You learn a games show by its handouts. London Games Festival’s Pocket Guide was folded into thirds: a venue map of Level 1, a numbered key to ninety-six games, Main Stage talks for Thursday and Friday, and the Playlist Rewards card — scan your ticket at any booth you played, cash in at the merch desk for stickers and keyrings while stocks lasted. It fit in a back pocket.
New Game Plus is the consumer expo at the centre of the London Games Festival, and the festival put it inside a converted exhibition hall at White City for the first time this year. A hundred playable games, mostly small teams who’d rather you played their thing for ten minutes than read their press release. Devolver had a corner. BitSummit’s Japanese delegation took up a row of booths, Italian developers showed under the Lazio Innova banner, and Northern Ireland Screen rolled in with its own pavilion.
The vibe was friendly without being pushy. Compared to the booth-arms-race energy of the bigger expos, it felt like a slightly nerdy book fair where the books move.
I was there on a press badge from my former employer. Now I’m writing this one for Popkulturist. These are the five games I’d still recommend three weeks later.
1. 'Heave Ho 2' — Le Cartel Studio / Devolver Digital
Four sets of disembodied limbs trying to grab a key off a ledge while one player giggles too hard to control their own hands. That was a typical run of 'Heave Ho 2' at Devolver’s corner. Le Cartel Studio (French, also behind last year’s 'Mullet Madjack') is bringing back the limb-wrangling co-op platformer that became a small Switch phenomenon in 2019. Each player controls a pair of disembodied arms, climbing levels by grabbing surfaces and pulling.
The sequel adds more puzzle scenarios and key-hunting maps, but the joy is structural. The game makes you bad on purpose, and being bad together is the whole point. Devolver is publishing, summer launch is the target. Two strangers in the queue ahead of me met, played for ten minutes, and exchanged Steam handles on the way out. I’m still rooting for those kids.
2. 'Keeper' — Double Fine Productions
I knew 'Keeper' by reputation. The walking-lighthouse adventure Double Fine released last October ended up on Eurogamer’s top-fifty list and won Gamescom’s Best in Show. I did not expect how it played in person.
You move a stone tower across a post-human island with a small seabird called Twig perched on your roof, and the game tells you nothing. No dialogue, no tutorial pop-up. You walk because walking is available, and the island reveals itself sideways. Lee Petty’s direction (he did 'Stacking' and 'Headlander') cares more about setting up moments that catch you off guard than about puzzle design itself.
The art is doing most of the work: visual notes from Dalí and 'Nausicaä', lit half by bioluminescence. I stopped trying to figure out what the game wanted and started looking at it the way you look at a slow-moving painting in a museum room you’ve wandered into by accident.
3. 'Ratatan' — Ratata Arts / TVT Co. Ltd.
Hiroyuki Kotani has been trying to make a 'Patapon' sequel for fifteen years, and Sony, by every indication, has not been interested. So in 2023 he announced 'Ratatan' at BitSummit, ran a Kickstarter that raised ten times its target, and arrived in London with the result.
It looks like 'Patapon' (the rhythm army on flat-colour silhouettes, the four-button command system) and plays close to it. You tap in time with the beat, your eyeball-army moves in response, and the screen fills with up to a hundred small bodies at once. The difference is structural. 'Ratatan' is a roguelite. Runs are short, and four-player online co-op is the showcase mode.
Full release lands 16 July on PC, Switch 2, PS4, PS5, and Xbox Series; it’s been on Steam Early Access since September. Last year it took BitSummit’s Vermilion Gate, which is their gold medal.
4. 'Reforj' — 4J Studios
4J Studios, the Scottish team who spent ten years porting 'Minecraft' to consoles, finally has a project of its own, and 'Reforj'’s booth at New Game Plus was running at full chat. The pitch is simple: a voxel sandbox like 'Minecraft', except every block can be sculpted into slopes and curves through a mechanic the studio built into its own engine (called Elements, charmingly named). The studio is calling its testers “Pioneers,” which is exactly the sort of branding you commit to when you mean it.
'Reforj' is on the Xbox Insider track in pre-alpha right now, with no public launch date, but the build had functional procedural worlds and four-player multiplayer working. Gareth Coker ('Ori', 'Halo Infinite') is doing the music. If 4J had wanted to spend the next ten years porting 'Minecraft' to a fourth console generation, they could have. Going at it from the other direction takes more nerve than the press release will tell you.
5. 'Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard' — Poncle / Nosebleed Interactive
Of all the games at New Game Plus, the strangest pivot was Poncle’s. 'Vampire Survivors' made the studio (and a chunk of indie’s last three years) almost by accident: auto-shooter mechanics and screens full of monsters that produced a hypnotic snowball loop nobody saw coming.
'Vampire Crawlers', out on Steam, Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch since 21 April, is none of that. It’s a turn-based card-driven dungeon crawler. Poncle is calling it a “BLOBBER” — a kind of first-person grid-based RPG that hasn’t been popular since the 1990s — and the deckbuilder layer borrows from 'Slay the Spire' by way of 'Balatro'. You play cards in ascending mana order to trigger combos, and getting a 12-card stack to chain correctly produces a different feeling from the original’s let-the-numbers-do-the-work flow.
The Switch booth was occupied every time I walked past. I don’t know whether the bet pays off, but I know it’s why people sit down.
I left through the back exit at six and made a hash of getting back to the hotel. Swapped messages with the organisers most of the way; they were patient with someone who had not had to navigate London before. By the time I’d figured out the Central line I’d already wishlisted three of the five.
