A great party game, albeit a test of how far a simple, clean premise can get you. There are a few modes, some co-operative, like the main adventure mode where you dodge enemies to bonk on the head of bosses, while others are more of a free-for-all. You use just the one joystick to play, as you may have guessed, as a Viking jumping on a trampoline. This one was created with one of the developers at D-Pad's little sisters in mind, originally dreamt up years ago when he was a teenager, so she could play it with just a single button. And its genuinely beautiful watercolour surroundings certainly help.Īn aggressively simple premise, but with sumptuous pixel art and personality behind it, from the team who made the brilliant Owlboy.

Maybe a touch on-the-nose, but a wonderfully direct and, undoubtedly, tranquil take on mindfulness-as-play. It's French like haute cuisine is French, art delivered via a formal, almost literal structure.

You play as a woman who returns to her grandmother's house after her death, and flash back to your childhood there, the aim being to explore the house and its surrounding area for words, sounds, and images, capturing them by literally clicking on emotive words like 'tranquillity,' nestled amongst some swaying trees on a woodland path, or snapping polaroids of picturesque scenery, or using a cassette recorder to capture the sounds of running water by a stream. Dordogne is a micro-developer indie, set in rural France, presumably at the soporific end of summertime. Music to the ears of hardcore RTS history nerds everywhere.įrenchness in a video game, this - meant in the best possible way. We saw enormous enemy charges mowed down because they were poorly thought-out, while strategic manoeuvres to cover progress with smoke and flank a dug-in opponent worked well. Petroglyph is shooting for realism, as you'd expect from the genre, with nice touches like real photography and music decorating the UI, and a massive suite of options for battle, from rolling smokescreens to undermining tunnels below enemy structures, to a heavy emphasis on trench warfare, visibility, and movement. This is all delivered in some typically impressive wrapping. This makes it a game of 'marginal victories,' as the developers put it to us, where it's as much about conserving resources - or draining your enemy's - as it is outright winning territory. It also comes with a nice twist: battles don't have to be outright won or lost, like a traditional RTS, but simply ended at the right time. You might've seen our takes on the more big-and-obvious fare, from demos of Creative Assembly's new thing Hyenas and Glen Schofield's Dead Space-alike The Callisto Protocol, to a nice chat with Sonic boss Takashi Iizuka and hands on with Sonic Frontiers, a bit of time with Obsidian's darkly brilliant Pentiment, and a look at Warhammer 40K: Darktide's meaty gunplay.īut! There are more games than just these big, obvious ones coming soon, and they very much deserve your attention, so here's a rundown of all the other clever, inventive, or just generally interesting curios that impressed us from the show.Ī realistic, First World War RTS, The Great War: Western Front's pitch may sound well-worn (and decidedly Gamescom), but it comes from a team with serious pedigree in Petroglyph, the developers of the original Star Wars: Empire at War and, much more recently, the very well-received Command and Conquer remake. Gamescom might've been subdued in terms of announcements - at least compared to previous years - but it's been quietly brilliant for unearthing interesting games.

Battle of isonzo