Cologne – a city with one of the mightiest, most impressive cathedrals in all of Christendom. And, as it happens, one of the largest, most impressive gatherings in gaming.
It’s called Gamescom, and it brings together thousands of developers, fans, and roving journalists for a few days of, well… games.
previews. parties. To play. That kind of thing. This year’s, the first to be held in real life since the pandemic began, drew to a close this past weekend.
It’s all getting a bit fuzzy, but I think I’ve spent time on about three to four dozen upcoming releases, of varying degrees of completeness.
Sure, a scrapped half-hour with an unfinished game isn’t exactly scientific terms, but it’s enough to form first impressions—both good and bad.
Cologne – a city with one of the mightiest, most impressive cathedrals in all of Christendom. And, as it happens, one of the largest, most impressive gatherings in gaming. It’s called Gamescom, and it brings together thousands of developers, fans, and roving journalists for a few days of, well… games
Let’s stick to the good. Really, all I needed to be told about Moonbreaker was that it came from the people who made the underwater survival game Subnautica, but there was more.
It is set in a new sci-fi universe dreamed up by Brandon Sanderson, one of the great stars of genre writing.
It’s all about moving your party of space villains around like they’re pieces on a tabletop, to the extent that they actually look like pieces on a tabletop.
You can even “paint” them within the game if you like. And above all, it’s fun; with much more fun to come.
Moonbreaker’s driving force, Charlie Cleveland, tells me, “Ideally, we want to make this game for decades.”
In any case, the year zero will soon begin, because the game is scheduled to go into Early Access in September on the PC gaming platform Steam.
It almost goes without saying that games based on the Alien movies are either masterpieces or disasters.
From what I’ve seen, Aliens: Dark Descent, due for release in early 2023, could well be on the right end of that spectrum.
Like Moonbreaker, it offers a top-down view of sci-fi action as you carefully position your little soldiers on large industrial landscapes.
But as the name suggests, it’s darker overall. This is a war of attrition: you face off against hundreds of drooling monsters in the shadows.
There were also many smaller games to watch.
News Tower is the one I remember best. It’s a management sim in the spirit of, say, Theme Park or the recent Two Point games.
Sure, a scrapped half-hour with an unfinished game isn’t exactly scientific terms, but it’s enough to form first impressions—both good and bad
It’s all getting a bit fuzzy, but I think I’ve spent time on about three to four dozen upcoming releases, of varying degrees of completeness
But what you manage in this case is a newspaper in Depression-era America.
You can build a delightfully animated office building, but you can also play the worst kind of person in the world – an editor – and make stories on the front pages.
I plan on rushing to live out my most kinky fantasies once it hits Early Access.
Village Romance is a game that already exists – on PCs.
Gamescom’s most impressive moment happened elsewhere; in a single, graceful swoop from the skies of America to the ground, where the developer demonstrating Railway Empire 2 proceeded to lay a route between two frontier cities
Although we learned at Gamescom that it will soon be released on the console that best suits its brand of gameplay: Nintendo’s Switch.
I spent a good 20 minutes holding it in my palms, dropping tile after tile to create beautiful, rural landscapes.
No other game at the conference was as immersive and made the sweaty hustle and bustle around me just melt away.
But the most impressive moment of Gamescom happened elsewhere; in a single, graceful swoop from the skies of America to the ground, where the developer demonstrating Railway Empire 2 proceeded to lay a route between two frontier cities.
Then we flew back to the canyons of Colorado to examine the fruits of our endeavor. Rush! And indeed, chu-choo!
So I ended up falling in love with a giant train set that’s on sale next year.
I’m very cool, as they say in Cologne. Very cool.
