Some games simply ‘wow’ you from the moment you’re permitted to enter their worlds, and in that regard, Project Bloomwalker is a blessing indeed. Revealed for the first time in the Xbox @ gamescom 2025 Broadcast, Project Bloomwalker is a beautiful survival crafting affair set in a gorgeous, anime-infused land that has been corrupted – its plant life shrivelled, and its ground turned an ashy white. As a ‘Bloom Walker’, you have the ability to cure the world of this blight, using your travelling caravan, a deceptively spacious house escorted by giant robotic legs, housing an equally giant talking cat. It’s quirky, inviting, and frequently magical.

During a hands-on demo at gamescom, we were invited to explore Bloomwalker’s world, and how you’ll seek to purify it. This really is the crux of the game. You’re not crafting to dominate the natural world – you’re there to heal it, and it feels truly different as a result.

The demo begins with your character carefully escorting their house through some tainted areas, using its power to slowly restore the world around it. It’s immediately inviting; the ground around it is restored as it works – the terrain explodes into vibrant green, foliage and massive mushrooms transform from nasty, sludgy mounds to bright, rainbow hues – everything here feels intentionally placed and ripe for exploration, which is exactly what you’ll need to do.

While the majority of the world we saw in the demo was relatively safe (sans one attack from a giant pelican), the tainted areas require some thought to explore, adding layers of puzzle to the mix. You’ll need to be prepared to encounter enemies like the aforementioned pelican, and venture into dangerous, blighted parts (taking damage as you do) until you can clear it. Luckily, there are resources like the Breathblossom that allow you to temporarily breathe in those spots, but you’ll need to work fast. For all of its beauty, Project Bloomwalker’s world can be treacherous, and it seems you’ll need to brace yourself for it in order to survive and keep your house moving.

The house’s purification power (or ‘purrification’, according to our cat, Kuroru), won’t last forever; after a short amble to the designated spot, we’re invited to settle the house down and start crafting more purification crystals. This is the resource that allows you to keep purifying, and it can be made from a number of items scattered around the map – berries, apples, honey, and a few other special materials like luminite.

This is where Kettlekid comes in, a creature I can only describe as the sentient, very hungry contents of a cauldron. Throwing your gathered resources into Kettlekid will create purification crystals, used to fill purification gauge so the house can keep on moving. These crystals are ferried over to your house by the absolute highlight of the demo – Oddlings. These tiny, squeaky balls of pure joy are here to help you, but they’ll need a bit of care to function effectively.

Fortunately, you have a wooden crafting table (also equipped with legs, naturally) at your disposal, which allows you to craft little leafy beds and tents for your Oddlings to rest in. In a pinch, you can also approach Oddlings that are exhausted and give them a hug, which will not only restore 50% of their energy, but also cure a tiny part of your own soul, too. It’s truly adorable.

Rogue Oddlings can also be found out in the wild, either stressing out in the open or concealed by a small puzzle. Once you found them, they can be adopted and recruited into your own Oddling army. While they’re a joy to have around anyway, building a larger group also expedites some automated crafting activities (like getting crystals from Kettlekid over to the house). There’s a hint of factory sim underneath all the loveliness.

Your own ambling house is truly impressive; the quaint little cottage, while small on the outside, houses a pocket dimension of sorts – a whimsical, celestial-themed bedroom full of sparkling trinkets and cute decorations. It’s truly amazing the first time you realize that it’s bigger on the inside than the outside, with no loading screen or transition. The attention to design is really felt here – I spent a good few minutes peering into round terrariums and zooming into the walls to absorb every magical detail. It’s also where you’ll come to chat to Kuroru about what’s going on, orienting you on your next goal.

Even with just a short time in Project Bloomwalker, I’m absolutely entranced by its whimsical landscape and characters, and its poignant premise.

It’s such a simple decision – in Onimusha: Way of the Sword, pressing the block button lets you deflect or parry attacks from any direction. Your character, Musashi Miyamoto, will seamlessly pull his katana into just the right position, sometimes readjusting for multiple strikes on the fly. It’s a single gameplay choice that says so much about this game, and offers so much to the player – built to dominate more than struggle. Plus, performing a no-look block just feels superb.

The long-awaited follow-up to Capcom’s grimdark feudal fantasy series sees you play as a master swordsman, who gains the abilities of the Oni gauntlet that’s attached itself to each of the series’ main characters, and is charged with taking down invading demons by any means necessary.

At first blush, you might expect this to be another entry in the burgeoning soulslike genre but, in a first hands-on, I discovered a game that, while not without challenge, was far more interested in making you feel good than making you get good. This is a consummate action game – one that constantly rewards you for experimenting with its systems, and feels almost incapable of looking bad, even in a non-expert player’s hands.

Much of this is down to animation. Every strike, dodge and, yes, no-look block, feels as though it’s reacting to the situation you’ve found yourself in, always looking natural. Fighting regular enemies rarely has the start-stop rhythm you might have come to expect – instead, you glide through these fights, dispatching demons, deflecting arrows (particularly delightful when you realise you can parry them back into the enemies around you), and finishing skirmishes with the series’ signature, instant-kill Issen attacks.

In these regular fights, offence is often the best defence – overwhelming smaller enemies with blows will deplete their stamina, opening up opportunities to unleash an Issen (with an appropriately over-the-top animation). Stronger enemies will force you to dodge a little more often (which can trigger a Bayonetta-like slow-mo), or parry more effectively, complete with gorgeous visual effects and generous stun windows.

The message is clear – you’re not playing as a character learning the ropes. This is already a master of their craft, and they act like it. For Musashi, these fights should feel simple – difficulty is more down to how you manage a crowd, than how you deal with the individual fighters in it.

But when the game pits me against a fellow Samurai, Sasaki Ganryu, it’s a swordfight worthy of the classic movies the developers have drawn from (even the main character’s likeness is based on legendary Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune). You might expect the game to suddenly embrace that soulslike comparison here, but it resists – it’s not easy, but you get the impression that Capcom would prefer you to be able to choreograph your own film-like encounter, resisting the impulse to truly stop you in your tracks with a fight that needs to be learned, repeated, and mastered.

Healing items are limited by your inventory space, but relatively plentiful, ensuring you can top up in tricky spots. Pulling off an Issen against Ganryu gives you an in-built gamble – do massive damage, or earn more Souls (used as currency and more). And the game prioritizes speed over precision – both you and Ganryu will buzz around the arena, dodging, lunging, and clashing in showers of sparks. It’s absolutely thrilling, featuring some of the smoothest, best-looking combat I’ve seen from an action game this generation.

As a taster of what’s to come, it’s absolutely piqued my interest. This feels like a classic action game waiting to emerge.

Onimusha: Way of the Sword arrives for Xbox Series X|S in 2026.

Onimusha: Way of the Sword

CAPCOM CO., LTD.

☆☆☆☆☆

★★★★★

Get it now

Fight through bloodstained battlefields of intense swordplay action. Explore the historic Japanese capital of Edo-era Kyoto, twisted by malevolent clouds of Malice.
With every stage cloaked in mystery, danger and intrigue. Battle against monstrosities from the underworld known as Genma in a tale of dark fantasy.
Follow the tale of a samurai who wields the Oni Gauntlet, a mystical artifact that grants its bearer the power to slay Genma.
Through gritty, blood-soaked brawls, he searches for his reason to fight. What fate awaits at the end of his path?

Note: this content has not yet been age-rated. Age ratings information will be published at a later date.

I am the proud of owner of an achievement for the Xbox 360 release of Super Meat Boy where the aim is to complete an entire chapter without dying. It’s something that I bring up whenever possible, as a testament to my skill and commitment to mastering one of the most frustrating (and satisfying) modern platformers of a generation.  

So when the opportunity to hop into a demo of Super Meat Boy 3D arose at this year’s gamescom, I had to do it. Would this be a glorious return to form for me, or a devastating fall from grace? Does this utterly absurd, high-speed, high-stakes game work as well in a three-dimensional setting?  

The demo would have me believe that the answer is a resounding yes. Meat Boy’s plight is familiar – he’s on a mission to save Bandage Girl from the clutches of Dr Fetus, and each level adds a slight uptick in difficulty as Meat Boy’s girlfriend is swept away each time.  

Taking control of Meat Boy again, even in his new, squidgy, 3D form, ignited the muscle memory of riding a bike – he moves in a very similar way to the original game and within a few levels I was hopping, sprinting, wall-running and of course, perishing like a pro. If these controls are lodged deep inside a part of your mind, it’s going to feel wonderfully nostalgic, but don’t fret if they’re not – everything still feels intuitive and responsive, another trick the original pulled off. 

However, unlike the original, the 3D element adds new layers of depth to each level – as well as moving up, down, left and right, Meat Boy now moves forwards, backwards, diagonally – having to consider depth perception at warp speed almost makes Super Meat Boy 3D feel like an entirely different game. Precision is utterly key in these moments, but there’s a forgiving element – a circle underneath Meat Boy will mark where he is about to land on a surface, making those extra risky leaps a little easier to calculate.  

Each level is an obstacle course, and your goal is to get from the start to the end. Simple in theory, but there’s a brutal buffet of disruptive, violent barriers between you and your lost girlfriend. It’s not just tricky jumps and avoiding falls – just the opening levels had me dodging chainsaw-wielding robots, giant, toxic cubes of slime full of eyeballs, and Meat Boy’s famous moving wall saws, to name a few. While some hurdles felt visible enough to prepare for, others took me by total, annoying surprise (and killed me instantly). Getting your butt kicked and learning for next time is what made Super Meat Boy so rewarding to conquer – and that masterclass is brought back for you to retake here. 

And while some of this is new, it wouldn’t remotely feel out of place if it were squashed down into 2D form and placed inside the original game, which feels like a testament to how developer Sluggerfly is preserving the authenticity of Super Meat Boy. 

Super Meat Boy 3D also looks great, these surroundings – from dreamy green platforms to harsh industrial caverns – feel familiar in how they’re designed, but with a stylish, modern flair. This new art style gives opportunity for fun new animation that really brings the characters and environments to life – squirrels running around with guns, lava spewing down walls, and of course, many more visceral ways in which Meat Boy can meet a swift end.  

All the swagger and attitude of the original Super Meat Boy is present here – and it feels as though Super Meat Boy 3D is built to iterate on its predecessor, not outperform it. That said, if you’ve never played the original, that doesn’t matter here – the premise is clear, and these opening levels are designed to welcome newcomers into Meat Boy’s weird, unforgiving world, but the initiation won’t be easy. The demo is respectfully saying “welcome back to Meat Boy”, but there’s enough new ideas here to make it truly feel like a successor worth playing, if you can handle the frustration.  

There’s a primal human pleasure in simply finding out what something does. It’s the reason you’d still want to push a button that says “do not touch”, or wonder what’s behind a locked door. Keeper thrives on that idea, building out a game of discoveries and experiments around it.

Seeing extended gameplay for the first time at gamescom, Keeper’s key trick – of telling its story in a never-before-seen world, all without words – means that almost everything you do is less about completing an objective you’re told to follow, and more about finding out what the objective is.

Shine Your Light

First revealed at Xbox Games Showcase earlier this year, Keeper is a dreamy, otherworldly adventure that puts you in the misshapen body of a suddenly sentient walking lighthouse – but there’s no narrator, nor talking sidekick to explain where you are, what’s going on, and what you should be doing. Working these things out is the game.

“A key tenet of this game is the unexpected,” Creative Director Lee Petty tells me. “We wanted players to be able to relax a bit, chill out a bit, and embrace the unexpected. So to that end, there’s some experimentation, but there’s nothing the player can do to die in this game. They can’t mess up the experience. We sort of get the player on board early so that, when something unexpected is thrown at them, it’s not a moment of panic that they don’t know how to get through.”

In three portions taken from early sections, I see how Keeper slowly introduces new ideas in subtle ways. With only the ability to walk, shine a beacon, and the help of a bird companion called Twig, the player needs to work out what they should be doing through context clues.

“The lighthouse beam has two main modes,” explains Petty. “It has an unfocused and a focused mode. The unfocused mode is for exploring – as you shine it around, you might see little subtle shimmers or reactions in the world. Bigger transformations occur when the player focuses that bigger, brighter beam on things, and that’s often used to solve puzzles as well.

“Twig rides along on the lighthouse and can do things that the lighthouse can’t. The lighthouse doesn’t have arms, only legs. Twig however, can directly manipulate things in the world. So what the player can do, for example, to solve a puzzle is use a combination of that light ability and Twig’s ability to pick up and collect things.”

I see this early on, as the lighthouse comes across a lumpen… thing blocking its path. Under the unfocused beam, the creature bristles slightly, enough to show you that it’s reacting – and, focusing the beam, it puts a claw in front of its eyes. This produces a shimmer, which attracts Twig, who flies to grab the claw, and an option to “tug” appears on the screen. Twig pulls at the creature, who flops to one side, revealing a seed that Twig stows away for a future puzzle.

It’s a sequence of purely organic discovery – the game doesn’t tell you what you need to be doing, and the weirdness of it all means you don’t come in with a preconceived idea of what you should be doing, other than trying things out. And this is repeated throughout. I see the lighthouse effectively organising a dance of creatures attracted to its light to smash through a sheet of ice, a gorgeous discovery that touching a certain spore-like plant will allow the lighthouse to subvert gravity itself, and even a wild sequence in which it becomes apparent that the beam can control the flow of time on objects it touches in a certain area.

The real ace in the hole here is that Keeper’s world is unlike any other – its bucolic landscapes inhabited by scuttling, alien-like creatures, trees with faces, and flora with unusual effects. It means that, even once you do work out where to go, or what to look at, the effects of your interaction remain a surprise. Crucially, Double Fine never want that feeling to go away:

“We wanted the entire game to have this sort of organic, almost handmade, bespoke feel,” Petty adds. “It’s not a game of repeating actions as much as a game of wandering among unique areas and set pieces that change.”

In just 15 minutes of gameplay, I see – by my count – 11 different puzzles (not to mention smaller interactions as you prod and poke at the world around you). It’s clear that the aim here is to keep surprising the player with what they realize they’re being asked to do. Not all of this is ‘mission-critical’, either – the more you explore, the more you’ll find:

“There’s a lot of stuff for the player to discover along the experience,” adds Petty. “Some of those come in the form of environmental storytelling, some of those things are in the form of hidden interactions with the various creatures, and a lot of it is also just about the players’ interpretation of the games events, and finding meaning in the experience.”

Crucially, though, this is all done with the same small pool of button presses. It might have been complex for the developers to find so many ways to play with these toys, but they didn’t want the player to be bogged down by an unwieldy control scheme:

“We wanted Keeper to be an experience that wasn’t especially difficult to play,” says Petty. “It’s not a game about control, mastery or incredibly hard challenges, because we wanted this sort of unique, weird-but-chill experience for players to go on. We don’t have a need for all those buttons on the controller.

“And we also just have a really big set of accessibility features where people can map the controls to what they want. If they prefer to play with keyboard and mouse, or they play on a controller, we support both of them.”

For a game this overtly strange, it’s a way of easing you in – in all ways, Keeper has been designed as a welcoming experience, not an alienating one. You’re discovering this world, not being repelled by it – and it seems there’s a great deal to discover. What I’ve seen is from its earliest stages, and a literal cliffhanger at the end of the demo – in which the lighthouse tumbles into an abyss caused by a bridge, well, ceasing to exist under its feet – promises that there are far more surprises to come.

Keeper arrives for Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC, Xbox Cloud, and Steam on October 17, priced at $29.99 USD. It will be an Xbox Play Anywhere title, and available day one with Game Pass.

Keeper

Xbox Game Studios

☆☆☆☆☆

★★★★★

Get it now

From Lee Petty and Double Fine Productions, Keeper is a beautiful and surreal otherworldly adventure, and a story told without words.

On an island in a long-lost sea, a forgotten lighthouse stands dormant in the shadow of a distant mountain peak. As withering tendrils spread and coalesce, it awakens. Taken with a mysterious sense of purpose and joined by a spirited seabird, it embarks upon a heartening tale of unlikely companionship, an odyssey of mystifying metamorphosis, and an unexpected journey towards the center of the island, into realms beyond understanding.

How do you follow one of the most hilarious first-person shooters ever created? Turns out: give us a skateboard and tell us to get nuts. During a recent hands-on opportunity with an early build of High On Life 2, I could instantly recognize many returning hallmarks from the original, most notably the return of the talking weaponry, Gatlians, but also the ability to use Knifey’s grapple to pull me onto ledges, and tons of sharply written dialog that blend this wild universe together. But it was skateboarding that really caught my attention.

Picking up some time after the end of High On Life, the hands-on preview kicked off with me skydiving into the world of ConCon (Convention Convention), which is a planet full of floating platforms housing (you guessed it) conventions. A bounty has led us here, targeting senator Muppy Doo, a politician who is in league with the evil executives at Rhea Pharmaceuticals who are intent on turning humankind into… prescription pills.

My mission? Make my way through multiple conventions to find him. First up is ParkingCon, a collection of crashed cars piled on top of each other with dozens of aliens fighting over the few remaining parking spaces – one space was even being “held” by a plastic chair – and we need to free one up to give returning character Gene’s flying Winnebago a chance to park by any means necessary (e.g. shooting aliens).  At first, I came to this with the approach of a standard first-person shooter, focusing on enemy groups one at a time, trying to clear these parking spaces, and cycling between my two available Gatlians: Sweezy (laser pistol) and Gus (shotgun). Then I hopped on the skateboard and everything changed.

High On Life Pro Skater Edition

The skateboard effectively replaces your sprint button, but it’s the speed and agility that comes with it that makes it such a game changer. The more I moved around the level on the board, the more objects I found to grind on by pressing the LB button, like handrails and concrete dividers. I even found some sections that resembled quarter pipes and noticed that certain cars were positioned just right to give the impression they were ramps to jump off. That’s when it dawned on me that this entire level was basically a skatepark! This is going to be great.

The speed of battle really picked up the more I became comfortable finding areas to grind, while cutting down enemies left and right with Sweezy and Gus. I could even “throw” my skateboard at enemies for a one-hit kill and found it hugely helpful that the same button tied to grinding was also Knifey’s head-latching ability, which would smartly pull me to rails or grindable objects if I was going to be coming up short. It means you can get into a real flow, even in a game where you wouldn’t expect it.

If you recall from the first game, traversal with Knifey’s grapple was a big component, unlocking a variety of environmental and platform puzzles. Now with the inclusion of the skateboard, the platforming aspects are all amplified and it wasn’t long until the demo started showcasing what else I could do.

Continuing to the next floating zone involved grinding on floating buses, bouncing on giant inflatable balloons, and then wall riding to safely cross a chasm of clouds, where I reached PoliCon (a politics convention). The skatepark motif continued here as well, with plenty of handrails and other objects to grind swiftly across this new zone, moving through to my next objective. And that’s when our personal assistant Suit-O stepped in.

So, What Else Can You Do?

For our demo, Suit-O was ever vigilant in popping up at the bottom of the screen and making sure we stayed on schedule for our 30-minute preview – intentionally fast-forwarding us through highlights of the demo, and “accidentally” leading us to the conclusion of a boss battle with one of the game’s new characters, Sheath, voiced by the amazing Ralph Ineson. What followed was a hilarious (and bloody) dissection of his alien bounty hunter character – whose head is then transformed into a new Gatlian. Yep, a boss voiced by a famous actor is also a gun in this game.

Sheath complimented Sweezy and Gus nicely with the feel of a battle rifle – Halo fans might find the familiar “punch” here — and his alt-attack is an Impaling Spike that can be used to string together subsequent targets and to create Spike ziplines, which I later use to cross over to the next convention, MurderCon (it’s exactly what you might think it is). I love that these Metroidvania-like components are still present from the previous game, opening areas formerly unreachable once you have acquired the specific tool to do the job.

Shoot, Shoot, Shoot!

Once we’ve stepped through the gates into MurderCon, the demo’s narrative shifted slightly to focus on Knifey who, as returning players may recall, loves to get bloody. He was predictably overjoyed to attend a convention that’s all about one of his favorite subject matters. Before I knew it, we were neck deep in a battle royale, surrounded by a laser tag arena aesthetic with lots of neon strewn about. And, yes, tons of enemies to shoot at. The speedy traversal elements took a backseat here, as the demo showcased more of a traditional multiplayer-like shooter layout, allowing us to lean more into our Gatlians and their abilities.

Sheath feels great with that perfect battle rifle punch, and using his Impaling Spike to tie groups of enemies together was incredibly fun. Sweezy is still a solid laser pistol with an alt-attack that creates a slowdown bubble that surrounds a group of enemies. And Gus’ shotgun and disc shot abilities are great at clearing crowds of enemies. All this fighting culminated in a boss battle with a large, ogre-like character named Brutus, who had a giant pyramid-like helmet fused to his head. It wasn’t long after that me and my Gatlians made short work of him and were crowned winners of MurderCon.

Finally, I was whisked forward once again by Suit-O to face off with Muppy Doo. At first, the encounter was your standard fare of dodging incoming attacks and unleashing some hurt with my Gatlians. But it was the next phase of the battle that I wasn’t quite ready for – and was unlike anything I’ve played. The final boss battle took place… in the menu screen.

See, Muppy Doo has a shrinking ability and was able to get so small that he snuck into my suit’s mainframe and tied up Suit-O. After freeing Suit-O by “clicking” on him, he became my mouse cursor as I clicked through my menu screen, trying to uncover the mini Muppy Doo who was trashing my sub systems.

Muppy would pop his head out from behind an icon, or start destroying menu items, and we’d punch him, forcing him to duck into another sub-menu. After a bit of this click-tag, it became worse for my character, forcing a full system reboot and deleting my save game… which rebooted into an entirely different game – Bible Adventures. No, really. Eventually, things continued to escalate to the point where the only solution was to have Knifey stab me to death – which he was more than willing to oblige. And thus, we wrapped up our time with High On Life 2.

A few games under their belt now, I like that Squanch Games is really starting to settle into a mindset of, “Wouldn’t it be funny if…” and find ways to go through with it, while making it incredible fun (and incredibly funny) in the process. Finding that balance is not an easy thing to do – kind of like trying to ride a skateboard while blasting aliens in the face. Of which we’re very excited to try more of once High On Life 2 launches for Xbox Series X|S on February 13, 2026, available on day one with Game Pass Ultimate.

High On Life 2

Squanch Games, Inc.

☆☆☆☆☆

★★★★★

Get it now

You’ve done it. You’ve taken down an intergalactic cartel, brought humanity back from the brink of extinction, and hunted dangerous bounties to the far corners of the galaxy. Bounty hunting has brought you fortune, fame and love; but when a mysterious figure from your past reappears and puts a price on your sister’s head, your cushy life gets thrown into chaos.

Do you have what it takes to risk it all and bring down an intergalactic conspiracy that once again threatens your favorite species (humans)?

High On Life RETURNS as you and your beloved rag-tag team of alien misfits shoot, stab, and skate your way through gorgeous, dangerous worlds all across the galaxy to blow up the EVIL pharmaceutical conglomerate hell-bent on putting price tags on HUMAN LIFE!