At Gamescom 2025, Cosmo Tales was easily one of the most unexpected booth visits on my schedule. I spoke with project lead Zdeněk Kvasnica about that original version of the game at the time. I walked into Bohemia Interactive braced for another tactical military sandbox, only to find Kvasnica pitching a vibrant family adventure starring a talking, space-faring van. The build was shockingly playable after just a few months of prototyping: short missions, dimension shifts, boss encounters, collectible stickers, comic panels, and a roadmap marking dozens of worlds.
Fast-forward to Gamescom 2026. I returned to Bohemia’s booth eager to see how much that galaxy had grown. Instead, I found out that almost everything I played last year had been thrown out the window.
The strange part is that the game may have gained more than it lost.
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“We Are Screwed”: A Mountain Cabin and Zero Cell Service
Even pitched as a compact family adventure, the initial scope was bleeding out fast. Bohemia had locked a strict two-year production window with a fixed budget and zero wiggle room. The breaking point arrived last November. The dev team walked into Kvasnica’s office with a blunt reality check: they simply couldn’t ship the game they had designed within the remaining schedule.
The fix required an old-school development retreat: a mountain cabin, a few crates of beer, zero internet, and no phones. By Sunday evening, the sprawling linear blueprint was dead. Instead, the team pulled out a single combat minigame that both the devs and playtesting kids loved, promoting it to the project’s new core loop.
Some Cosmo Tales photo recap from Gamescom 2026:
“We ended up with this idea,” Kvasnica recalled. “And I said: let’s go make it. Let’s go build it.”
Your Kid’s First Roguelite
That cottage epiphany turned the next 9 months into a complete structural rebuild. The result is an arena-based run-and-gun roguelite designed around fast perk synergies, snappy runs, and pure arcade momentum.
The story and characters survived the purge, but the design priorities flipped. Instead of pacing players through bespoke scripted milestones, you dive into arenas, clash with rogue machines, level up, and assemble broken builds on the fly. In a charming Saturday-morning-cartoon twist, those malfunctioning bots aren’t actually evil—they’re just missing vital parts. Beat the encounter, patch them up, and they happily switch to your side.
Bohemia sums up the pitch with brilliant brevity: your kid’s first roguelite.
Czech Automotive History, But Weaponized
The Škoda 1203-inspired flying van from last year is no longer flying solo. The garage now pulls iconic models straight out of Czech automotive history, each bringing a fundamentally different default playstyle to the table:
- Škoda 1203: Rapid-fire, machine-gun-style spray for direct pressure.
- Škoda Felicia Fun: Lobbing heavy grenade-style explosives.
- Škoda 110 Super Sport «Ferat»: Precision shooting that handles like a dedicated long-range sniper.
From that baseline chassis, randomized perks let you shape your build as the run unfolds, while the sticker system from the 2025 prototype survives as stackable passive buffs.
The shift solves a brutal production problem without needing dozens of bespoke, throwaway story missions. Bohemia divides the run into combat arenas (or “tiles”) bundled into rooms. The spaces themselves are tight and handcrafted, but each run feels distinct thanks to your vehicle choice, the perk pool, and randomized challenge mutators tacked onto completed areas.
Designing for the Attention Span
Loop-based gameplay naturally faces a hurdle when kids are holding the controller: a ten-year-old might happily blast robots all afternoon, but listening to identical scripted voice lines on repeat will kill the magic instantly.
To counter fatigue, narrative drops are tied directly to run progression. Clearing arena tiles and progressing through “rooms” unlocks deeper lore beats rather than cycling the same dialogue. Replaying cleared zones introduces optional, randomized mutators: speed trials, harder difficulty modifiers, and a 1-HP survival challenge where you start on the brink of death.
There’s also an unapologetic retro ethos behind the pivot. When debating how to save the project, Kvasnica thought back to what hooked him as a kid playing on his mother’s work computer: Lunar Lander, Prehistorik, and Commander Keen. Games from an era where story took a backseat to pure, uninterrupted gameplay. Cosmo Tales retains the vibrant finish of a modern Saturday-morning cartoon, but under the hood, its philosophy is straight out of the DOS era.
The Road to Early Access
Cosmo Tales hits Steam Early Access on September 3, 2026, rolling out with three core “Tales.” A straight run through the initial content takes roughly 5 to 6 hours, though the roguelite loop and alternate car loadouts will stretch that significantly. The current demo covers Tale One, doubling as an accessible onboarding ramp.
Completion times vary wildly depending on who is at the wheel: younger kids take about 60 to 90 minutes exploring the mechanics, while Bohemia’s internal studio speedrun record sits at a blistering 7 minutes flat.
The post-launch roadmap is already moving:
- Late 2026 Update: A dedicated asymmetric local co-op mode inspired by Donkey Kong. An adult handles vehicular navigation while the kid mans the turret and triggers perks, creating intentional, hilarious couch chaos.
- 2027 Plans: At least two more narrative Tales, expanded vehicle rosters, new biomes (like the desert biome the studio couldn’t squeeze into the Gamescom build), and console ports.
Glowing Bank Cards and Planetariums
The wildest turn of the interview happened outside the game engine entirely. While the team was rewriting the core codebase, Kvasnica was busy pitching the IP across completely unexpected industries. Partnering with Česká spořitelna (Erste Group), Bohemia launched an initiative teaching digital and financial literacy to children. It’s not just a logo licensing deal: kids attend workshops to learn about digital safety and smart budgeting, play tailored scenarios in Cosmo Tales, and even get access to a standalone companion mini-game integrated directly into the bank’s George mobile app.
Midway through our conversation, Kvasnica pulled up promotional materials for an unexpected real-world tie-in: an actual, functional Cosmo Tales kids’ payment card that lights up whenever tapped at a terminal. Instead of nickel-and-diming families with microtransactions or predatory pay-to-win mechanics, they are using institutional partnerships to fund the IP while doing something genuinely positive for the community. And speaking as a parent, that kind of human touch is impossible not to respect.
Final Take: Cutting Scope to Save Soul
The cynical headline here writes itself: Studio panics, slashes content, slaps a roguelite label on it. Technically, that happened. But being hands-on with both iterations tells a very different story. The 2025 build was a classic case of feature creep: too many dimensions, too many minigames, and a handcrafted scope that a modest team could never finish without burning out. The 2026 build answers the brutal question every game must solve: what does the player actually do for 80% of their time?
You pilot a weird space-faring Czech car. You dodge plasma bolts. You assemble cracked weapon builds. You wipe out, tune your engine, and jump straight back in. The game got tighter, more focused, and far clearer about what it wants to be. If anything, the roguelite structure may ultimately make it larger in practice, with repeat runs, different builds and new challenges extending its lifespan well beyond a straightforward campaign.
And Cosmo Tales itself may be turning into something larger still: one of Bohemia’s most distinct new properties outside the military sandbox.
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