Gamescom 2026 with one carry-on bag

I flew to Gamescom with hand luggage only. Partly because I am cheap, mostly because I could not think what else I would need for four days. Both of those were true right up until Friday afternoon, when I realised the plan meant carrying everything I owned around a show floor the size of a small town.

Friday 28 August to Monday 31 August 2026. The bank holiday did most of the planning for me.

That bag is the reason I did not play a single game until Friday evening.

Getting there#

Gatwick to Cologne Bonn, then straight onto the train, and the train drops you more or less at the door. No hire car, no hotel detour, no faff. I was inside the halls within a couple of hours of landing, which felt like a win at the time and slightly less like one by hour three of carrying a rucksack.

The bit the publishers spend the money on#

The AAA stands are absurd, in the best way. The Witcher 3 statues are the sort of thing you stand in front of for a while without saying anything. Star Wars had a pod racer. Xbox had a full-size Boomer from Gears of War and a Warthog from Halo, both close enough to touch.

The one that genuinely surprised me was the sim games area. Not a screen and a wheel in a corner, but a digger, a double decker and a normal bus, and you could climb into the bus and play Bus Simulator 2027 from the driver's seat. I did not expect to queue for a bus at a games show, and yet.

The tech halls are the other money pit. ROG devices, high-end PCs and monitors you cannot justify to yourself at home, and XREAL Air glasses, which I had read plenty about and never actually worn. Now I have.

Then there is everything that is not a stand at all. The cosplay is a show in itself, and the standard is genuinely high, close enough that you stop assuming the person in front of you is part of a stand. The merch halls will happily take whatever the games did not.

I walked the whole event, or thought I had, at least four separate times. Every single lap turned up something I had not seen. By the last day I stopped trying to be systematic about it.

The first game I played was Gears of War: E-Day#

Friday evening, and only because I had finally stopped moving long enough to be tired. It was every bit as good as I wanted it to be. Playing an unreleased game behind closed doors on a machine far better than mine, with nobody else in the room, is the sort of thing that stays with you regardless of how the game eventually turns out.

Arc Raiders made me a live target#

The Arc Raiders event was a real-life scavenger hunt. Teams, an arena, a different list of items each, and robots trying to shoot you while you collect them. You wear a helmet that flashes red across your visor and vibrates when you are hit, which turns out to be an extremely effective way of removing any remaining self-consciousness about running around a warehouse.

Genuinely intense. Easily the best thing I did that was not a game.

The indie hall is the reason to go#

Within five minutes of walking into the indie hall I knew where the rest of my weekend was going.

It is quieter. Less queueing, less noise, no light show. Instead you get to play the game and then talk to the person who made it, which changes the whole thing. Someone explaining their own mechanic while you play it, or leaning over to help when you have not understood something yet, is a completely different experience to being handed a controller by someone on a rota.

I love indie games anyway, mostly because they still experiment. Nobody in that hall was adding a loot pack. They were trying an idea to see whether it worked, and some of them did not, and that is fine.

My Steam wishlist took a beating and every developer I told was delighted about it.

Four that stuck with me, for four completely different reasons.

Marupoyo, a tilt-based platformer. I played about a minute of it and immediately thought of my kids, which is the highest compliment a game can get out of me at the moment.

Zibbo Show, a deck and dice builder, tactical and genuinely fun. This is where I got "I have never seen that before", one of my favourite sentences in software and apparently in board games too. It came out of a play I made that produced a score the developer had not expected, helped along by rolling six 5s out of nine dice. I would like to claim skill. It was mostly the dice.

Auditum, which the developer described to me as a "top-down atmospheric survival horror game about a blind teenager searching for his father in a post-collapse Madrid overrun by the undead". Not remotely my usual genre. It sounded like hell and I was completely intrigued, and that sentence is doing exactly what a pitch is supposed to do.

Recur, a puzzle game built around time. I saw it announced a few months ago, decided then that it was right up my street, and finding it in the indie hall with the people who are making it was the best kind of coincidence. Playing it did nothing to change my mind.

I also found a few bugs, which happens when you hand a tester's brain a build that has never met the public. Kept the tone light and nobody seemed too upset about it.

The other surprise was who was there. Teams behind games I had already been watching, and franchises I did not know would be represented at all, We Were Here among them. Turning a corner and finding those people standing next to their own game is a better version of following a studio online.

There is a lot to do that is not playing games#

I tried dozens of new games. I also:

• Did the Arc Raiders hunt.
• Collected swag bags, which I am fairly sure were the subject of a private bet between publishers over who could produce the physically largest one.
• Climbed a wall.
• Went through a bouncy castle obstacle course, at my age.
• Stood on a small surfboard balanced on top of a large rolling pin, which was new to me and remains hard to describe.

The LEGO run, which is the actual story#

Sunday, and I got there very early. Two young children means an early start is not a sacrifice, it is just a Tuesday.

The plan was Blood of the Dawnwalker. The gate opened, I ran, and there was already a queue. So I changed target and went to the LEGO stand instead, because I had spotted that playing it got you a small LEGO Batman figure, which I thought would make a decent souvenir for the kids.

Standing in that queue I found out what the queue was actually for. A high enough score won one of two large LEGO sets, and a short survey afterwards got you a free Joker minifigure. That explained why the LEGO area had a long queue every single time I walked past it for the rest of the weekend.

The game was LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, and the mode was Mayhem Mode, a chaotic time-attack mode from the upcoming Mayhem Collection DLC: cause as much damage as possible as Joker and Harley Quinn. Target score 250,000, with bonuses for hitting objectives and penalties for ignoring them.

I asked the member of staff working the queue for tactics, on the grounds that I wanted every advantage available. He was not what you would call helpful.

The man behind me in the queue, on the other hand, had clearly played it before and gave me everything. Then I got to the front, was asked whether I fancied co-op because a two-player booth had just opened, and he played it with me.

So we planned it. Agreed up front who was doing what, and he translated the bits of the instructions that were in German. One of us went for extra time while the other went for score, we did as many of the objectives as we could to avoid the penalties, and then escaped early rather than pushing our luck. I did check with him that he was happy with that, because my genuine concern was that they would run out of LEGO sets if we took too long over it.

Final score: 330,000.

I could not quite believe it when the guy from the queue came back over to us and I was handed the Batmobile Tumbler from Arkham Knight, with Batman, Joker and Two-Face minifigures inside the set, plus a separate LEGO Batman minifigure on top. Neither of them on sale yet.

Over the moon does not really cover it. A stranger in a queue gave me the tactics, played the game with me, translated it as we went and then came back to see whether we had done it. That is the part I will remember longer than the set.

The kids, who love LEGO, took the news exactly as well as you would expect. Best souvenir I have ever come home with, and I had gone over there for a minifigure.

Later that day: Cologne, the cathedral steps and a Kölsch#

Once the Tumbler was safely back at the hotel I made time to leave the halls and see the city. The cathedral steps are a lot of steps and the view is worth all of them. Then German food and a Kölsch, served the way it is supposed to be, because doing Cologne without the full Kölsch experience seemed like a waste of a trip.

What I would change#

Not much, honestly. Carry less, or find somewhere to put the bag before the first lap. Accept that you cannot see it all and stop trying on day one instead of day three. And spend more of the time in the indie hall, which is the advice I would give anyone going for the first time.

I never did play Blood of the Dawnwalker. Four days, dozens of games, and the only one I set out to play is the one I missed. I am not sure I mind, given what I got instead.

The huge stands are what gets photographed. The conversations with the people who made the games are what I came home with.