PikPok and Mattel are bringing players into a colorful new Barbie adventure with Barbie: Horse Ride & Rescue, an equestrian-focused game designed around horse rescue, exploration, customization, fashion challenges and story-driven discovery. Developed by the New Zealand studio behind the Rival Stars Horse Racing franchise, the game will launch globally on mobile on June 16, 2026, with PC through Steam and Nintendo Switch 2 versions planned for 2027. The new title combines the recognizable Barbie universe with PikPok’s experience in horse-focused game development, creating an experience aimed at older teens and adults who are looking for a relaxed, character-driven and highly customizable adventure.
There are games I remember because they were good, and then there are games that somehow became part of my life outside the screen. Crazy Taxi belongs firmly in the second category. I loved the series as a kid, but one of my strongest memories has almost nothing to do with actually holding a controller. When my younger brother had trouble falling asleep, I used to invent bedtime stories for him about a completely crazy taxi driver racing around the city, picking up passengers, taking ridiculous shortcuts and getting into increasingly absurd situations. Years later, standing at Gamescom 2026 with Crazy Taxi: World Tour in front of me, that memory was the first thing that came back. This was easily one of the meetings and hands-on sessions I had been looking forward to most at the entire show, and that kind of emotional baggage can be dangerous because nostalgia has a habit of setting expectations impossibly high.
That is why I was genuinely relieved when I started playing and realized that SEGA has not forgotten what actually made Crazy Taxi fun. World Tour still understands that the player should almost never feel comfortable. You pick a direction, accelerate, make a decision, change that decision because something else suddenly looks more important, jump, drift, crash, search for the next objective and immediately move again. The game has an almost constant forward momentum, and that was easily my favorite part of the Gamescom experience. I never felt like I was waiting for the game to entertain me. Instead, it kept creating reasons for me to do something, and after a few minutes I stopped thinking about the fact that I was testing an upcoming game at a trade show and simply started playing it the way I used to play Crazy Taxi years ago. That is probably the biggest compliment I can give it.
Going into my meeting with HoYoverse during Gamescom 2026, Honkai: Nexus Anima was one of those games I thought I understood before I actually spent enough time looking at it. On the surface, the description is simple enough: this is a creature-collecting adventure strategy game set within the Honkai universe, where you meet creatures called Anima, build a team around them and use their abilities in battle and exploration. The obvious comparison is Pokémon, and visually there are moments where your brain naturally goes there, but after seeing the game in more detail I think reducing Nexus Anima to another creature collector would be unfair. What immediately caught my attention was how much effort HoYoverse is putting into making the creatures feel like part of the world rather than collectibles waiting to be added to a menu. The environments I saw felt broad, colorful and deliberately inviting, with enough visual variety to make exploration feel like something I would actually want to do without constantly being pushed toward the next objective. I liked that feeling. There was no sense that the world existed only as empty space between missions. It felt designed for wandering, discovering things and simply spending time with the Anima accompanying you.
The foundation for all of this is the Nexus, a system of invisible connections between paired concepts called Aspects, including Love and Hate, Light and Dark, and Reality and Illusion. Following an event called the Sundering, those connections were broken and their remaining power became scattered throughout the world as Anima. That concept sounds complicated when explained on paper, but it gives HoYoverse an interesting excuse to make creatures radically different from one another, both visually and mechanically. This was one of my favorite parts of what I saw. The Anima did not feel like slight variations built from the same design template. They have different shapes, personalities and abilities, and those abilities matter beyond combat because different companions can influence how you interact with the surrounding world. The starting town of Iia is a good example. Its New Quarter, commercial areas, architecture, Nexus Hall and True Nexus Building give the location a stronger sense of identity than I expected from an opening area. I personally enjoy games that let me explore at my own pace, and Nexus Anima seems to understand that exploration becomes far more interesting when the creatures traveling beside you are involved in it instead of disappearing into an inventory the second a battle ends.
I was given the opportunity to see Hasbro Games Junior Collection and its Monopoly Junior experience during a meeting at Gamescom, where I had the chance to get a much closer look at how the game translates one of the world’s most recognizable family board games into a digital format. What immediately stood out to me was just how deliberately the experience has been adapted for younger players. Rather than simply taking the traditional Monopoly formula and putting it on a screen, the game appears to rethink the way younger children interact with the mechanics, presentation and pacing of the experience. At the same time, it retains enough of the recognizable Monopoly structure to make it feel authentic. I was particularly impressed by the balance between accessibility and genuine gameplay depth, with mechanics designed for younger players without introducing the complexity that can sometimes make strategy-heavy board games difficult for children. The colorful presentation, interactive dice mechanics, character customization, familiar locations and competitive mini-games all contribute to an experience that feels designed around family play rather than simply being a simplified version of a more advanced game. After seeing it in action, I came away very positively impressed, and I am already looking forward to trying the game with my own family when it launches.
Walking into my meeting with HoYoverse at Gamescom 2026, Petit Planet immediately felt different from almost everything I normally associate with the company. There are no enormous battles demanding perfect timing, no constant pressure to optimize a character build, and no feeling that the game is trying to push you toward the next challenge as quickly as possible. Instead, Petit Planet is built around the idea of slowing down. You become a Planet Tender responsible for developing your own small world by gathering resources, planting crops, growing trees and flowers, crafting furniture, reshaping the terrain, fishing and gradually turning an initially simple space into a home that feels personal. What surprised me most during the presentation was how deliberate the visual design feels. The colors are soft without becoming dull, the environments are bright without constantly fighting for your attention, and practically everything I saw seemed designed to make the player feel comfortable. I personally found that incredibly refreshing at Gamescom, where you spend entire days moving between loud booths, trailers, presentations and games competing to be more spectacular than whatever you saw five minutes earlier. Petit Planet did the opposite. It invited me to stop.
That accessibility is clearly part of the product strategy rather than simply an artistic decision. Petit Planet wants to be approachable to someone who might not normally consider themselves an experienced gamer. The controls, pace and visual language are designed around gradual learning rather than punishment, while the core activities do not seem obsessed with measuring performance. At the same time, I would not describe the game as something created exclusively for children. The art direction is too carefully constructed for that, and the appeal of building a peaceful space at your own pace is obviously much broader. Personally, I think this may become one of its biggest strengths. There are plenty of games that claim to be relaxing, but many eventually introduce timers, optimization loops or resource pressure that turn relaxation into another checklist. From what I experienced at Gamescom, Petit Planet seems far more committed to preserving that gentle rhythm. My concern is that HoYoverse will eventually need to find ways of creating meaningful progression without damaging exactly what makes the game attractive. Relaxation works when I still feel curious about what comes next. If everything becomes too safe or predictable, calm can very quickly become boredom.
Ghost Haunting Brings Classic PointandClick Design Back to Life
During our meeting with Daedalic at Gamescom 2026, the first game presented to us was Ghost Haunting, a handcrafted 2D point and click adventure developed by Cologne based studio Creative Monkeys. We did not play the game ourselves during the meeting, but the presentation provided a detailed look at its story, visual direction and accessibility systems. The project is heavily inspired by the LucasArts adventure games of the 1990s, combining low resolution pixel art, linear storytelling, environmental puzzles, item combinations and conversations with strange characters. The developers want the game to look like something from the classic era while still benefiting from three decades of improvements in game design. Every pixel has reportedly been created and adjusted by hand, reinforcing the feeling that this is a carefully produced adventure rather than a quick attempt to imitate retro graphics.
The story follows Gigi, an unpredictable eight and a half year old girl whose grandmother was the only person who truly understood her. After her grandmother dies, Gigi is not given a proper explanation of what happened and assumes that she has simply travelled to the realm of the dead. She later discovers Baron Butternut, a demon trapped inside a talking pumpkin, as well as the truth about her grandfather’s secret work hunting ghosts and monsters. Gigi decides that if spirits can travel from the realm of the dead into the world of the living, she should be able to make the same journey in reverse and bring her grandmother home. Despite the subject of death, the game is built around absurd comedy, including a toilet dwelling goblin, an organisation of verified vegan vampires and a suspicious character named Dr. Calligraphy. The adventure is set in Germany’s Eifel region, with forests, castles, legends and real locations used to give the fictional world a strong local identity.
Gamescom is full of games that I want to play, but ACE COMBAT 8: WINGS OF THEVE was different for me from the moment I walked into the meeting. Aviation has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. My father served in the Air Force for close to 30 years and today continues working in the defense industry, including in the aviation field. I grew up in a house where aircraft were never just machines you saw in movies. During school holidays, my father would take us to the Air Force Museum, and during the year there were occasions when he took us to his base and we could see where he worked. Sitting down at Gamescom 2026 and getting my hands on the next mainline Ace Combat therefore felt strangely personal. I was not simply approaching it as another journalist moving from one appointment to another. For a few minutes, I felt like the kid who used to stare at military aircraft and try to understand what made each one different.
Going into my Gamescom 2026 meeting for Total War: WARHAMMER 40,000, I had a very different level of curiosity than I normally have before a strategy game presentation. I have been playing Total War with my brother for years, and during the last couple of years we have also fallen deep into the Warhammer 40,000 universe, so seeing these two worlds finally come together felt personal. I had the chance to see the game in action, study the battle interface, learn about the technology behind it and later sit down with David Petry, Battle Product Owner, and Joy Dey, Tutorial Lead Designer at Creative Assembly. What became clear very quickly was that Creative Assembly is not simply taking Total War: Warhammer and replacing swords with bolters. This project is forcing the studio to rethink how Total War handles projectiles, battlefield readability, ranged combat, controls, scale and even the technology underneath the series.
Gamescom is usually full of products fighting for attention with bigger screens, stronger motors and increasingly complicated specifications, but one of the sim racing ideas that stayed with me after Gamescom 2026 was surprisingly simple. During my time with Asetek Racing, I had the opportunity to experience its Virtual Button Box as part of a complete racing setup, and what impressed me was not a single headline specification. It was how naturally everything worked together once I was actually racing. The steering wheel felt comfortable in my hands, the feedback from the simulator made the car feel far more physical than I expected, and having interactive controls directly in the center of the wheel meant I could manage different functions without feeling like I was operating a collection of separate peripherals. For me, that combination made the experience feel much closer to sitting inside a purpose-built racing cockpit than simply playing a racing game with expensive hardware.
Honkai: Star Rail Version 4.5, titled To Roll the Stars in Astropolis, launches on August 26, 2026, taking the Trailblazer away from Planarcadia and into Astropolis, one of the Interastral Peace Corporation’s major strongholds. Following the appearance of the Voracity and the new crisis threatening Planarcadia, the story will focus on finding the power needed to protect the region while navigating the IPC’s upper management. Astropolis also introduces a much lighter side to the update, with Robin and Aventurine joining the Trailblazer for an interstellar summer vacation alongside the main storyline.
