Today is the opening day of Gamescom, the Cologne expo that is now the biggest event in the video game calendar. This year, I am not among the 300,000-odd crowd descending on Germany, but I did watch the two-hour livestreamed opening-night broadcast yesterday – so you don't have to. Here is all of the most interesting news, arranged by theme because I am deeply bored of writing straightforward lists of games and trailers. News that will annoy Xbox fanboys the most There was a new trailer for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Bethesda and MachineGames's new first-person adventure, in which longtime video game actor Troy Baker seems charmingly thrilled to be playing Indiana Jones. It'll be out on Xbox and PC on 9 December – but it was also announced that it will be coming to PlayStation 5 in spring 2025.

It has been a year with no major new console launches and where the industry has seen strikes and cuts with thousands of workers being laid off. The opening night of Gamescom is often an opportunity for a big shiny night to get fans all excited for the year ahead. Setting the stage for the next 12 months, here are the biggest things we found out from Europe's biggest gaming show in Germany. In a year when games became films, and films became games, the convention centre in Cologne saw a night all about the big trailers. This year, Borderlands has taken attention for its movie adaptation starring Cate Blanchett and Kevin Hart. That film received some of the year's harshest reviews, but that has not scuppered plans for a new game in the mainline series.

Last year, NVIDIA unveiled DLSS 3 with frame interpolation, which used its AI-driven rendering accelerator to add extra frames to games. Now at Gamescom it's introducing DLSS 3.5, which adds Ray Reconstruction, a new feature that will use the company's neural network to improve the quality of ray traced images. It'll be available for all RTX GPUs--unlike DLSS 3's frame interpolation, which only works with RTX 40-series cards. NVIDIA says Ray Reconstruction will replace "hand-tuned denoisers with an NVIDIA supercomputer-trained AI network that generates higher-quality pixels in between sampled rays." That's similar to NVIDIA's original pitch for DLSS -- making low-res textures look better thanks to AI -- and it could potentially lead to better ray tracing performance as well.

Madison Karrh's booth at Summer Game Fest 2022 was on the far right side of the demo area, hugging a wall at the front of the small industrial space in downtown Los Angeles. Her game, Birth, was one of the first projects you'd see after grabbing a swag bag, but it was easy to overlook in a sea of neon pixels and mainstream names like Street Fighter, Cuphead and Sonic. Birth is a thoughtful game of bones, puzzles, loneliness and decay, rendered in earth tones and captivating, hand-drawn vignettes. In a Day of the Devs cluster at Summer Game Fest, the Birth booth was a bubble of respite from the fast action showcased on surrounding screens. "Showing Birth at conventions feels like putting my whole, raw, beating heart on a table in front of a bunch of strangers and asking if it is enough for them," Karrh told me a few months after Summer Game Fest. Birth is, essentially, a game about death.

Games follow a seasonal rhythm, and perhaps because I have spent my career writing about them (take that, school careers advisor!), Absolutely nothing happens in winter, ever. Spring is often when the most interesting games appear – the slightly offbeat big releases or ambitious indie games that want to make a splash after the Christmas rush. In summer, E3 and Gamescom and all of the other showcases look ahead to the future. Autumn is truly the season of games, when the Fifas and Call of Dutys and Assassin's Creeds come out, and everything else either competes with them for attention, or scrambles to get away. The world's biggest games convention, Gamescom, marks the shift between summer and autumn.

In the morning company meeting, we have a Google doc where everyone comes in and writes that they're OK or says if they've changed their location,

A slightly shorter missive this week as I'm on my way to Gamescom in Cologne, a convention I attended for the first time in 2006. I played the then-unreleased Nintendo Wii for the first time at my first Gamescom. A few years later, I got a look at Project Natal, Microsoft's mad motion-controlled game experiment that later became the Kinect. I once had the uncomfortable experience of being driven around Cologne in a limo for 20 minutes, while being shown dodgy footage of a licensed Stargate online game that was never released. For more than 15 years, I have honed my journalistic technique by plying tipsy, jetlagged American game developers for rumours after a few pints of Kölsch by the river.

Welcome to Pushing Buttons, the Guardian's gaming newsletter. If you'd like to receive it in your inbox every week, just pop your email in below – and check your inbox (and spam) for the confirmation email. I spent the latter half of last week in London for the Bafta Games Awards – a ceremony whose existence still seems to surprise people, despite the fact that they've been running in some form for 18 years. I suppose it doesn't help that the institution is literally called the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, but video games are a big deal at the UK's prestigious arts organisation, more so now than ever. It's never been a paid thing, though I have eaten a shameful number of cocktail sausages during jury deliberations.)

Publisher Devolver Digital also revealed its next big indie game called "Cult of the Lamb," an action RPG with roguelike and dungeon crawler elements. Players assume the role of a possessed lamb and build a flock of deceptively cute woodland creatures to become the biggest, baddest satanic cult around. It's developed by Massive Monster, the creators behind "Adventure Pals," a platformer whose art and humor took a page from cartoons like "Adventure Time." Its release date is scheduled for 2022.

It took me four tries to beat the first major enemy in our Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice ($60 preorder on Steam) demo. Just a slightly more powerful soldier than the mobs around him, a named Samurai General commanding nameless hordes. Time and time again I marched towards him though, having dispatched his troops, and was killed by the sweeping swings of his sword. As much as it's tempting to lump all of From Software's games into a "Souls-like" umbrella, the studio's proven skilled at reinventing what that term means--from Demon's Souls to Dark Souls, Dark Souls to Dark Souls III, and to the faster-paced fan favorite Bloodborne. Sekiro has plenty in common with its brethren, to say nothing of Team Ninja's Nioh, and yet it's also uniquely Sekiro, and that means going through the entire Souls learning process once again.