"You're not the last Belmont anymore", Trevor reminds his daughter Rose, as they gently sail into a Paris ablaze and ripped apart by monsters. Rose knows it well, as do indie developers Evil Empire. Following their success with roguelike Dead Cells (and its own Castlevania DLC), Konami gave them the keys to Dracula's kingdom, trusting the French team to bring the series back to life after a ten year slumber. It's a heavy holy cross to bear, but Castlevania: Belmont's Curse holds it up confidently.

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It's hard to know where to start when talking about Stupid Never Dies. An action RPG built on style, excess and punk ideology. I mean, within the first minutes of my demo starting, I am flushing undead protagonist Davy down a toilet in an abandoned shopping mall to arrive in a hellish arena.

There is a lot going on.

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Look, before you say it, I know. Persona 4 Golden is held up by some as one of the best and most important RPGs ever. After all, it was the series' Final Fantasy 7 moment, where many of the mechanical and thematic threads of the earlier games finally knitted together and became something greater than their parts. You step into the shoes of Yu Narukami, a Japanese transfer student freshly arrived in Inaba. There, you use your limited time to make friends, study for your exams, and dive into a metaphysical dimension to turn-based battle the literal manifestations of your friends and rivals' twisted perceptions of themselves. Its story and characters particularly celebrated for their honest and painful looks inward at the parts of ourselves best left unseen. I’m a fraud for not having played it yet, with that sin only compounded by having had it in my Steam family sharing library for years. I have no excuse. I’ll face the shame-filled shadow version of myself, eventually.

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On my final day of Gamescom, strolling (running) around the indie area to make sure I don't miss anything good, I stumble upon Wrong Organ’s upcoming Carcass Clad. Set in a wartorn Soviet city, empty of people but littered with tanks wearing coats of Frankensteined cattle corpses (light stuff!), Carcass Clad is a three-player co-op experience that shares the stressful responsibility of piloting a tank and taking down enemy units between those unlucky three.

If you read the name Wrong Organ and thought, ‘Wait, the Mouthwashing team? They're making a multiplayer co-op game?’, I can't fault your surprise. Edwin did interview them about it back in June, but I walked up to the booth knowing the devs themselves and little more, so I was experiencing all of Carcass Clad and its heavy departure from their previous work for the first time.

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