When Game Pass first appeared, you’d have been justified in suspecting that the whole thing is just a great big frontend designed to suck people into Xbox’s first-party wormholes like Halo, Sea of Thieves, and Gears of War. But perhaps that’s a bit of a quaint and old-timey way of looking at things, because if there’s one thing Xbox has shown in the last few years it’s that it’s no longer defined by its traditional cluster of first-party IPs.
Game Pass is a pretty solid representation of Xbox’s new platform fluidity and diversity. Its library is sizable, sure, but it also feels carefully curated to cater to a vast span of gaming audiences. Never has that been more apparent than this year, when Game Pass has hosted some of the best indie games of recent memory; the kinds of clever, high-minded games that make the oft-used description of Game Pass as the ‘Netflix of Gaming’ sound a little crude. Here are some of the games this year that show there’s far more to Game Pass than just trying to get you to buy Battle Passes in Halo or cats in Sea of Thieves.
Norco (PC Only)
Game Pass’ rich run of form started earlier in the year with Norco, the wonderfully weird Louisiana-set point-and-click adventure from debuting developer Geography of Robots. Set against the backdrop of the poor, overly industrialised titular town in the near future, Norco oscillates between fantastical imagery and gritty realism, all held together with incredible (and often vile and hilarious) writing, and stunning pixel art. Seriously, exhaust all the dialogue you can in this game to be breasted to some bizarre stories - especially the guy in the French Quarter… with the old hot dogs… and the limo.
Norco’s atmosphere is as thick as the air deep in a Louisiana - its sombre melodies, strange characters and crepuscular settings really evoke a town, like so many in America, that’s been left behind by ‘progress.’ Having been on something of a point-and-click odyssey in recent years, I can say that Norco addresses longstanding issues with the genre when it comes to puzzle obscurity and pacing. By using mini-games to break up the game, it shows that sometimes you need to part with genre conventions to progress the genre itself.
Immortality
Remember FMV games in the 90s? What was once believed to be ‘the future of gaming’ instead became this weird anomaly genre that we’d look back on and laugh about. But for a good few years now Sam Barlow has been on a mission to revive the idea of merging live-action movies with gaming, and Immortality is his most ambitious venture yet.
The game tasks you with finding out what happened to an actress, Marissa Marcel, who was to star in three movies made between the late 60s and late 90s. By scouring footage from the making of these movies, you eventually piece together the story (it’s a really weird one). The performances, writing, and all-round authenticity of these movies to their respective periods, make this a cinephile’s dream, even though it can get pretty nightmarish.
You can also play Barlow’s other two FMV games, Her Story and Telling Lies, on Game Pass.
Citizen Sleeper
Not every RPG needs to tie into some grand story about saving (or, in some cases, subjugating) the world. Sometimes all you need is a quiet, sombre tale that casts you as an escaped AI humanoid trying to survive on a rickety space station controlled by several factions seeking to escape the grip of interstellar capitalism.
You have immense RPG freedom in how you approach the strange denizens of the space station - many with conflicting agendas that you’ll need to navigate. You can be a Machinist capable of digging into the cogs of the station to extend your waning life, spend your precious cryptocurrency on feeding a cat, or stomp around as a no-nonsense Extractor who prefers to resolve things with force.
A bit like Disco Elysium, this game holds true to classic RPG conventions like RNG and dice rolls, which means that not everything will go to plan. If you can get around that and the fact that you don’t actually control an avatar in the world and basically play via a detailed map of the station, then you’re in for one of the most quietly brilliant RPGs of the year.
As Dusk Falls
I’ve already said my bit about the strange static art style of As Dusk Falls and how it takes a bit of getting used to, but push past that and this is one of the best choice-driven interactive movie-type games of recent years. When a trio of brothers on the run from the police and a family moving cross-country all find themselves holed in a roadside motel in Arizona, their lives become intertwined, and your choices will dictate who lives, who dies, and who hooks up with who, among other life-altering decisions.
The quick-time events and dialogue in As Dusk Falls have been simplified to work on touch-screens (up to seven people can play, making decisions-by-committee), and the real charm is in seeing the myriad ways in which the story can branch. The flawed, troubled, and outright broken characters sometimes feel almost too real for some of the action-packed set-pieces the game puts you through.
Metal: Hellsinger
Maybe you need to cleanse your palette of all the mid-high-brow offerings listed above (though I’m sure metal fans would ravenously chew my ear off about the genre’s high-minded ties to classical music). If so, then perhaps you need to descend into the heavy metal rhythm-based hell of this rhythm-based first-person shooter. Taking Doom’s punctuated, flowing combat and turning it into a literal rhythm game, Metal: Hellsinger has you tearing through hell to the deep demonic twangs of bass guitars and bespoke metal numbers sung by some familiar faces (or rather voices) from the scene.
Even if you’re not a fan of the acquired taste that is heavy metal (like yours truly), the music is so well woven into the game’s combat and tone that you almost forget what it is you’re listening to as you merge with the game, ultra-violently shooting and slashing your way through an army of hell’s finest on route to retrieving the protagonist’s voice.