Germany has always been big on adventure games. I'm not really sure why that is; I just know that there’s a disproportionately large number of developers and publishers of adventure games there, and players as well. Even today, you can walk into a shop and find three stretching meters of shelf space, four shelves high, stacked with adventure games. Most of these never see an English release, so I've adapted and often find myself playing these games in German, and even attending German trade fairs like the gamescom in Cologne. This year I got the chance to go representing Adventure Gamers, as part of a team of three people including Harald Bastiaanse and Mark Jones, and we had more appointments than ever before. Plus I even discovered more adventure games in the making while walking around the halls, squeezing some extra presentations in between the ones already planned. A pretty exhausting three-day schedule, but definitely worth it!

The gamescom consists of two main parts. One part is the Business Hall, which actually spreads across a pair of halls, each with two floors. It's open from Wednesday to Friday and is accessible only by games journalists and trade visitors (i.e. developer/publisher/distributor). This is where all the behind-closed-doors meetings take place. Booths here are usually sparsely decorated and range from a simple square room with a table and two chairs to luxurious affairs complete with bars and several viewing rooms. The other part is the Entertainment Area, which is where the heavy action takes place from Wednesday to Sunday. Booths here compete for your attention by being the biggest, having the flashiest trailers or the loudest music or giving away the best goodies. Electronic Arts had an actual MiG jet at their Battlefield booth, and I saw quite a few expensive cars just sitting around as decoration. These halls are open to the general public and are usually very crowded, especially on the weekend.

Although the fair officially opened on Wednesday, some publishers like Sony, Microsoft and EA held press conferences and events the day before. None of these were very interesting for adventure gamers, but there was an expo in town called "NotGames", hosted by the Cologne Game Lab and curated by Tale of Tales’ Michael Samyn and Auriea Harvey, so I decided to visit that, stopping at some shops along the route to gaze at all those adventures on display (and yes, I bought some). At the expo, titles like Trauma, Amnesia and The Path were playable, together with other vignettes, interactive movies and artistic… for lack of a better word – games. Although the ones I got to play had fascinating stories, there was indeed no real gameplay and after the novelty of the experience wore off, I quickly lost interest in most of them. It's a pity there was no introduction or explanation for any of the games; there were only computers and devices like iPads sitting alone in the room with a game pre-installed, so visitors with questions or remarks were left in the dark (quite literally, as the expo room was pitch black).

The first real day of the convention wasn't open to the general public, so this was the best day to check out all those big upcoming titles. Even with just press and trade visitors, the queues to see things like Skyrim and Diablo 3 were so long you'd have to wait two or three hours to get your hands on them for 15 minutes or so. I didn't have that much time, because we started off with Alan Johnson of Telltale Games, showing us a new build of Jurassic Park . Alan is a big fan of the movies, and he says that Telltale is doing everything possible to make the game a feast of recognition for everyone who has seen the first movie. Our little AG team then had to split up, as a Konami press conference including Doctor Lautrec and the Forgotten Knights coincided with an appointment with Lace Mamba Global to see the son of the devil in action in Lucius and the lovely-looking garbage on planet Deponia . There were some other unannounced games in LMG’s portfolio, but Claas Wolter was waiting for a couple of final signatures before he could show those, so unfortunately we didn't get to see them.

Our next appointment was with dtp, where Matthias Finke and Mareike Hoffmann showed us Memento Mori 2 , which begins with Lara and Max on their honeymoon in South Africa. Of course, it's not long before their nice little holiday is interrupted by a phone call... but then it wouldn’t be much of a game if they lived happily ever after. The previously unannounced The Lost Chronicles of Zerzura , developed by the Cranberry Production team behind the second and third chapters of the Black Mirror series, is not a horror game but its dark, mysterious setting and plot concerning da Vinci-esque inventions and the Inquisition certainly had me intrigued.

On my way to the Daedalic booth for our next appointment, I came across a poster for The Second Guest , an adventure game that is obviously inspired by Tim Burton, so I popped into the HeadUp Games booth and asked if I could see more of this intriguing episodic game. They were happy to show it right then and there, which meant I was a few minutes late for my appointment with Claas Paletta, who demoed some of the new Edna & Harvey adventure, Harvey's New Eyes , and the beautiful world of The Dark Eye: Chains of Satinav . I've thoroughly enjoyed the PC role-playing games set in the same world, and I am looking forward to this game a lot.

Next I met with Agustín Cordes, whose previous game Scratches I helped beta test. It was wonderful to finally meet him, and Agustín brought an early version of his next horror mystery game, Asylum . There isn't any real gameplay yet, but the entire first floor was explorable and the atmosphere is very foreboding. Just how I like it.

While walking around the Business Hall I also spotted a poster for Phobos 1953 , an adventure game developed by Phantomery Interactive (Outcry), so I decided to try my luck again, once more with success. Tamara Berger from the German publisher UIG Entertainment told me some interesting tidbits about the supernatural Russian adventure concerning the exploration of the human mind and the effects of fear, and also shared some details about their upcoming Portal-style physics puzzler Sunset.

After all these dark and gloomy games, it was time for a sunny, bright, tropical setting at the booth of Reef Entertainment. A presenter for Wizarbox was more than happy to oblige by showing us Captain Morgane and the Golden Turtle , which is set in the same universe as the So Blonde games. Steve Ince is responsible for the story once again, which this time gives us insight into the youth of Morgane Castillo and how she became a pirate captain.

For our final appointment of a tiring day, we investigated a reported theft with Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson, looking at a pearl necklace found in a fish tank, trying to determine if it was the one reported missing. Wael Amr from Frogwares explained to us how the series has grown over the years and how they have always listened carefully to feedback from the community. In The Testament of Sherlock , Holmes himself is the one being accused of theft and fraud, which definitely puts a different spin on the sixth adventure for the great detective.