’s still demanding and relentless, but there’s a snappy, spring-loaded quality to the run ‘n’ jumping, and the near-instantaneous offer of a retry makes deaths seem like momentary setbacks even as you’re dashed on the same spike trap fifteen consecutive times. The post-level replay of all your attempts running at once, with that one successful Meat Boy powering through the dwindling pack, is just as cathartic in 3D as well.
Here’s an unexpected one from milsim specialists Bohemia Interactive: a Saturday morning cartoon of a space combat game, in which your chirpy AI-infused rocket van switches up its weapons and defensive tools by phasing through dimensions mid-flight.
It’s all intentionally light and bloodless – instead of exploding, enemy ships glitch out of the fight like malfunctioning holograms – and the gee-whiz dialogue is clearly written for young’uns, but the shoots of a decent casual action game are visible. The visual palette swaps for each dimension, in particular, are a nice touch. Swapping laser guns for rocket cannons requires shifting into a hyper-saturated otherworld, while time can be slowed with a trip to the “noir dimension”, appropriately rendered in moody black and white. It’s out in early access next year.
A chilled-out Metroidvania where you’re a Curiosity-style space rover, rolling around an exoplanet collecting funky bugs, and also your mind has been implanted from a deceased dog. This, and the fact that one of your wider objectives is to find and meet other pooch-brained rovers, had me briefly worrying that it might have a similar problem to A Storied Life: Tabitha in offering an unintentionally macabre take on grief. But, ultimately, Good Boy is more of a celebration of pets as they are, rather than how they were, with the still-barking dogs of Observer Interactive developers serving as inspiration for the rover cast. It’s got heart, this, and some brains too: tying progression into researching and upgrading your chassis means that the ability gating isn’t simply a matter of capturing the right insect.
Strangely, for a game whose Steam blurb declares that “teamwork is everything”, my demo of tactical roguelike FPS Rogue Point tasked me with clearing an oil rig of baddies all on my lonesome. Still, this did help ratchet up the tension, which I can easily imagine is tangible even with a squad of four – enemies are smart enough with flanking and grenades that you’re constantly stretched between corner-checking and the need to keep moving.
Since gathering intel pickups helps identify routes and secrets in subsequent runs, these also act as an all-too-tempting prize that both encourages and rewards risky manoeuvres beyond securing the key objectives. I don’t know if I have it in me to consistently endure eight missions of such stresses in a row, as per Rogue Point’s standard deployments, but I respect the deviousness of how it pushes and pulls you around its arenas.
Speaking of stress, here’s the ‘Nam-themed spinoff to infamously unforgiving WW2 shooter Hell Let Loose. What happens when that game’s vast 50 vs 50 multiplayer battles and near-instant deaths are transplanted to a time of automatic rifles and close air support? Terror, it turns out. I never actually got KIA’d but only because the constant cracking of near-miss shots so easily suppressed me back to the relative haven of a protective shed.
I’m always a bit sceptical of massive, dozens-per-side matches like this, which can feel like a game is merely happening around you. Even if you try to make a bigger impact than just taking potshots from a hut. But then, Hell Let Loose: Vietnam’s combined arms approach does allow for distinct roles, and the asymmetric quality intrigues. You’d think the Yanks, with their tanks and gunships, would have the edge, but I’m told Expression Games had to “nerf the tunnels” employed by the Viet Cong side as they were just too effective for surprise attacks. Which is something Lyndon B. Johnson never thought to do.
Not to downplay Team Ninja’s role in their own game, but watching director Masakazu Hirayama tear through Ninja Gaiden 4’s half-robot, half-demon wretches with hitherto-unflipped acrobatic flair made the influence of co-developers (and proven exaggeration enthusiasts) Platinum Games look clear as day.
As Masakazu explained to me via translator, Ninja Gaiden 4 is still about mastering a toolbox of sharp-edged ninja tools and using them to de-limb monsters. Given the 10 year gap since the last mainline game, though, there’ll be some optional concessions to newcomers, like automatic guarding and dodging toggles. Conversely, there’s also a Master Ninja mode for experts and/or masochists, with all aids permanently turned off and enemies programmed to swarm you in packs. Will it be all things to all ninjas? We’ll find out on October 21st.
We’re previously covered how this sci-fi citybuilder, in which your home base lies on top of a colossal space whale, looks to reject the colonial assumptions that similar strategy games take for granted. You only settle on planets your people had previously been displaced from, and taking too many liberties with your piscine host will see it push back in ways a non-sentient environment could not. It’s the latter that I found most interesting during my Gamescom demo, with the whale taking their polluting guests to task in what is essentially a series of disappointed cosmic DMs. You can respond with acceptance, defensiveness, or admissions of ignorance, and while our particular chat ended in an amicable agreement to do better, pissing off the whale is a very real risk. They may even start disregarding your navigational cues, dragging your civilisation off course.
I can see the appeal of Legacy of the Dark Knight: flowing Arkham-style punch-ups framed by comedy plastic remixes of Batman’s less terrible films. It needs some technical work, though. The punching is fine in a Baby’s First Brawler kind of way, but gliding and grappling around a brick-built Gotham City lacks the smoothness that Rocksteady had down to an art. And the Batmobile handling – I tried the Robert Pattinson model – feels awful, like trying to iron a shirt in front of an industrial electromagnet.
There are encouraging signs from Turok: Origins that it could be more than another weak reboot. Thwipping arrows into dinosaurs is a pretty timeless pleasure, and from what I’ve played, Saber do appear to be threading the needle of making a Native American/indigenous power fantasy without breaking out any obvious stereotypes. All the same, much of my demo played like a dozen other co-op FPS games already sitting in my Steam library, with so-so shooting – often against just regular dudes, sans the dinos – and basic, drama-deprived objectives. Bursts of excitement come from the Mantles, super-suits with more creative abilities and ultimates (like dumping a thousand hungry insects down an enemy’s pants), but again, class powers are hardly a novel concept.
I want to be upfront in saying that Hellraiser’s specific flavour of body horror, all flayed skin and impaled nipples, was and remains Not My Thing. It’s gross, as it is in Revival, but not strictly scary. Neither is the surprising emphasis on combat, be it pistol headshottery or the slower melee duels against knifey cultists. Now, being pursued through the stony Labyrinth by a teleporting Chatterer, for no better reason than he thought it’d be a laugh and that he knew I couldn’t do a thing about it? That’s scary. Hopefully these moments of genuine terror don’t get lost among the knife fights and squelchy stuff.
While Toxic Commando is plainly having another go at the ultra-dense horde shooter strategy that’s previously served World War Z and Space Marine 2, it also borrows from a far less predictable corner of Saber’s back catalogue: the weighty vehicular play of RoadCraft and MudRunner. And credit where it’s due, it works. Almost all of my favourite demo moments involved our crew’s adopted 4×4 in some way, shape, or form, from ploughing through zombie crowds to winching open supply caches as the reward for a herd well killed. By the end of the run, it really did feel like the fifth member of the team, and who would’ve expected that kind of genuine attachment in a love letter to meathead 80’s action flicks?
Stardew Valley meets polytheistic mythology. I appreciate how brisk Romestead feels – wood becomes buildings, and buildings become towns, at a clip that precludes extended spells of gathering sticks. And it’s the same story with its more adventurous side: the path from cutting down a few stray undead to fighting a giant demigod is remarkably short. The actual Roman gods get involved too, accepting prayers in exchange for boons, though I’d hope these get a bit more exciting further up the tech tree. New building types are nice but c’mon, Jupiter lad, you can do better than that.
“Roguelite strategy autobattler” combines three things I’m barely interested in typing out, let alone playing. Nonetheless, Flask showcased enough personality to make for a genuinely compelling demo, and not just because of its impressively revolting hand-drawn art.
You play as a heavily indebted alchemist, ordering homunculi into battle to harvest the valuable blood of slain monsters. Each homunculus (great word) can be equipped with five empowering flasks that they’ll chug on a timeline, with each bottle associated with a particular element. Stacking elements in a row will add more powerful effects, so there’s some tricky decision-making to do over whether to arrange your flasks by their direct effects or build around the element bonuses.
There’s also a neat asynchronous multiplayer element, where the game’s bosses essentially represent other players – you’ll fight their minions, complete with the flasks they last had equipped. There’s no cost if ‘your’ alchemist loses a fight in someone else’s game, but a nice, capitalistic leaderboard will keep track of who’s bringing home the most blood.
There’s a lot to say about Daimon Blades that doesn’t strictly pertain to what you do within it – the fact that this is Streum On Studio’s first game since regaining independence, for instance, or how it’s a distant prequel to sci-fi shooter E.Y.E.: Divine Cybermancy. All you really need to know, however, is this: you can be friends with the swords.
Moment to moment, Daimon Blades is a Darktide/Vermintide-style, first-person melee slasher, albeit one adopting a roguelike structure over fixed missions. At this, it seems fine, if perhaps a little overtuned towards some of the more blade-resistant enemy types. It’s the claymore relationship-building that I remain most curious about: each blade is possessed by a demon, who’ll grant bonuses for involving it in glorious bloodshed, or debuffs if you disappoint it by dying a lot. Maybe it’s just a twist on conventional weapon XP systems, but it sounds like a fun one.
Borne of loneliness during the Covid pandemic, The Lonesome Guild is a family-friendly ARPG about forging bonds first and slapping bad guys second. Party members, who are all introduced suffering their own version of enforced solitude, must be approached and chatted to before they can level up, so farming XP won’t do much good unless you can get them to open up around the campfire. The buddy system still plays into combat, mind, with opportunities for more powerful team-up specials between characters that increase as your friendship with them deepens.
It might look, and even sound, too much on the kiddywink side. But The Lonesome Guild’s battles do require some sound striking and dodging fundamentals, and because you can possess and control any of your pals at will (they’re cool with it, apparently), there’s a respectable dynamism even with the simplicity of individual character’s movesets.
I wouldn’t call the original Planet of Lana’s brevity a weakness, but Children of the Leaf is definitely looking to make everything bigger. Including the puzzles – you’re still juggling the human Lana and cat-monkey companion Mui more or less simultaneously, only now Mui can be directed almost anywhere on-screen, expanding the scale of this sequel’s button-pushing, wire-cutting conundrums. Some, including an underwater maze I had to navigate with both Lana and a Mui-hypnotised fish, span multiple screens.
With greater size comes greater complexity, and I’m a touch concerned that this could slow down the pace; another strength of the original, where you’d never get stuck on a solution for long. Still, I was never outright frustrated by the demo’s puzzles, and even if I was, at least I’d have another game’s worth of lovely, painterly background art to look at instead.
I don’t think Olden Era is specifically attempting to entice non-strategists, but as someone without a HoMM-playing bone in his body… I did not hate playing Olden Era. Besides the pure aesthetic qualities of its richly colourful overworld and elaborate fantasy battle animations, navigating its different strategic layers – exploring, recruiting, building and so on – proved comfortably frictionless.
I was still crap in fights, clearly being better suited as a peacetime faction lord, though the new Arena mode sounds like an agreeable way of getting some practice in: it lets you draft hodgepodge armies of units and magical artillery that you might be hours off unlocking in your main campaign. And I’m rarely against games including a ‘make action figures fight’ mode.
Check out our Gamescom 2025 event hub for all the PC game announcements and preview coverage from Cologne.
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Author: 360 Technology Group
