The Best Games We Played At Gamescom 2025

By Elijah Gonzalez | August 25, 2025 | 9:44am

Video Games Lists Gamescom

The Best Games We Played At Gamescom 2025

Gamescom was big this year. Well, technically speaking, it’s big every year; it takes place in the massive Koelnmesse convention center, where the event organizers challenge themselves to see just how many Germans they can cram into one location. But, on top of being large in terms of attendance, there was also a fittingly impressive lineup of games at the show. As the post-E3 era continues, Gamescom has been one of many conventions that has gained increased relevance in its place, becoming another spot for Keighley-sponsored hype. This year, there were big AAA publishers alongside an expansive lineup of smaller-scale titles concentrated in the Indie Arena, with hundreds of games waiting to be discovered.

While we certainly didn’t play everything at the show, after getting hands-on with dozens of upcoming projects, we’ve compiled a list of 10 games you should be particularly excited for.

Honorable Mentions: Kirby Air Riders, I Hate This Place, Cronos: The New Dawn, PUBG: Blindspot, Bubsy 4D

10. Monsters Are Coming! Rock & Road

Gamescom 2025

Even as someone who never fell down the Vampire Survivors rabbit hole, I can see the appeal of Monsters Are Coming! Rock & Road, a roguelike where you control an auto-attacking little guy who defends a walking fortress. There is a lot going on at once, but basically, you’re fighting off swarms of large spiders and other creepy crawlies trying to destroy your city, which slowly moves downwards towards its destination. Along the way, you make an alarming number of decisions about how to build your moving base, adding attachments that range from ordinance-flinging parapets to plots of land that will net you resources. My brief time with the game immediately communicated its appeal as I ran from one corner of the screen to the next, chopping down trees and destroying rocks that blocked my city’s path, while upgrading my playable character and battlements with branching synergies: I opted for a freeze-oriented build that slowed down my attackers, but it seems there’s a vast number of ways to handle things. With so much control over how a run goes, Monsters Are Coming! connects the brain-scratching pleasures of draft-oriented experiences, tower defense, and auto-attack games, a combination that threatens to consume your free time like a black hole (in a fun way).

9. Super Meat Boy 3D

As a 3D follow-up to a deservedly beloved precision platformer, I was initially skeptical about whether Super Meat Boy 3D could mimic the original’s speed and pinpoint accuracy while adding another dimension to the experience. Thankfully, from what little I played, I was pleasantly surprised. One core reason why this iteration seems to work is that it introduces certain simplifications compared to other 3D platformers, which let it maintain its speed without making your head hurt. Specifically, you can only move in eight directions to keep things guided, and it uses a fixed perspective to ensure you’re not wrestling with the camera while sprinting at Mach 1. Through this streamlined approach, they’re able to maintain the distinct pace of the original game without it being overwhelming; specifically, it recreates the tension of just barely clearing a spinning razor blade or situations where you time a perfect leap through obstacles by repeatedly wall jumping. There’s also an air dash now, making room for new types of diabolical challenges. In short, my sample of Super Meat Boy 3D translated this series and its breakneck platforming to a new dimension.

8. Prison of Husks

If you thought Bloodborne PSX was neat, Prison of Husks is the game for you. It’s a low-poly soulslike that, from what little I saw, nails everything about this setup. You play as a sentient doll looking for her girlfriend, who seems to be on the other side of sword-wielding ghosts and a labyrinthine castle. As for the specifics, it borrows elements from Bloodborne, with a high-speed dash step, and Sekiro, with an emphasis on landing parries in quick succession to power yourself up. Despite its throwback graphics, it was every bit as smooth as you’d want from a modern title, nailing the feel of dodging and deflecting strikes before going for a weighty sword slash. Another unique mechanic is that you start with an armor coating that absorbs three instances of incoming damage, which can be re-upped at save points or by performing parries. Through its enigmatic world and tight gameplay, Prison of Husks emulates old-school aesthetics while retaining a contemporary feel.

7. Pragmata

Pragmata is something of a rare breed in 2025; it’s a AAA video game that isn’t attached to an existing series. Luckily, what I played largely lived up to this untapped potential with some novel ideas. It’s a third person shooter where the main twist is that you have a small Android child strapped to your back who can hack the killer robots trying to murder you. While the hacking minigame itself is fairly straightforward—use the face buttons to move a cursor through a series of squares on a grid—what makes it interesting is that you have to multitask doing this while trying to avoid getting terminated. If you succeed, your mechanical foe will become stunned, dramatically decreasing their otherwise bulky defense so you can blast them with either a devastating low ammo shotgun or your rechargeable pistol. Once multiple murder bots start attacking you simultaneously, it becomes an exercise in managing time and physical space, as you utilize the stasis gun to freeze foes long enough to hack them and reduce them to scrap. It’s a cool twist, and while I’m less convinced regarding its inevitable “dad game” storytelling, where the seemingly generic protagonist tries to make it back to Earth from a deadly Moon base with his adopted robot child, the core loop here makes this one to look out for.

6. Metroid Prime 4: Beyond

You know how the Metroid Prime games tend to be about patiently working through solitary environments and age-old ruins that haven’t been seen by a sentient soul for eons, frequently casting Samus as an archeologist as much as a warrior? What if instead, the latest one opened with the kind of pitched battle more likely to star the Master Chief than our orange bounty hunter? In Beyond’s intro, Space Pirates battle an army of Galactic Federation soldiers, as mechs blast drop ships and Samus weaves through a dogfight to land planetside. While it sounds like the opposite of what many series veterans likely want, the bright side was that this demo was a trigger-happy good time.

One problem with the Metroid Prime series is that its shootouts often felt a bit uninteresting, at least in the first two entries, because of how powerful your visor lock was. Here, Retro Studios finds a clever solution to that problem: there are certain enemies that you can lock onto, but require you to manually adjust your aim to hit weak points. It also certainly helped that this free-aiming used the first solid implementation of the Switch 2’s pseudo-mouse functionality I’ve seen so far. Add in other cool touches like needing to use the morph ball and a dedicated dodge to avoid incoming attacks, and the game’s systems could very much handle this more action-oriented direction. I don’t doubt that the pace of the experience will settle down significantly after this bombastic introduction (which is most likely for the better), but the upside is that Metroid Prime 4 seems quite capable of delivering high-octane thrills as well.

5. Fractured Blooms

Combining psychological horror with the grounded qualities of a cozy game, Fractured Bloom is a tense narrative-focused experience about repeating the same day and chores over and over. You play as a teenage girl who has to farm, cook, and clean, presumably for her perpetually out-of-view parents. Her narration guides the player through an introduction that is vaguely eerie but not outright frightening. However, as this day begins to loop, details start to change as the world becomes darker and more delirious. The initial warning signs of inexplicable footsteps and doors opening and closing on their own eventually become positively mundane compared to the glitches in reality and crimson vines that begin to entangle this house. Most impressively, it manages to imbue low-key chores with an edge of anxiety, as you attempt to complete these tasks before something gets you. If that wasn’t bad enough, if you take too long to finish your duties, this will eat at your sleep and thus your stamina for the next day, affecting how many actions you can perform. It all comes together in an uncomfortable portrait of mental health issues and implicit familial abuse that puts you in the headspace of someone who feels the walls of their life closing in on them. The small chunk I saw of Fractured Blooms makes it seem like it learned important lessons from classics like P.T. and Silent Hill.

4. Esoteric Ebb

After ZA/UM fractured into a million pieces, there’s a whole wave of Disco Elysium-inspired titles from different factions that worked on the original. While Esoteric Ebb isn’t part of this diaspora, you’d be forgiven for making that assumption given how closely it sticks to that game’s general structure. As if based on the same tabletop ruleset, this CRPG is also based almost around dialogue decisions presented on the right side of the screen, where your stat proficiencies are personified as internal dialogue. Of course, the big difference in this case is that it’s set in a high fantasy setting instead of the Soviet bloc-spoofing Revachol.

You play as an amnesiac Cleric attempting to unravel a political conspiracy in a dense world where workers’ movements, religious orders, and Fantasy Stuff collect in a melting pot. Visually, the art style has a distinct, colorful look, and the music intentionally separates itself from the typical orchestral fare you’d associate with orcs and elves, instead opting for melancholy synths. Perhaps most importantly, its dialogue left a mark, conveying a mostly hilarious and occasionally somber tone that has me hopeful this one has the writing chops needed to make this style of narrative-focused CRPG work. Disco may be dead, but this Cleric is ready to party.

3. Onimusha: Way of the Sword

Hey, it’s been quite a bit since a new Onimusha game came out—two whole decades, pretty much. And while I’ll admit that I have little to no previous experience with this series, thankfully Onimusha: Way of the Sword left a great first impression. If I had to describe its sword-wielding action I would use the word “grounded,” which is a weird thing to say in a game about fighting demons and disembodied yokai heads. As far as combat goes, you press square (on a PlayStation controller) to do a one armed horizontal slash, triangle to do a vertical two armed strike, R1 to block or parry, and circle to dodge. In a world where dedicated action games are frequently either described as either “like Dark Souls” or akin to a character action game (i.e, the old God of War games, the 3D Ninja Gaidens, Bayonetta, etc.), this version of Onimusha is neither, although you can see some elements of both.

It uses a Sekiro-style poise system where you and your enemies have health and posture meters, and when this second bar is broken, your foes are opened up for a finishing strike. There’s a fairly slow cadence to these battles, which are clearly going after a pace inspired more by Akira Kurosawa films than most other games (something doubly felt because the game’s main character, Miyamoto Musashi, shares the likeness of Kurosawa collaborator Toshiro Mifune). For example, if you button mash, there’s a decent chance that your adversary will side step your sloppy swipe and slash you in the back. Each hit has weight, and it’s very satisfying when you land a finishing blow, slicing your target along whichever axis your sword struck them. The demo climaxed in a great boss fight that showed off how repeated parries put Musashi into a slightly powered up state that makes his sword glow blue—I honestly wasn’t even completely sure what this did, but it felt good to have a visual acknowledgement of being in a flow. On top of these parries being intrinsically satisfying to pull off, as your sword brushes aside the incoming blade, they can also be done regardless of which direction you’re facing, making fights with multiple enemies quite manageable. I wasn’t necessarily sure what to expect from this one, but I came away hoping for more Miyamoto Musashi in my future.

2. Towa and the Guardians of the Sacred Tree

Games trying to imitate Hades‘ lightning fast combat have their work cut out for them, but Towa and the Guardians of the Sacred Tree seems to meet that challenge. Here, you choose two characters out of a sizable lineup as you pass through a procession of randomized combat arenas in the hopes of reaching the end and saving Shinju village. Just like in Hades, you choose which path to follow after each fight, giving you influence over which boon you’ll earn after the next battle. And while it’s also an isometric action game based around a dash, it has lots of unique nuances that make it seem like its own high-skill ceiling action game.

As previously mentioned, you control a duo, with one acting as the lead who can slash and dash, and the other handling support duties with a pair of spells on cooldown. Where things get particularly frantic is that you can actually manually control your second character with the right stick, which matters because they can also take damage—you don’t have to take manual control because they’ll move on their own, but positioning may matter in certain circumstances. On top of this interesting mechanic that adds a lot of potential complexity, each playable character has different movesets with their own systems. The combatant I played, Towa, comes with an involved stance switch mechanic where she needs to basically “reload” her swords by switching between two blades with different attack types, one of which leaves a lingering whirlwind on screen even after you’ve gone back to the other blade. Strikes and dashes are just as snappy as you’d like them to be, which combines nicely with the previously mentioned specifics. It’s all further sold by punchy animation and a beautiful art style that taps into Japanese mythology. The best roguelikes give ample room to improve your skills, and Towa’s dense systems seem like they will give much to master.

1. Hollow Knight: Silksong

The internet tends to beat dead horses until they’re unrecognizable piles of goo, but even by those standards, the jokes around Hollow Knight: Silksong’s development cycle have been a lot. While I’m not sure any game could live up to that degree of delirious, frothing-at-the-mouth hype, what I played of this long-gestating sequel certainly lives up to my personal expectations: more Hollow Knight. Considering that Team Cherry’s previous game is arguably the best Metroid-inspired game since some of the classics that pioneered the space, that’s something I say as the highest praise. This time, you play as Hornet, who is more than just a palette swap from her diminutive predecessor, coming across as far more nimble and acrobatic. You can hold her dash to break into a run, which can then transition into a high speed jump that covers a great deal of horizontal distance. She also has a dive kick-styled aerial attack that lets her bounce on enemies alongside a loadout of equippable tools, which in my case were kunai and a long distance stab attack. The result is a more agile experience that will likely give you quite a bit of airtime. This was best felt in a sharp boss fight against a fencing-themed bug, whom I dive kicked, aerial bounced, hit with projectiles, and did everything else I could to avoid a fair, grounded duel.

Outside of this battle, as far as its atmosphere goes, this appears very much to be a return to the first game’s melancholy setting. In a wordless intro, Hornet escaped captivity and began exploring a mossy, seemingly abandoned underworld. While it was hard to get a read on how Silksong will measure up to the previous game’s biggest boon, its ingeniously designed world (there’s only so much you can see in a 15 minute demo), my brief look at the game has maintained my high hopes.

Elijah Gonzalez is an associate editor for Endless Mode. In addition to playing the latest, he also loves anime, movies, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.