Weekly Post 9

Table of Contents

Recap

Everything is great, cause we are on vacation. We spend the first week of family + girlfriend holiday mostly hiking around the Eiffel, and Luxembourg. We also did a bit of an unplanned visit to the gamescom in Cologne (which isn’t too far from here). My girlfriends family decided to stay the full day, and I simultaneously got an offer for some not used tickets, so that worked out perfectly. I have never been there, and was positively overwhelmed with everything. I especially enjoyed hanging out in the indie dev area after we walked around the whole event, talking to the devs themselves about their games.

Note regarding images

Lots of images incoming, sorry. As last time, press on the images to see them in full, I can not be bothered to properly insert them I’m not an image guy. And when you hover/long press on them you get more details.

Some impressions from the landscape around here.

The whole area is build from vulcanic stone, which they don't get tired to mention; and here they are mining it. Look at the cute baby nutrias being there all by themselves and eating the plants. This is a local waterfall with a bit of a hard hike leading to it, but very much worth the effort. This is a warning. Do not go to Bad Bertrichs. This is a dead town, and you will have wasted every minute getting there and being there. Let it rest in peace.

Then we have the lovely area of Calmont, where some high quality wines are produced in mind boggling hard manual labour, the steepest vineards in Europe.

Mosel on the right. Mosel on the left. This is the average German train station. Beautiful sun/sky, and you might be able to see the steep vineyards in the background. If not, just imagine really steep hills.

Then we visited Luxembourg.

They build the town into the stone walls, and its beautiful. Here is a random view down, alongside of the river. The train bridge got extended behind the old one, which works great. They have very low flying planes all the time. This is a neat light matrix near where we parked. Its huge, and its colourful. I love this photopoint with the tree rigt after it.

And lastly, gamescom. The pictures are from my girlfriend/her mum, because I was too busy being awestruck to actually take some without people in it. So thanks :)

Sadly always a big queue, I would have loved to give it a shot, big lego game fan. Huge Cult of the lamb booth, I really liked the game, didn't quite get if they announced a sequel here or a DLC or whatnot. Not enough blood for my taste. Look at the big dune monster. Or this... fortnite lama? I guess? Or this huge pirate boat... wtf what is happening. These people are definitely happening. Not convinced about their idea, definitly a good booth.

Culinary highlight

It is not that easy to find vegan restaurants in this area, so that is a nice challenge. But there were always tasty options, for example one local dish called Döpnuts/Döppekuchen which Wagners Landhaus served with well done smoked tofu.

Currently watching/reading/listening

We continued with Wednesday a bit, and steady progress with Wind and Truth.

Games

So many great indie games from gamescom. I will make a short list with all the indie games I tried, please whishlist them it helps them massively with getting discovered by other people. Shoutouts to

  • Smash n Grab, a reaction skill based beat ’em up where you play a robot and racoon breaking into places and stealing stuff.
  • Travel Pack, a relaxed tile hopping games where you roll a dice and collect appropriate resources.
  • The Dropouts, a heavily from Life is Strange inspired mystery game with a great art style and some cool new ideas, e.g. you get to set if you want to experience jump scares.
  • Swan song, a puzzle game from experienced video and board (!?!do you know how hard it is to make commercial board games!?!) game makers, which looks and feels so great, and the devs are so lovely.
  • Tiny bookshop we didn’t actually get to play, but that there were always people playing speaks for itself and what we saw looked really good. I will probably give it a shot and report about it in detail. You manage a cozy bookshop.
  • Ikuma - the frozen compass is another game which we really wanted to play and just never got to cause there was always a queue. Its a coop game, you play either the husky or the person, who are stranded and have to find a way home, looked like a lot of fun!
  • And I have to ofc mention Mars Attracts, which comes out in early access in three weeks. Please whishlist and buy it, it is such a great theme park builder and you get all the gruesome Mars Attacks! humor, it is so good.

As always, make the best out of your day!