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Gamescom 2011 - A Week in Review

Gamescom 2011
Gamescom 2011

Germany has always been big on adventure games. I'm not really sure why that is; I just know that there’s a disproportionately large number of developers and publishers of adventure games there, and players as well. Even today, you can walk into a shop and find three stretching meters of shelf space, four shelves high, stacked with adventure games. Most of these never see an English release, so I've adapted and often find myself playing these games in German, and even attending German trade fairs like the gamescom in Cologne. This year I got the chance to go representing Adventure Gamers, as part of a team of three people including Harald Bastiaanse and Mark Jones, and we had more appointments than ever before. Plus I even discovered more adventure games in the making while walking around the halls, squeezing some extra presentations in between the ones already planned. A pretty exhausting three-day schedule, but definitely worth it!

The gamescom consists of two main parts. One part is the Business Hall, which actually spreads across a pair of halls, each with two floors. It's open from Wednesday to Friday and is accessible only by games journalists and trade visitors (i.e. developer/publisher/distributor). This is where all the behind-closed-doors meetings take place. Booths here are usually sparsely decorated and range from a simple square room with a table and two chairs to luxurious affairs complete with bars and several viewing rooms. The other part is the Entertainment Area, which is where the heavy action takes place from Wednesday to Sunday. Booths here compete for your attention by being the biggest, having the flashiest trailers or the loudest music or giving away the best goodies. Electronic Arts had an actual MiG jet at their Battlefield booth, and I saw quite a few expensive cars just sitting around as decoration. These halls are open to the general public and are usually very crowded, especially on the weekend.


 

Image #1Although the fair officially opened on Wednesday, some publishers like Sony, Microsoft and EA held press conferences and events the day before. None of these were very interesting for adventure gamers, but there was an expo in town called "NotGames", hosted by the Cologne Game Lab and curated by Tale of Tales’ Michael Samyn and Auriea Harvey, so I decided to visit that, stopping at some shops along the route to gaze at all those adventures on display (and yes, I bought some). At the expo, titles like Trauma, Amnesia and The Path were playable, together with other vignettes, interactive movies and artistic… for lack of a better word – games. Although the ones I got to play had fascinating stories, there was indeed no real gameplay and after the novelty of the experience wore off, I quickly lost interest in most of them. It's a pity there was no introduction or explanation for any of the games; there were only computers and devices like iPads sitting alone in the room with a game pre-installed, so visitors with questions or remarks were left in the dark (quite literally, as the expo room was pitch black).

The first real day of the convention wasn't open to the general public, so this was the best day to check out all those big upcoming titles. Even with just press and trade visitors, the queues to see things like Skyrim and Diablo 3 were so long you'd have to wait two or three hours to get your hands on them for 15 minutes or so. I didn't have that much time, because we started off with Alan Johnson of Telltale Games, showing us a new build of [game=2056]Jurassic Park[/game]. Alan is a big fan of the movies, and he says that Telltale is doing everything possible to make the game a feast of recognition for everyone who has seen the first movie. Our little AG team then had to split up, as a Konami press conference including Doctor Lautrec and the Forgotten Knights coincided with an appointment with Lace Mamba Global to see the son of the devil in action in Lucius and the lovely-looking garbage on planet Deponia. There were some other unannounced games in LMG’s portfolio, but Claas Wolter was waiting for a couple of final signatures before he could show those, so unfortunately we didn't get to see them.

Our next appointment was with dtp, where Matthias Finke and Mareike Hoffmann showed us Memento Mori 2, which begins with Lara and Max on their honeymoon in South Africa. Of course, it's not long before their nice little holiday is interrupted by a phone call... but then it wouldn’t be much of a game if they lived happily ever after. The previously unannounced The Lost Chronicles of Zerzura, developed by the Cranberry Production team behind the second and third chapters of the Black Mirror series, is not a horror game but its dark, mysterious setting and plot concerning da Vinci-esque inventions and the Inquisition certainly had me intrigued.

Image #2

On my way to the Daedalic booth for our next appointment, I came across a poster for The Second Guest, an adventure game that is obviously inspired by Tim Burton, so I popped into the HeadUp Games booth and asked if I could see more of this intriguing episodic game. They were happy to show it right then and there, which meant I was a few minutes late for my appointment with Claas Paletta, who demoed some of the new Edna & Harvey adventure, Harvey's New Eyes, and the beautiful world of The Dark Eye: Chains of Satinav. I've thoroughly enjoyed the PC role-playing games set in the same world, and I am looking forward to this game a lot.

Next I met with Agustín Cordes, whose previous game Scratches I helped beta test. It was wonderful to finally meet him, and Agustín brought an early version of his next horror mystery game, Asylum. There isn't any real gameplay yet, but the entire first floor was explorable and the atmosphere is very foreboding. Just how I like it.

While walking around the Business Hall I also spotted a poster for Phobos 1953, an adventure game developed by Phantomery Interactive (Outcry), so I decided to try my luck again, once more with success. Tamara Berger from the German publisher UIG Entertainment told me some interesting tidbits about the supernatural Russian adventure concerning the exploration of the human mind and the effects of fear, and also shared some details about their upcoming Portal-style physics puzzler Sunset.

 

Image #3After all these dark and gloomy games, it was time for a sunny, bright, tropical setting at the booth of Reef Entertainment. A presenter for Wizarbox was more than happy to oblige by showing us Captain Morgane and the Golden Turtle, which is set in the same universe as the So Blonde games. Steve Ince is responsible for the story once again, which this time gives us insight into the youth of Morgane Castillo and how she became a pirate captain.

For our final appointment of a tiring day, we investigated a reported theft with Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson, looking at a pearl necklace found in a fish tank, trying to determine if it was the one reported missing. Wael Amr from Frogwares explained to us how the series has grown over the years and how they have always listened carefully to feedback from the community. In The Testament of Sherlock, Holmes himself is the one being accused of theft and fraud, which definitely puts a different spin on the sixth adventure for the great detective.

Our second day, Thursday, started with some action. We had been approached by Don't Nod Entertainment from France to come and check out their futuristic (action-)adventure Adrift, which is set in Paris in 2084, a world where the social media of today has evolved to make it possible to trade memory files. Only a few people are in control of it all in a very Orwellian, scarily believable story. The team is made up of very talented, award-winning developers and the trailer sure looked awesome. Unfortunately, they weren't ready to show any real gameplay yet, so we have no idea how much action there actually is. We'll certainly keep following any news about this title, however.

When I left the booth and tried to find a place to sit down for a moment, I ran into Josué Monchan from Pendulo Studios, and he was happy to show me some scenes from their upcoming title Y: The Case of John Yesterday. Quite unexpectedly, this will not be a funny game like Runaway or The Next BIG Thing. Instead, the game deals with serial killings, the fringe people at the edge of society and worldwide conspiracies. The graphical style is still 'cartoony', but in a very dark and gory way, and Pendulo have incorporated elements of graphic novels, with panels that 'pop up' and fractured cinematics. I was very impressed with what I saw and can't wait to see more of the game.

 

Image #4By then it was time to go check out Secret Files 3. A few developers from Animation Arts presented us with some scenes showing Nina on a motorcycle on her way to her wedding. When she arrives, the church is completely empty. Only Max and a priest are there, but they act like everything is fine and the church is full of guests. Suddenly, the church is falling into ruin around them and Nina falls down. When she’s able to get up again, Max and the priest are gone, but a shape appears to walk through a wall and the church is on fire. The tempo in the game will be high, according to the developers, which was certainly true of the opening scene we saw.

After all that excitement, it was time to relax a bit with the more casual oriented games of aideMMedia. They showed us titles like City of Secrets 2 and Freak Files, along with a number of other 'light' adventures and hidden object hybrids. Where the sequel to City of Secrets continues the subterranean comic adventures of Mr. Moles, Freak Files is a wacky adventure about space exploration and aliens, containing some arcade elements.

As we arrived at the Iceberg Interactive booth, we were told that Matt Clark had some trouble with his laptop, and there was no converter for the power socket so we had to postpone our appointment. But we didn't want to let the remainder of the afternoon go to waste, so we made an impromptu appointment with Italian developer/publisher Reply Forge to see their adventure Dream Chamber. Unfortunately, as they were in the final stages of making a deal with a publisher, there wasn't a lot they were willing to show us just yet.

 

Image #5On Friday, we had a few hours to ourselves before the first meeting. I spent that time in the already very crowded Entertainment Halls, checking out the playable demos for Sherlock Holmes, Haunted and Secret Files 3. Even with headphones, the noise of the fair is so loud it's hard to understand anything that's being said in the game, and having people constantly watch over your shoulder waiting for their turn doesn't make for an enjoyable gaming session. After watching a presentation for Funcom's upcoming MMORPG The Secret World, which looked quite hectic and confusing to me, I quickly fled back to the relatively quiet Business Halls.

Much better late than never, we finally got to see Bracken Tor. Matt Clark is a very enthusiastic guy who showed us a lot of material from real archeological digs and how he converted that into the game. There you try to find evidence for the existence of a 'beast' on the moors of Bracken Tor, in the same vicinity as the earlier Barrow Hill. A few locations and characters from that game even reappear in Bracken Tor. Matt also announced he is working on a third game in the series that will also take place in the same general environment, Wychwood Hollow. Even though Matt didn't show us anything but a map displaying the relative locations of all three games, the story of dealing with a village where witches were burned was enough to get me excited for it already.

 

Image #6The final two appointments for the show were with Jan Klose from Deck13, who couldn't show us much about Jack Keane 2 because the game hasn’t been in development for very long, and Jan Theysen from KING Art, who demoed the follow-up prequel to The Book of Unwritten Tales, The Critter Chronicles. As the title suggests, the adorable purple-haired 'monster' returns and we get to visit his home country this time. The game has been in development for quite some time, but the team met with setback after setback with publishers, delaying its release even in Germany. Fortunately, they used that time to not only fix lots of bugs but also implement everything on the 'nice-to-have' list that usually ends up being thrown out the window when deadline approaches.

Although this marked the end of the official part of our gamescom visit, Mark and I later went on to an annual gathering of the adventure community. Every year, the German adventure site Adventure-Treff organises a meet, inviting many developers and publishers along. This is always something to look forward to, as where else does one get the chance to relax and have a beer or cocktail and discuss games, movies or whatever comes up with fellow adventure fans and colleagues like Steve Ince, Charles Cecil, Agustín Cordes, Matt Clark, Martin Ganteföhr and many, many others? Even the Critter made an appearance! It was a great end to an exhausting but very rewarding gamescom. So much so, I am really looking forward to next year!

But that’s getting ahead of myself, as this report is simply the beginning. Coming up over the next few weeks, we’ll have lots more in-depth coverage of the games we saw in detail, plus lesser-depth coverage of those we didn’t. Everything you always wanted to know about the games mentioned above, we weren’t too afraid to ask, though not all questions were answered just yet. So stick around for a complete recap of our gamescom experience in our upcoming previews of Secret Files 3, The Critter Chronicles, The Testament of Sherlock and a whole lot more.

Photos by Harald Bastiaanse.

 

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