Today is the opening day of Gamescom, the Cologne expo that is now the biggest event in the video game calendar. This year, I am not among the 300,000-odd crowd descending on Germany, but I did watch the two-hour livestreamed opening-night broadcast yesterday – so you don’t have to. Here is all of the most interesting news, arranged by theme because I am deeply bored of writing straightforward lists of games and trailers.
News that will annoy Xbox fanboys the most
There was a new trailer for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Bethesda and MachineGames’s new first-person adventure, in which longtime video game actor Troy Baker seems charmingly thrilled to be playing Indiana Jones. It’ll be out on Xbox and PC on 9 December – but it was also announced that it will be coming to PlayStation 5 in spring 2025. Earlier this year, Xbox boss Phil Spencer went to great lengths to reassure Xbox fans that Indiana Jones would not be a multiplatform game, so I’m interested to see how this goes down.
Unexpected comebacks
Borderlands 4 is coming in 2025, announced by a trailer that showed us pretty much nothing. Presumably developer Gearbox was hoping to ride the hype from this month’s film, but alas, it’s not very good.
Peter Molyneux turned up to show a new, self-funded game called Masters of Albion, which has been kept very quiet (perhaps understandably, as several of his more recent games were high-profile disasters, and the latest, Legacy, is a web3/blockchain that sold £40m in NFTs in 2021 before going extremely quiet). This is a mashup of Molyneux’s greatest god-game hits: Fable, Black & White, and Dungeon Keeper. By day: build the town, design food, weapons and armour to nourish and equip your townspeople, and generally play god. By night: defend it against fantasy creatures by possessing your warrior subjects and swinging a club about.
Ten years since the first game, Monument Valley 3 is coming from Ustwo and Netflix, featuring the usual Escheresque puzzles and mesmerising colour palette. It’ll be out on 10 December, and the previous two games are also being rereleased via Netflix.
And the long-in-the-tooth Mafia series is getting a new entry from Brighton-based Hangar 14, called Mafia: The Old Country.
Debut games from nervous developers
King of Meat, a multiplayer Rick and Morty-style cartoonish gameshow colosseum game from Glowmade, will let players create intimidating gauntlets for other players to take on, like a cartoonish Takeshi’s Castle. There was also a new co-op action-adventure game that reminded me a little of Hi-Fi Rush, called Lynked: Banner of the Spark, from new studio FuzzyBot, in which you kill evil robots and save cute ones so that you can fuse them to your arm to give yourself combat powers.
Zombies and/or men with guns
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 was trotted out yet again ahead of its October release, showing a whole level from its single-player campaign, an overwhelmingly ridiculous cold war action romp. (The character’s analogue camera is treated with all the reverence of a gun, right down to the elaborate reload animations.) Techland is adding a new zombie game to the Dying Light series, The Beast, promising another 20 hours of open-world undead parkour action. You can shoot yet more zombies in the forthcoming eight-player co-op survival game, No More Room in Hell 2. And Arc Raiders, a co-operative survival shooter that was previously announced as a free-to-play game, will now be out in 2025, and will not be free to play.
Most overdue TV tie-in
A 100-player Squid Game tie-in from Netflix was the most obvious video game tie-in of the show – I’m surprised it took them this long. It’s a Fall Guys-esque cartoonish selection of sadistic challenges, and it looks really fun.
On the flipside, Deadpool director Tim Miller introduced his company Blur’s new Amazon Prime TV series, Secret Level, through choking sobs. It’s an anthology similar to Love, Death + Robots (also by Blur), described as a love letter to video games. It’ll be out in December.
Games I don’t understand, but which will probably sell millions of copies
Infinity Nikki, which promises to be “the cosiest open-world game”, looks totally baffling. It features a pink-haired anime girl and an array of weird-cute singing creatures, like a kawaii Noah’s Ark. I don’t know what to make of it.
And the forthcoming Dune MMO, Dune: Awakening, featuring hundreds of players exploring the desert planet of Arrakis competing for abandoned tech and sources of spice, got a huge reaction in the room.
For horror fans with taste
A trailer for a new game from the Little Nightmares guys at Tarsier looked super promising – it’s an intricate and intimate side-scrolling horror game called Reanimal. Meanwhile, Little Nightmares itself has been passed on to a new developer, Supermassive, with a long pedigree in horror. There was a trailer for that, too, retaining the Tim Burton-esque toy-like feel of the first two games.
Games that looked particularly cool
With its intimidatingly majestic creatures, extreme weather and expensive-looking production, Monster Hunter Wilds looks amazing. I’m a longtime fan of the series, and can’t wait for this new game – look out for an interview with its developers on the site soon.
There was a long preview of Civilization VII, the latest attempt to capture the messy entirety of human history on a computer monitor.
Meanwhile, Lost Records: Bloom & Rage features four kids hanging out in the summer of 1995, playing music in their garage and sharing their hopes for the future – but the future doesn’t turn out how they’d hoped.
Lastly, I will keep an eye on Herdling, expected in 2025. There’s a mild Last Guardian vibe to this game about a boy herding huge horned beasts about mountainous places.
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What to play
I have been looking forward to Tactical Breach Wizards for years: it’s the third part of the Defenestration Trilogy, a series of indie games about interesting ways to throw enemies out of windows, from the unfairly funny and talented developer Tom Francis. (Disclosure: I know Tom from back in the day when he was a games journalist.) In this turn-based subversive military tactics game, you play a bunch of misfit wizards whose general uselessness as humans is balanced out by very helpful powers, such as being able to see one second into the future or resurrect the dead.
Our reviewer Rick Lane was totally enamoured with it, writing that “its blend of ingeniously flexible puzzles and deliriously funny writing would be sufficient to clear it for active duty on anyone’s gaming device. But what qualifies it for the Special Arcane Service is how boldly it stares down the murky morality of military-themed games.”
Available on: PC
Approximate playtime: 15 hours
What to read
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The people behind Two Point Hospital and Two Point Campus have announced Two Point Museum, a cartoonish and humorous museum-management game in the spirit of the old Theme Park titles.
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Fulfilling the dreams of retro-game dads everywhere, collector Ibrahim Al-Nasser connected 444 consoles to a single TV, earning himself a hyper-specific Guinness World Record in the process. I dread to think what that HDMI switcher looks like.
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Video game actors have spoken to the BBC about being asked to perform sex scenes without warning – another problem caused by the prevalence of non-disclosure agreements in video game acting, which often prevents them from seeing a script until they arrive on set.
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The video games industry has finally been given its own Sunday Times rich list, which catalogues 30 of the UK’s wealthiest devs, YouTubers and other high earners. I enjoyed Garry’s Mod creator Garry Newman’s response on LinkedIn: “You know, success can be measured in various ways – units sold, positive feedback, or staff quality of life. Personally, I gauge my success by the amount of money I get.”
What to click
Question Block
Prompted by the recent release of the brilliantly funny Thank Goodness You’re Here!, reader Ant asks:
“Comedy as a video game genre is pretty poorly represented. I spent most of my childhood dreaming of a Red Dwarf-themed game, part point-and-click adventure (the true comedy genre if we have one), part space exploration game. What are your all-time favourite funniest games? And which classic British sitcom do you wish they’d translate to video game immortality?”
First, a moment of appreciation for TGYH’s brilliantly disgusting brand of Yorkshire comedy: I played it on holiday and thought it was brilliant. And upon finishing it, I had exactly the same thought. Very few games set out to be funny, and even fewer succeed. Plenty of games are witty, but they’ve rarely made me laugh out loud. Outside of the obvious point-and-click answers – Grim Fandango, Monkey Island – I thought South Park: The Stick of Truth was funnier than the show had been in years. Inept music game Trombone Champ is extremely amusing, as are absurdist sports games What the Golf? and What the Car? But my all-time fave is still Octodad: Dadliest Catch, which brought a uniquely game-y version of physical comedy to the table that left me unable to breathe for laughing. (Keep an eye on the forthcoming Baby Steps for more of that.)
And as for which British sitcom would translate well to a video game: tell me The Mighty Boosh wouldn’t work brilliantly as a bizarro point-and-click adventure. Ideally with plenty of rhythm-action sections for the songs.
If you’ve got a question for Question Block – or anything else to say about the newsletter – hit reply or email us on pushingbuttons@theguardian.com.