What We’ve Played at Gamescom, Day One: Hollow Knight: Silksong, Metroid Prime 4, and More

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 another sentient soul for eons, frequently casting Samus as a sort of archeologist as much as a warrior? What if instead, the latest one opened with the kind of pitched battle more likely to involve the Master Chief than the galaxy’s most well-known bounty hunter. In Beyond’s intro, Space Pirates battle an army of Galactic Federation soldiers, as mechs laser blast drop ships and Samus weaves through a dogfight to land planetside. It’s not exactly what you associate with Metroid, and while it sounds like the opposite of what many series veterans likely want, the bright side is that this demo was admittedly a very good time. One problem with the Metroid Prime games is that shootouts often felt a bit uninteresting, at least in the first two, because of how powerful lock on is, but here they find clever solutions to that problem: there are certain enemies that can be locked on to, but require you to manually adjust your target to hit weak points. It certainly also helped that the game utilized the first really good implementation of the Switch 2’s pseudo-mouse function I’ve seen so far. Add in some other cool touches like needing to use the morph ball and a dedicated dodge to avoid incoming attacks, and the game’s mechanics could very much handle this more action-oriented direction. I don’t doubt that things will settle down significantly after this bombastic introduction (which is most likely for the better), but the upside is that it seems Metroid Prime 4 very much delivers in this high octane mode as well.

Pragmata

As a AAA video game that isn’t attached to an existing series, Pragmata is a rare breed in 2025. And luckily what I played largely lived up to this untapped potential with some relatively 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 killer robots that are 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 at hacking, 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 sure about its inevitable “dad game” storytelling, as the seemingly generic protagonist tries to make it back to Earth from this deadly Moon base with his adopted robot child, the core loop here makes it one to look out for.

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 floating 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 “like Dark Souls” or as a character action game (think 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. There’s 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 open 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 other games (something doubly felt because the game’s main character, Miyamoto Musashi, shares the likeness of frequent Kurosawa collaborator Toshiro Mifune). A good example of this is that if you button mash there’s a decent chance that your adversary will side step you and land a slash to your 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. On top of these parries being intrinsically satisfying to pull off, as your sword brushes aside the incoming blade, they also can 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 there will be more Miyamoto Musashi in my future. 

Resident Evil: Requiem

I’m disappointed to say that despite Resident Evil: Requiem being one of the games I was most excited to check out going into the show, the short 20-ish minute demo I played has me more concerned than sold on the next installment in the series. Playing as Grace, a cop who has been kidnapped as a seeming test subject for another hairbrained nightmare virus, you creep through some very PT looking hallways to find a collection of objects needed to escape—a key, lighter, screwdriver, and then fuse. If nothing else, finding a weird adorned key is very Resident Evil. However, it doesn’t take long before you run into a hellish creature that wants to take a considerable chunk out of you, and probably will. While there have been plenty of freaky abominations that give chase in these games, like Mr. X, the difference here is that you play as the slowest moving character in video game history armed with nothing but an empty bottle. Flee in a straight line towards a room with light (your stalker does not like well lit locales), and hope you don’t get cornered, because if you do, you’re about to get munched on. There’s a lot that can be said about the Amnesia: Dark Descent inspired strain of non-confrontational horror games, but at least in those there’s usually more to do than slowly walk away in a straight line, like hide in closets and manage your sanity meter. I doubt that this small, very contained section is entirely indicative of what Resident Evil 9 will play like, but if it is, Capcom will have pivoted so far from the action excesses of Resident Evil 6 that they’ve somehow ended up at what may be an even less preferable alternative. Many have said this is a “return to roots” for the series, which seems incredibly misleading both in terms of tone and gameplay: it’s a return to the beginning section of Resident Evil 7 more than a return to the 1998 game or its immediate follow-ups. And even as a big fan of Ethan Winters’ not so pleasant run-in with Southern Hospitality, this demo felt so constrained and limiting that I was more frustrated than frightened. I imagine the final game will feel less like traversing the guided corridors of a haunted house, but we will see. 

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.