Blog

Our Gamescom trip

Welcome to this Gamescom-focused update documenting our recent expedition to Cologne!

After a fourteen hours drive we arrived on the day before the official opening. First thing we did is get our official passes and then we started building our booth right away.

Everything went smoothly and we were ready for the opening!

Attendance came in waves, with moments of quiet before the (small) swarms. It was both exciting and scary for us to suddenly reveal to the world what we had up to this point only played on our monitors at home.

During the first couple of days we were able to spot issues that needed to be addressed, so we took a machine back to the Airbnb apartment and spent some time in the evening to fix and patch the problems. After which we decided the resulting build was ready to withstand the new players thrown at it for the rest of Gamescom!

That being said, we knew some animations were missing (as I didn’t have time to finish them before we hit the road for Cologne), the IK feet for the characters were not in yet and some assets were definitely going to be changed/improved in the final game. Still, we received LOTS of compliments regarding the way the game looks and plays, leading us to believe we might have done something right.

Namely it seems we managed to avoid the typical “Unreal look” (whatever THAT means) because we have a fairly stylized artistic direction and we don’t use Megascan models (except for some tree assets which will be swapped anyway).

The game was running at a solid 60fps in native 4K (no upscaling at all) on a RTX 4070 TI (so not even the latest generation of graphics cards).

Here’s a quick glimpse of the game running at our booth (just some phone-shot footage):

Any visitor who finished the demo was awarded a special wooden button, making them honorary members of Gusto and Fatale’s Guild of Thieves! Only a hundred of these were made, so if you have one, congratulations, you’re part of a select club!

Oh, and we had a small glass display cabinet on the side which proved quite successful in attracting the attention of passers-by. It showcased some of the existing merch related to the first game like the collector’s editions on PS4 and Switch, as well as some one-off “just-for-kicks” t-shirts. 😉

It also displayed a couple of figurines featuring the new game’s characters (Gusto on the left, Fatale on the right holding the undershine, a special thief’s tool):

We wanted to reveal them as they might appear in a future crowdfunding campaign (wink-wink, nudge-nudge)…

The attentive reader will no doubt notice the kind-of “mission statement” in the upper left of the case picture. I’m glad to say it connected rather well with the public and journalists. 🙂

What was particularly nice is we met long-time fans of the game, actually looking for our booth! Some had driven for hours just to see us. It was so humbling for us to speak face to face with people of all ages telling us how much the first game meant to them. A unique moment of human connection we rarely get to experience, seeing as most exchanges usually happen in an impersonal manner through internet.

We also got to meet new potential players who were discovering the game by chance, while walking through the aisles of Gamescom. They were clearly reacting to the poster visual (painted by Jerome Jacinto as always) and then they really liked what they saw on the TVs.

So to wrap it up, Gamescom 2026 was a great experience for us. Thanks to everyone who took the time to visit the booth and play the demo, we learned so much. It comforted us in the choices we made years ago and confirmed that despite the engine change and having to restart everything from scratch, the heart of the first game is still very much beating in the new one!

One final thing: You can now wishlist Ghost of a Tale 2 on Steam right HERE!