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The 11 best games we played at Gamescom 2026

Get these on your wishlist ASAP - Featuring #3 Valor Mortis, from Lyrical Games and One More Level (Ghostrunner).


“First-person Dark Souls” is a pretty compelling elevator pitch. “First-person Dark Souls set during the Napoleonic Wars” is even more compelling. “First-person Dark Souls set during the Napoleonic Wars and developed by the makers of Ghostrunner, one of the tightest first-person games ever?” Yeah, little surprise here that Valor Mortis absolutely rules. Valor Mortis specifically offers two olive branches to onboard new players. The parry is almost imperceptibly more forgiving than anything spawned out of the halls of FromSoftware. And the checkpoints come a bit more frequently. This compels one to keep trying, trying, and trying again, ultimately capturing the live-die-repeat essence that made Ghostrunner and its sequel such breakout hits. —Ari Notis



Job Simulator: Human Relations Preview: You No Longer Need to Have VR on Your Resume to Play


If you’ve played VR, odds are you’ve played Job Simulator. It’s a staple of the VR space (pun intended), whimsically “simulating” an office environment to comedically overexaggerated effect. The problem, of course, is the “if you’ve played VR” part. It’s now been a full decade since Oculus Rift first released and attempted to bring virtual reality gaming to the mainstream, and despite advances on the hardware side – such as the raw power of the Valve Index or the wireless freedom of the Meta Quest – and killer-app quality games on the software side (I still have the sublime Half-Life: Alyx as my Game of the 2020s so far), VR has simply never gotten over the hump, adoption-wise.


And so it was with plenty of excitement that I sat down recently to play Job Simulator: Human Relations, a non-VR version of the popular comedic multiplayer workplace sim that is played on a regular ol’ flat-screen monitor.




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