We've spent the last couple days in Cologne at GamesCom to browse some merch booths and play a couple games here and there, so I forgor 💀 to make a post in time.

I walked past Valor Mortis in the Indie Area, but I didn't clock that it's this upcoming first-person soulslike, so I didn't give it a try. I've got the demo downloaded, though, so I will give it a shot soon and might give a review here.

I've actually not managed to play a lot of games this year, but my standout would probably be 1001 Threads of Mizan. It's a 3-person cooperative third-person action-adventure game with focus on combat in huge open areas and against giant bosses. It felt a little like a mix between an RPG with the three characters having distinct moves and roles sorta, Monster Hunter in that you fight against one giant enemy cooperatively, and maybe sorta a little bit of soulslike mixed in there? Though the latter is in big quotation marks since it's just a dodge and a parry that reminded me of it. The standout feature, next to the Arabia-inspired setting, is the seamless integration of a flying carpet mount that you use in the fights as well for traversal and combat. Felt really cool to play. Definitely some Shadow of the Colossus vibes in there too.

Also not a soulslike, but Qwick is really really awesome. It's a small indie game based in Austria that came to be of an internal gamejam students at TU Graz that has you speedrun through levels as a little candle that must not melt by the end of the level. It's very charming and the dev we talked to was really excited that we scoured them out to give the game a shot given it's very small and barely advertised outside a bit of short-form videos on TikTok et al.

Have any of you been to GamesCom this year? What was your highlight?

Edit: Oh, and we also got these: