Gamescom 2023: all the biggest news, previews and reveals as they happen
Gamescom 2023 is underway, and it’s already proving to be another action-packed week for gamers who have arrived in Cologne. With over 1200 exhibitors here, there are a massive number of games to check out.
NME is currently on the ground at Gamescom, which means we’re rushing to see as much of this year’s convention as possible. Whether you’re watching the event from home or trying to get your hands on as many games as possible in the event hall, you can use this article to make sure you’re caught up on everything happening in the Koelnmesse.
From each Opening Night Live trailer to everything we get our hands on at the show floor, we’ll be updating this article with everything going on at Gamescom this year – check it out below.
August 22: Gamescom 2023 kicks off with Opening Night Live
Geoff Keighley welcomed Gamescom attendees to Opening Night Live, which was packed with new trailers and announcements for upcoming games. This includes the reveal that Supermassive Games is developing Little Nightmares 3, while Tripwire Interactive revealed that gory shooter Killing Floor 3 is in the works.
We also got to see Ice-T cast in Payday 3, the world premiere for Tekken 8, and a reveal trailer for gritty sci-fi fantasy The First Descendants.
We could spend the rest of the blog talking about Opening Night Live, but instead here’s a roundup of every trailer and announcement from Gamescom Opening Night Live 2023.
Dustborn is a Marvel-tinged road trip
Our day kicked off with a hands-off demo for Dustborn, a road trip set across the remains of the United States after a “disinformation apocalypse” destroyed the country. It picks up with four super-powered misfits speeding away from a heist gone wrong, and soon sends them on a drive across North America’s remnants posing as a punk-rock band called the Dustborn.
Within half an hour, we’d fallen in love with these foul-mouthed crooks. We’ll have to wait until 2024 to spend longer with this, but the reveal trailer can be seen below.
Cosy train puzzle game Station To Station is coming out this year
Tucked away in the bustle of Gamescom’s hallways, it was a delight to sit down for a relaxing half-hour with Station To Station. A cosy puzzle game with gorgeous voxel art, Station To Station tasks you with bringing environments to life by building train stations across the world.
Cheeseries need to be connected to dairy farms to get working, while cities will require various resources to “solve” each puzzle. But the journey beats the destination, and we could have spent hours developing the game’s small slices of paradise.
Check Station To Station out on Steam, ahead of its full launch on October 3.
Persona 5 Tactica is a stylish shot of strategy
We’ve spent the last year stuck into the last three mainline Persona games since Atlus released a slew of ports, so checking out strategy spin-off Persona 5 Tactica felt essential.
Tactica takes the characters, charm and style of Persona 5, and drops it into a Mario + Rabbids-style turn-based blast. Combat is simple to grasp, yet an emphasis on cover and positioning suggests it may be deceptively intricate. We’re going to have a full article on our Persona 5 Tactica hands-on soon, so stay tuned.
Stalker 2: Heart Of Chornobyl is brutal
The award for “most deaths at Gamescom 2023” goes to Stalker 2: Heart Of Chornobyl, which wasted no time in killing us repeatedly. We guessed this post-apocalyptic shooter would be tough when its hands-on started with a mutated dog making lunch of our leg, but were still taken by surprise by its difficulty.
Though our preview was fairly short, Stalker 2 has the same unforgiving gunplay as Shadow Of Chornobyl, GSC Game World‘s first foray into the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone. Guns are awkward to pay, but you only need to be accurate (or lucky) once to leave an enemy down and out. Like Persona, we’ll be visiting Stalker 2 in more depth soon, so keep an eye on NME Gaming for more.
We’ll be updating this page with all of our highlights from Gamescom 2023 – check back here each day for more!
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Andy Brown
NME
