This year’s Rezzed festival, which returned to Tobacco Dock at the end of last week, felt unconquerable in the best way. Unlike other game expos with their huge show floors dominated by a few key titles, Rezzed featured dozens of rooms and more than 200 smaller games, from Kickstarter millionaire Yooka-Laylee to the idiosyncratic co-operative physical-digital hybrid Vaccination.

With so many games on show it would have been impossible to play them all, but from those I did, here are 12 of my favourites for you to look out for (and a bonus that you can play right now).



Sundered (Thunder Lotus Games)

The aesthetically striking Sundered is a Metroidvania in which a “a wanderer in a ruined world” called Eshe leaps through 2D caverns, some procedurally generated, fighting off hordes of enemies with a sword and a giant (and immensely satisfying) gun. The player can upgrade her skills – which includes deciding whether to use corrupted “Elder shards” dropped by bosses, at risk of her humanity – but only when she dies and re-spawns at the central hub of the regenerated world, so purists will attempt to finish the game without upgrading once.

This top-down action RPG was made – code, art and music – by one man with a penchant for old-school Zelda. The main character is a galactic traveller called Roq who has accidentally awoken an alien race. Equipped with a sword, bombs and hallucinogenic cacti, he explores a pixelated and procedurally generated planet complete with dungeons filled with enemies, puzzles and secrets. A second player can join as his companion “Skybot” Jib, who can scan alien corpses and shield Roq, or as Velle, a black woman with a blaster. Players generate a planet with a six-letter word that acts as a seed, which the developer hopes will encourage speedrunners to search for the generation that can be completed in the fastest possible time.

Tacoma Photograph: Fullbright

The next game from the makers of Gone Home seems an inevitable hit, even if its release has been delayed for some fine tuning. The Rezzed demo for Tacoma provided a tantalising introduction: as a private contractor called Amy Ferrier you explore a few rooms of a space station, using an augmented-reality (AR) headset to watch and hear three-dimensional recordings of the now absent crew (a pleasingly diverse collection of characters), replaying the recordings to do things like note what code one uses to unlock a door, and at the point in which it’s revealed that something has gone wrong … the demo ends. The ability to pick up and examine objects (and then carefully return them) supports the theory that this will be Gone Home in space, but with a larger cast and a more unfamiliar setting this should be an interesting next step for Fullbright.

A very different space experience comes in the form of EXO ONE, one of the most popular games in the always wonderful Leftfield Collection. Players explore a variety of exoplanets as a sphere, using gravity to build momentum, launching from hills to drift through the air (or, when it comes to gas giants, propelled only by clouds), perhaps squashing flat to glide. Appropriately otherworldly, EXO ONE is all about the thrill of touring alien worlds with as much flow as possible.

Rime (Tequila Works)

Rime is a game about childhood and the feeling of discovery, set in an appropriately (almost intimidatingly) huge island filled with puzzles. The child protagonist, occasionally guided by a fox or glimpses of a mysterious figure, explores the ruins of this beautiful world using wordless vocalisations to activate switches that open doors and otherwise set things in motion. Rime is a world to get lost in, as reflected in the resounding disappointment from players at Rezzed when their demos timed out.

Knights and Bikes (Foam Sword)

Another game hoping to replicate feelings from childhood is Knights and Bikes, in which two young girls ride their bikes on an adventure around a fantastical hand-painted re-imagination of 1980s Cornwall (in fact, all but one of the characters is named after a Cornish village). Though it can be played alone, with the computer controlling the other character, it’s meant to be played cooperatively, and the two girls have different abilities: Nessa can throw water balloons, for example, and create puddles that Demelza can then jump in to splash enemies into submission. Occasionally, however, as children are wont to do, they may spontaneously decide to compete instead, perhaps racing for something cool spotted in the distance. It’s testament to the charm of this game that people at Rezzed wanted to play despite the traditional stools having been replaced with stationary bicycles.

Ooblets Photograph: Glumberland

Right next to Knights and Bikes – and also being published by Double Fine – was the equally charming Ooblets, a cute and colourful mix of Pokémon and Harvest Moon. You rock up in a new village and are presented with your first Ooblet, an inevitably cute creature that toddles behind you. On the way to your farm you experience your first turn-based battle with a wild Ooblet that drops a seed. When planted, this seed grows overnight into a second Ooblet that joins your party. It’s early days (the website states a projected release date of mid 2018), but even this short demo was immediately captivating.

The Adventure Pals (Corupted Games and Massive Monster)

Continuing the childhood theme, The Adventure Pals is a 2D platformer in which you (and, if you like, a friend) play as a kid who has a giraffe pal that boosts their platforming abilities by, for instance, rotating its tongue like the blades of a helicopter or using it to latch on to points to swing across large gaps. Absurd and cartoonish, and funnier than you might expect, this was an immediate mood-lifter at the end of the last day of Rezzed.

Pocket Rumble (Cardboard Robot Games)

Half the allure of Pocket Rumble is down to its imminent release on the content-hungry Nintendo Switch, but the other half is its accessibility. With two-button controls and clear, colourful graphics, Pocket Rumble is intentionally easy to learn, with enough complexity to give competitive types enough to play with. One character has a very small cat that can turn into a giant monster that demolishes her foe. An instant classic.

Megaquarium (Twice Circled)

Similar in style to the developer’s previous game Big Pharma (if not quite as serious, Megaquarium is another simulation game with echoes of the old Theme Park/Hospital types. As the name suggests, this one has you manage an aquarium, placing tanks and the requisite equipment, populating them with fish, hiring staff to feed them and scaling up. Apparently the aquarium theme came from a developer’s girlfriend; hopefully she gets a cut of the profits.

The Occupation (White Paper Games)

Reportedly Ken Levine’s favourite game of the show, The Occupation is an ambitious first-person narrative game in which you are an investigative reporter with four hours – both in game and in real time – to explore a government building in an alternate-reality 1980s Britain and learn what you can about the controversial “Union Act”. The idea, not quite fully executed in the Rezzed demo, is that the player should be able to act however they want and have the game respond accordingly: poke your nose in where it’s not allowed and face the consequences, turn up the thermostat and people will open windows, stress them out and they’ll smoke more cigarettes. The developers want any two players to come away from the game with totally different stories, though the story from players of the Rezzed demo seemed singular: a hope the ambition will pay off at release.

Nest (Jonathan Whiting)

If you want something to play now, you should download (for free) Nest from Jonathan Whiting, a talented developer perhaps best known for his work on Sportsfriends. To describe the game would spoil it, but it’ll only take mere minutes to see what makes it great.