There is a LOT of Gamescom footage flowing into YouTube and I, dear reader, are burdened with the need to spend my days working, so I didn’t get time to watch much of it. I wound up picking the Xbox feed since I’m pretty pro-Xbox in general. From that 2.5 hours of footage I’ve plucked two very different games that caught my interest.

The first is kind of a cute skiing game called Lonely Mountain: Snow Riders. This team’s first (?) game was Lonely Mountain: Downhill and it was about riding a bike down a mountain. I played it and it was OK but it happened to come out somewhere around the time Descenders came out, which was also about riding a bike down a hill. Riding a bike down a hill is a bouncy frantic activity though and neither game really grabbed me. (Those are all Steam links since I know most of my readers are Steam users rather than Xbox users.)

But I always enjoy chill skiing games like Ubisoft’s Steep. Snow Riders didn’t get much more than a gameplay trailer with commentary but I kind of fell in love with it:

It just looks so mellow and relaxing, doesn’t it?

Switching gears in a pretty radical way, the other game that really caught my eye is Atomfall. (I think this might have been on Opening Night Live but until I saw a longer look at it, it didn’t make too much of an impression.) This is a kind of sci-fi/folk horror game that is trying to capture the vibe of British sci-fi from the 1950s and 1960 like Quatermass and early Doctor Who. In it, a region in northern England is quarantined after a nuclear power plant catches fire. Five years later the region is still quarantined and no one really knows why, but the folks living there are really having to scrape by. Who YOU are is a mystery that you’re trying to solve. You play in first person and the game gives you no clues as to who you might be. It seems a bit rpg, a bit action-adventure. Combat is a mix of melee and guns, though ammo is very rare. There’s a lot of scrounging for materials for crafting, but it seemed more like The Last of Us crafting (ie making molotov cocktails and other smaller items) than say Fallout crafting where you’re making entire guns and armor and so forth. In addition to combat there seems to be a significant amount of puzzling and mystery solving.

Anyway here’s the trailer:

And here’s yesterday’s Xbox Gamescom stream all queued up to the Atomfall segment, it’s about 20 minutes long:

That’s not all that looked interesting, of course, but these were both new to me and each caught my interest in a different way. There was also a lot of content about Diablo IV, Starfield and some new games as well. And while I admit I fast forwarded through it, they devoted a good chunk of time to new accessibility peripherals. Not a bad first day for Xbox, but like I said, there’s a lot of other content from the show to be found if search YouTube for Gamescom.

Not sure I’ll do this kind of post every night of Gamescom… I’m really starting to run low on spoons this week. But we’ll see; tomorrow Xbox is talking about Fallout 76 (and of course lots more).