This week, RPS took the downright heroic step of declining to live report on the latest Geoff Keighley trailer bonanza at Gamescom 2026‘s Opening Night Live. Under the wise guidance of editor-in-chief Julian “Walks Away From Omelas” Benson – and with the honourable exception of Oisin “Looking At Omelas Through A Telescope” Kuhnke, who was on regular evening freelance newswriting duty – we experimented with viewing the showcase as you ordinary humans do, partly because we’ve recently found that the returns aren’t worth the effort of staying at our desks. Some of us may have even streamed the showcase in bed! Like wild beasts!
Personally, I wondered if removing the pressure to churn out copy might improve my opinion of the millionaire charisma vortex that is the Keighley vision for videogames. Perhaps I’ll grasp the spirit of Keighleymas if I’m actually watching those trailers with both eyes, I speculated. Sadly, it was not to be, and it seems, I’m not alone in that feeling. Here’s Julian with the first entry in our list of standout Gamescom 2026 announcements.
Julian: We went into Opening Night Live planning to write this round up so we were all watching with an eye out for a game we’d like to celebrate. An hour into the show I was worried there’d be nothing I wanted to shout about. Then, thankfully, there were trailers for No Law and Lego Skylines.
Still, it’s hard to shout about those trailers.
This year really showed the weakness of a big trailer blitz. Lego looks colourful and lovely, but 42 seconds is barely a glimpse of a game. No Law was longer and looks to be a varied immersive sim. But immersive sims in montage leave out the most important bit: planning. It’s not enough to have lots of tools in your toolbox,.you need to be able to analyse a situation and plan your approach. I’ll be playing both games here at Gamescom, so I should have a fuller look at each game to share soon.
Geofffest and his ilk charge enormous amounts for blocks of brief seconds in their shows, putting great emphasis on short, vibes based trailers from publishers that have cash to splash. For many games, that’s not a useful way to meet them, nor a sensible option when budgets are slim. It can leave a show like last night’s feeling insubstantial, and suggest that next year doesn’t have much going for it. But that’s just not true.
After all, in 2027, we’re getting Duskers 2.
James: Slim pickings, weren’t it? Even amid a string of underwhelming Geoffcasts, this one was poor: a lovelessly fired-off barrage of samey swordfighters and likely doomed online shooters that managed to feel impatient and overlong at once.
I do, at least, like the look (and sound) of Lofsöng. The debut, self-published project from Italian devs Unreleated Studio, it’s an “art-driven” puzzle adventure in which words no longer exist – presumably killed off by games media writers so they won’t have to cover another Opening Light Live – thus leaving you to figure out the secrets of our deceased planet through sight and sound.
The proof’s in the puzzling, but the ones shown so far have an intriguingly geometry-focused vibe, and I’ve had a soft spot for being the lone lifeform on an otherwise barren planet ever since Exo One.
Oisin: An action game? That isn’t a roguelike? Egads! Eureka! A third one of those beginning with E! Plain in name but not in appearance, Murals certainly caught my eye with its painterly look and vivid colour work. It’s from the team behind Disney’s Illusion Island and the more recent Battletoads, so there should be a suitable amount of juice to be found here.
Murals is one of those “twists on classic fairytales,” kind of games that can often be a touch rote, so I’m hoping it offers enough to back that choice up. Still, the rule of thumb for me is, if it’s pretty, you’re already doing something more interesting than most other games.
Which kind of says something about Mr. IMAX Jr.’s whole shtick, ‘ey? A whole two hours of video games and nary a pop of something genuinely different, only the likes of a “new IP” that’s actually just a PUBG spin-off that can only seem to find an identity in a sense of nostalgia most people don’t really have, HoyoVerse hoping that no one will notice how closely it copied FromSoftware’s homework, and even more remakes that nobody asked for. I’d play Lego Skylines though.
Mark: Echoing the sentiments of some of my colleagues above, this year’s Opening Night Live ended up being headlined by the already announced DLC for a decade-old RPG that I’d assumed would make up one of the bigger sections, but likely cede the coveted show closing spot to something brand new. Of the fresh announcements (well, sort of, it did leak beforehand), Paradox’s foray into post-apocalyptic grand strategy – Afterworld – was the one which piqued my interest most. The chance to build up a tribe and blend old world tech with a new vision for a destroyed world tickles both the Fallout and Crusader Kings-loving bits of my brain.
The vibes of the debut trailer might have been a bit more Mad Max-ish and game director Dan Lind might have pegged Afterworld as being loosely closest to Stellaris in terms of Paradox’s established strategy series, but none of that has blunted my interest. Give me an American wasteland to try and spread my flag across via war or more likely weaselish alliance-making, as I also try to avoid having my entire clan wiped out because the water source in the bunker’s gone bad or nasty weather’s scattered their food rations to the winds.
Lego Skylines also looks like a good time, and, despite neither having knocked my socks off thus far, I think I’ve started talking myself into trying Wizards of the Coast’s Exodus and Warlock when they arrive next year.
Jeremy: I thought everything pretty much looked the same, as I always do during these big gaming shows. (I miss the halcyon days of E3, when stuff looked different! Or is that my memory just playing tricks on me…) The Witcher trailers were cool though, and Warlock looked better than I imagined.
However, as someone who has run numerous D&D campaigns for Warlock players, I gotta say that was some wildly un-Warlock-like behaviour on screen. How many spell slots did she use up within those eight minutes? Why wasn’t she just Eldritch Blasting her way through everything? Running away from the Beholder was the most realistic part!
Anyway, the fact that this game is apparently sent in Ravenloft’s Darkon with Tasha serving as your patron intrigues me as a tabletop gaming nerd. Though I do think I’d rather see a game simply titled Ranger that’s all about Drizzt Do’Urden sniping giants from afar with a crossbow.
Edwin: Hmmm! Harumph! Well, I thought Ontos looked good, because it’s Frictional doing a Shining on the Moon, though I’m a little bothered by the departure in the direction of talky philosophical puzzling. I’ve never been that convinced by Frictional’s dialogue writing, much as I enjoy their lore. In any case, that’s not a new announcement. Nor is Playdeady sonic puzzlebox Lofsöng, which James has already covered, or Pony Island 2: Panda Circus, the “phantasmagorical voyage through time, myth, divinity, and video games” from Inscryption creator Daniel Mullins.
Of the Actual New Things, I’ll echo Mark and Julian’s guarded enthusiasm for Afterworld, if only because it’s a chance to get in early with an emerging Paradox grand strategy series, after years of pawing at the ramparts of Europa Universalis. I can see Exodus being a fun time if it manages the feat of courting comparison with Mass Effect while striking out on its own trajectory – I thought the octopus-in-a-mech reveal was promising. I also thought Metro 2039 had pretty amazing outdoors lighting – they’ve managed to bottle a very specific grade of wintry haze.
But yeah! I wouldn’t say I was seriously excited about anything, and any curiosity I felt was flattened by the ambience and curation of the show as a whole – a narrow and self-congratulatory deluge of guns, swords, gacha, genre fantasy and cyberpunk. I do think gaming benefits from having a few tentpole “festivals”, but developers and players deserve much better than this one. Still, at least I got to watch it all in bed.
