Destructoid Checkpoint Special Edition #3 - Still echo the songs of Lettenhove

CDPR is back on the Path - and so is Geralt

And so, dear readers, we’ve completed our second day at Gamescom 2026, having checked out a big handful of games, including (objectively) the best game of all time - The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Specifically, though, we attended CDPR’s amazing booth at the Gamescom business center, where it built an entire cinema for preview purposes.

I didn’t get to get my hands on Songs of the Past, that was handled live by CDPR’s own staff, but me and a few dozen others were brought into a proper theater, with a huge screen, to see what’s new with Witcher 3’s first DLC after 10 whole years. And man, was it something.

It is set in Lettenhove, or Letten as the game itself calls it, Dandelion’s birthplace and, well, viscounty. His rich family is having trouble in paradise, and in the preview, we find that the mischievous troubadour is missing from his home and town, with Geralt now tasked to go and search for him after having strange dreams of a deadly well. He talks about that well a lot. A lot.

The main mission we got to see for an hour is packed with long cutscenes, heavy dialogue scenes, and a bunch of high-octane action which, apart from emerging from the Witcher’s swords, also came from the all-new hook weapon that he can use to bring enemies into the fray and even execute them on the spot in cool slow motion animations.

Everything about the expansion screams The Witcher 3, as if not a single day had passed between 2016 and today. However, I do have to note that the writing has experienced a marked drop in quality compared to the rest of the game, but that only makes sense since it’s not the same writers working on the expansion. It’s still early to call anything out, though, because we won’t be seeing Songs of the Past prior to 2027, but I just had to mention it.

We talked to some folks, too

And while this presentation was all fine and dandy, we didn’t really get to talk with the developers, unlike Patrice Desilets, the creative director of 1666: Amsterdam. I poked around his brain a bit to see how the studio is reacting to the game’s lukewarm response on Steam, primarily due to performance, and I was assured that patches are going to keep dropping for the game and not rely on big early access updates to drive things forward.

Additionally, Desilets revealed to me that major historical figures will come into the game and play a significant role in the plot. While he didn’t reveal many names, he dropped probably the most important one: Rembrandt, and, like Da Vinci, I am positive he’ll be a great influence on what’s happening in the land of tulips.

The Wolf Among Us 2 and Remastered are both amazing beasts (literally)

I also sat down with The Wolf Among Us 2 developers and had them walk me through one of the stages in the game, also as a hands-off experience. This was because not everything was complete yet, and so the devs wanted to ensure the integrity of the presentation stayed intact. However, I was allowed to make decisions in dialogue choices, and boy did I try to make the worst ones possible.

And I also got to see their consequences. A lot was placed on reactivity as the devs described it, with each decision, whether in gameplay or dialogue, having some sort of repercussion, minor though it may be. Furthermore, I witnessed how well a third-person camera works in The Wolf Among Us 2, which will provide a significantly different experience to the first game.

It was really cool to look at and go through, and maintained the same level of excitement and quality as the original. But speaking of the original, I also played the remaster, and it’s just such a straight up improvement over the actual game that it’s genuinely shocking. Every part of the graphics and the art was touched up, whether to an extreme or just a little bit, while the lighting got a complete overhaul with real-time shadows mixed with hand-painted visuals.

Everything looked so sharp, and the colors popped like never before. I am super excited to go through the game again, which will also contain deleted scenes that contain moments from the story that were removed for a number of reasons but nevertheless are cool to see.

There’s some charm in the little things, too

Yesterday, I also checked out an indie game called Wilderings, which is a combination of Soulslike and Roguelike but targeted at a more casual and relaxed audience. It was brutally difficult, and never in a million years would I ever have expected this cutsy cozy-looking game to throw such a challenge at me.

It was still early in development, but man did it show promise, both as a sort of satisfying hack-and-slash and some kind of environmental simulator that’s trying to remind us to pick up our trash after us. I liked what I saw, and the devs will definitely have more to show down the line.

Path of Exile 2’s sword is finally coming, and I got to play a bit with it but also watched game director Jonathan Rogers take it to town. Suffice it to say that I sucked, and Rogers showed us that the sword is probably going to be the most complex and versatile weapon in the game. In the right hands, it will easily achieve overpowered levels, but not in mine though.

Warhammer 40K: Total War was a brutal and incredible experience. It comes out in 2027, and I cannot wait to see it. I was the fourth person out of hundreds to beat CA’s battle challenge, which pitted my Ultramarines against a bunch of Orks equipped with all sorts of voodoo-powered weaponry.

The campaign map is comprehensive and triple-layered: there are settlements, then planets, and then systems, all of which you will have to manage and pay attention to to maintain control over them. Orbital support can be devastating if you have ships in the sky, and it helped me overcome the Orks on several occasions.

Factions are heavily customizable, too, so there’s a ton of depth for everyone to play however they want.

Cologne is almost over

With Thursday down, we’ve got Friday and Saturday left to worry about. Business centers close on Friday, which we’ve reserved for indies, so we’re going to hop onto games that we missed out on over these past two days for our final edition coming out on Sunday morning.

Cologne has been incredibly fun so far, and I can’t wait to tell you about all the great things I’ve seen on the floor today.