When I was mentally listing blog post topics last week I thought for sure that Gamescom Opening Night Live would be easy blog fodder. I’d just embed a bunch of trailers with a minimum amount of text and be done with it. Then I watched and y’know, I don’t think I’m going to do that. First because honestly there weren’t that many trailers that got me super excited on their own, and second because anyone can just go to YouTube and find trailers themselves.

I did, against all odds, actually take notes while I was watching so I think I’m just going to transcribe those to share the things that caught my attention. (By the time I finished watching the show it was almost 10 PM and that has helped me decide to abbreviate things somewhat!) Assuming I can find it, I’ll end with a trailer for the one game I’m most excited about. Hint: It wasn’t even in the main show, it was in the pre-show!

So basically in no other order than “this is what order stuff came up in the show” here’s what I jotted down.

We Harvest Shadows is some kind of horror themed farming game being created by a single dev, who calls it an “anti-cozy” game. He said during the pandemic Animal Crossing was a great way to remain sane but then he wanted to make a game that kind of twisted that. There’s a demo on Steam that I intend to check out at some point. I am just intrigued by ‘anti-cozy’.

Path of Exile 2 hits Early Access on November 15th.

Dune Awakening is coming to PC in 2025. It looks like it’ll be a great game if you’re one of those people who has a guild-full of friends, but to me it looked far too group oriented to be of much interest for me to play. It might be the kind of game I’d watch streams of, though. Also I wonder how varied the biomes will be cuz, y’know, desert planet.

Genshin Impact is coming to Xbox on November 20th. Always glad to see games stop being console exclusives. Hoping it does well enough that Hoyoverse brings Honkai Star Rail and Zenless Zone Zero to Xbox as well.

Bethesda has added a vehicle, the Rev-8, to Starfield as of last night. I haven’t had time to try it out yet. Also the expansion, Shattered Space, is due out on September 30th.

Secret Level is not a game, but an anthology series based on a bunch of games and coming from the folks who did Love, Death and Robots on Netflix. Secret Level hits Amazon Prime on December 10th and I’m really looking forward to it. Aww heck, I guess we can squeeze in a trailer for this.

Peter Molyneux is back. He’s older and who knows, maybe a little humbler? He’s working on a godgame called Masters of Albion that takes a bit of Black & White, a bit of Fable and a bit of Dungeon Keeper and mixes them together in a game where you build up your city by day and by night have to defend it against monsters. The day part seems to be all in ‘god mode’ but at night you can possess a fighter and go fight in 3rd person, or zoom out to smite enemies in god mode. We’ll see. He at least wasn’t promising that this will be the ultimate game of all time. Maybe with age comes wisdom.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle launches on Xbox and PC on December 9th and Microsoft has announced that it’ll be coming to PS5 in spring 2025. If you haven’t taken your cynic pill yet today you might entertain the possibility that they were planning for it to be an Xbox exclusive then changed their minds (since MS is so pushing the “Play Anywhere” mantra) but since the PS5 version started late it’ll come out a little later. I just think a deliberate “timed exclusive” of just a few months doesn’t do anyone any good, so I’m going to choose to believe this is the team playing catch up after changing course to make the game non-exclusive. Call me naive if you will.

And yeah, those are my notes which isn’t a lot from 2.5 hours of show (30 minute pre-show, 2 hour main show). Not saying there weren’t a ton of games shown but so many of them I just felt like I did with Masters of Albion: we’ll see. I’ve mentioned before that I’m becoming a little less susceptible to hype in my old age. My gamertag used to be “Jaded” and I’m starting to think I should have kept it.

OK now for my personal Game of the Show. You who have stuck with me during the years of once-a-month recaps know I was obsessed with Snowrunner for a long time, but I always thought “This game would be so much better if you could choose to repair the roads that you’re going to be using over and over…it’s crazy knowing you’re going to have to make a dozen trips and just dealing with the huge mud holes and stuff every time. Let us lay down bridges or whatever wherever we like!”

Well RoadCraft, from the Saber Interactive who made Snowrunner looks like EXACTLY that game and I can not wait to play it! Here’s the trailer which is pretty much all I know about the game.

This of course is just the opening night of Gamescom so I’m sure we’ll get a lot more gaming news over the next few days, so maybe I’ll have another post about it later in the week. Oh and if you want to watch the whole show, it is of course available on YouTube!