The 25 Best Games on Xbox Game Pass
This article was originally published in 2021, which in the world of gaming is a whole lifetime ago. It has been updated with new picks for 2025.
Eight years since its initial release, Xbox Game Pass is still a solid deal. For a monthly fee that ranges from $10 to $20 depending on the tier, anyone with an Xbox or a PC gets access to a vast library of video games, pulled from a variety of different publishers, which can all be downloaded for free. These aren’t budget titles, either. The library is stocked with legitimate Game of the Year winners, alongside some of the most popular multiplayer titles on live servers. It’s a hallmark of a rapidly changing entertainment industry, which seems to be affecting all varieties of content. Everything, even the Xbox whirring underneath your TV, has embraced the Netflix model.
When Game Pass first launched, Microsoft put all of its games on the service the same day they hit store shelves. That isn’t the case anymore. Brand-new arrivals are now gated off to the Game Pass Ultimate tier, which costs $20 a month. It’s a bummer, but there are still plenty of titles available on the cheaper Game Pass options to keep us occupied. Your first few hours with the subscription will likely have you trawling through the vast archive of offerings, deciding what you want to add to your hard drive. Seriously, there are more than 100 games on the service, including, like, six Madden games alone. If that all seems daunting, we’re here to help. Here are the 25 best games on Game Pass.
Balatro
The design philosophies of tabletop games and video games have been merging lately, and the best product of that strange brew is, undoubtedly, Balatro. Think of it like a poker-ish variant of solitaire, where you’re dealt a giant hand of cards and want to make the best hand possible with your mulligans. (Have three kings? Might as well try to snag the last one for a four of a kind.) The thing is, during each run of Balatro, you will utterly break the physical limits of a standard deck. Maybe you’ll have converted all 52 cards into spades? Or tilt the scoring multipliers in such a way that an ace high is unbeatable? Balatro is wonderfully inventive while remaining structured around a set of rules your grandparents could understand. A masterpiece, through and through.
Banjo-Kazooie
Microsoft bought British gaming studio Rare in 2002, which means that a number of the company’s classic Nintendo titles can be found on Xbox platforms. There is something uncanny about playing Banjo-Kazooie on a machine that’s built to render gigantic game worlds in glistening 4K, but personally, I’m grateful for the opportunity. Nearly 30 years after release, Banjo-Kazooie still runs circles around so many contemporary platformers with its charm.
Celeste
Straight up: Celeste is the greatest 2-D platformer of the last ten years. Each level presents a fascinating new puzzle, navigable through a precise combination of air-dashes, double jumps, and a world-specific wrinkle built into the architecture. It’s beautiful — taking place on a psychedelic nordic mountain in a permanent 16-bit magic hour — and somehow also manages to unfurl a powerful narrative about the debilitations of a panic disorder.
Cities: Skylines
City-building games tend to be a little confrontational with the sheer volume of logistical problems — garbage buildup, water-supply shortages, electrical-grid malfunctions — they toss at the player. And yet, whenever I sink into a lengthy session with Cities: Skylines, I am always downright relaxed. It’s not like the game doesn’t drop all of the managerial overhead in your lap. Cities: Skylines will absolutely ask players to budget for a sewage-pipe extension out of an expanding subdivision. But you’ll rarely feel hemmed in, like you’ve made too many bad decisions and have punted your metropolis past the point of no return.
Citizen Sleeper
Citizen Sleeper won’t be for everyone. This is a text-based RPG in the tabletop tradition — free of combat, almost visual-novel-like in execution — where the gameplay entirely consists of rolling skill checks and hoping for the best. However, if this game gets its hooks in you, it will likely be because of its premise. Players take control of a “Sleeper,” as in, a discarded human exterior left behind by its previous user, whose consciousness has been digitized and uploaded to the Matrix. Your previous body lived on, shackled in dronelike slave labor, before it escaped from bondage by hitching a ride on a freighter. So, think a little bit of Blade Runner and a little bit of Severance. Developing studio Jump Over the Age put yeoman’s work into Citizen Sleeper’s worldbuilding, especially all the other lonely souls on this starship — each of whom seem to be outrunning something, or someone.
Control
Remedy has made wonderfully weird games for decades, but I think Control is the most cohesive interpretation of their worldview yet. On paper, this is a third-person shooter with some fun, physics-y telekinetic abilities. But the game is at its best when you’re exploring the bizarre corridors of the Oldest House and the inner workings of the Federal Bureau of Control — a highly secretive U.S. intelligence division dedicated to paranormal events. You’ll commune with a transdimensional being in the Astral Plane, investigate the case of a haunted fridge, and power through the mind-boggling Ashtray Maze. By the end, you’ll be a believer.
Crusader Kings III
Some management games let you take the role of God, sculpting landscapes down to the molecular level. Others allow you the levers of power over a state, or a city, or even a humble township. But Crusader Kings III is the only title on Game Pass that gives players dominion over a bloodline. It is the high Middle Ages, you’re the head of a landholding family of minor renown, and have eyes on a much more prestigious throne. How do you engineer your ascendence? Simple, by engaging in all sorts of royal skullduggery. Do you align your children in an array of strategic marriages to accumulate a thick dossier of inheritances? Do you arrange a few powerful alliances and go to war? Or maybe, just maybe, do you poison your liege and hope nobody around the fiefdom finds out? Crusader Kings III lets you weave a vast network of blackmail and intrigue. It’s like The Sims for sickos.
Dead by Daylight
Dead by Daylight has evolved from a gory, goofy multiplayer romp to a shockingly nuanced e-sports-adjacent platform. The basics remain the same: Four players take control of survivors attempting to escape a dingy hellhole, while a fifth takes the role of a roaming psychopath trying to kill them. But amid a rapidly thickening cast of characters and a wide variety of different perks to build out your stat sheets, Dead by Daylight almost resembles something like League of Legends in terms of competitive complexity. The good news is you can avoid all of that, take the reins of Michael Myers or Ghostface, and have a blast as a complete noob. Dead by Daylight contains multitudes.
Diablo IV
It wasn’t too long ago that the idea of Activision Blizzard making one of its tentpole franchises available on a rival company’s service would be totally verboten. But after Microsoft purchased the company in 2022 — a deal that sent shockwaves through the industry — we’ve all been witnessing some strange sights. So, yes, Game Pass members can absolutely boot up a copy of Diablo IV. Hell hath frozen over.
Thankfully, the merger has brought a lot of new players to the game. Which is good, because Diablo IV is perhaps the most purely satisfying RPGs on the market. Players are given untold flexibility in the way they flesh out their chosen class, but no matter what journey you take, most of your time here will be reducing the demons of the underworld into pulpy piles of flesh and bone with steel and cinder. Diablo IV is dark, cold, and macabre, but nonetheless it pulsates with gamer joy. There is no better sensation than cracking open a chest, and finding a longsword that deals a 0.3 percent more damage than the one currently equipped.
Dishonored 2
Many games claim to be open-ended sandboxes, but Arkane Studios actually fulfills that promise on Dishonored 2. I spent an hour scaling a clockwork tower, dispatching a series of bloodthirsty automatrons, en route to assassinate an evil inventor waiting in his high office. Later, I discovered that it’s possible to eschew all of those challenges entirely, and instead take him out while he’s enjoying an afternoon tea on the balcony, completely oblivious to your entry. Dishonored 2 is full of those moments of misdirection, and it certainly deserves your attention.
Doom (2016)
Doom’s 2016 reboot is one of the best first-person shooters ever made, full stop. The games industry has pivoted away from the labyrinthine single-player campaigns of yore, where we ration our health bars while blasting away through twisting corridors brimming with blood-hungry demons. The original Doom pioneered this formula in the 1990s, and two decades later, id Software revealed that it still had plenty left in the tank. Hyperkinetic combat, jaw-dropping visuals, and a ludicrously batshit narrative about an evil corporation harvesting free energy directly from the depths of hell. It is total video game excess at its most joyous. Genuinely life-affirming.
Forza Horizon 5
There was a time when the Forza series was the exact sort of stuffy racing-sim that appealed to gearheads and nobody else. (That experience is still available in the form of the stately Forza Motorsport 8.) Thankfully, the team at Playground Games found a way to draw us laymen into its Über-balanced driving physics by, basically, transforming the tenets of the genre into something you’d expect from an old-school Nintendo 64 platformer. Seriously, Forza Horizon 5 has you wielding this vast arsenal of automobiles to explore a huge open world, pick up collectibles, discover hidden jumps, and expand your already massive garage. It’s like the more subdued older brother of Burnout. The best part is Forza Horizon 5 is still getting updates and maintains a huge community of fellow players nearly five years after its initial release.
Halo: The Masterchief Collection
Halo Infinite was intended to be the Xbox Series X’s killer app, and while there is still fun to be had in that open-world oddball, playing it might not fill the Spartan-size hole in your heart. Thankfully, Game Pass subscribers can cop the Master Chief Collection, which remains one of the best deals on the market. You’ll get access to the campaigns for Halos 1, 2, 3, ODST, Reach, and 4, as well as their corresponding multiplayer offerings. It’s a fascinating history lesson; you can go from the primitive Blood Gulch duels of 2001 to the Big Team Battles of 2012 in an instant. The glory days are right in front of you.
Hollow Knight
Countless games have attempted to recapture the magic of Dark Souls since its auspicious release in 2012, but none have gone about it quite like Hollow Knight. The game has all the trappings of the FromSoftware universe — a gloomy backdrop of a decrepit empire, a pile of eldritch lore, nooks and crannies that are intentionally difficult to discover — but all of that is wrapped up in an action platformer. Hollow Knight plays like DuckTails with BloodBorne’s scope. The more you dig, the more you’ll be rewarded.
Inscryption
I can’t tell you much about Inscryption without giving up what makes the game so special. But, at its core, this is a wonderfully moody little deck-builder that is harboring some dark secrets around the edges. Step away from the game board — as your character can do at any point, for reasons that initially remain unclear — and you’ll find a handful of inscrutable baubles furnishing this spooky cabin. Poke and prod correctly, and the gears of this puzzle box begin to turn. After that, you’ll find just how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Little Kitty, Big City
Any subscription service needs to feature a few jolts of serotonin that are quick to download and easy to please, and right now, the reigning champion in the field is undoubtedly Little Kitty, Big City. There isn’t much going on here beyond the title. Players are cast as a black stray in a bulbous, Pixar-ish downtown district, and quickly get into all sorts of trouble. Our kitty topples flower pots, breaks windows, and torments neighbors — empowering a dark fantasy so many human beings possess. What would I do if I was the worst cat in the world? Don’t expect an opus, but do expect a game your mother will want to play.
Mass Effect: Legendary Edition
One of the best perks of the subscription-service revolution in the games business is the way it has made a whole back-catalog of classics easily accessible. This is especially true with Mass Effect, which — before Legendary Edition — was trapped on the Xbox 360. But now, any enterprising gamer can witness the trilogy in full, warts and all. For the uninitiated, Mass Effect is a galaxy-bestriding space opera that pioneered a formula that RPGs rely on to this day. The libertine romance options? The moonlit check-ins with your crew members in between missions? The hybrid of dice rolls and headshots? It all starts here. I’m partial to the middle chapter, which felt like a true blockbuster event back in 2009. But don’t sleep on the ambitious jank of the original, or the wildly controversial conclusion. Mass Effect has become a bit of a tortured franchise in recent years due to some botched resurrections, but with Game Pass, we’ll always have the classics.
Microsoft Flight Simulator
There is a certain stateliness to Microsoft Flight Simulator, almost like it embodies an alternative history where video games prioritized things other than killing an infinite tide of zombies, aliens, and rival players. It possesses a deep reverence for the majesty of flight, to the point of perfectly replicating 70 different aircraft in the source code. You can really get into the weeds here and, with time, master all of the many technical details that come with piloting a 747. But even if you know nothing about planes, Microsoft Flight Simulator allows you to automate pretty much everything except the steering wheel. Banking a left turn into a perfect landing for the first time is genuinely thrilling.
Minecraft
I mean, it’s Minecraft. This game took over the world in 2011 with an enduring core concept: Carve your way through a world made of blocks, and build your own universe with what you find. The fundamental experience, in which the player slowly assembles an empire of stone and survives the Creepers, still works beautifully. But these days, people come to Minecraft for its community and the things they wrought — be that rinky-dink multiplayer mods, or a pixel-perfect recreation of Mordor.
Persona 3: Reload
We are in the middle of the doldrums between mainline Persona games, which is typically when players tend to get bombarded with remasters and rereleases. However, RPG fans have been waiting for a fully modernized version of Persona 3 for ages, so nobody is complaining. Like previous entries in the series, Persona 3 is part dating sim, part Pokémon-style monster battler, but compared to the heist-movie high jinks of 5 or the eternal summer vacation of 4, the game that first popularized the franchise overseas is a tad darker. The townsfolk, who you must become friends with to juice your total strength in the dungeons, are more introspective, guarding maudlin biographies. The narrative is grounded in the specter of death, in ways that can be a tad on-the-nose. (The way we summon our Personas? By shooting ourselves in the head with a phantasmal handgun.) Still, it’s nice to serve as a light in all the gloom. If nothing else, Persona 3 makes you feel like you are doing some good in the world.
Rainbow Six: Siege
There are a lot of competitive first-person shooters on Game Pass, but only Rainbow Six: Siege offers the thrills of scoring a headshot through plaster. Ubisoft’s long-running tactical series got a fresh coat of paint in 2015, complete with a smart synergy of character powers and gadgets. (One operator has a grenade that specifically mutes the other team’s hearing.) The selling point is how modular Siege’s maps are. Doors can be kicked down, walls can be shredded, ceilings can be blasted through. Most multiplayer games ask their competitors to fight on a purely east-and-west scale. Siege asks you to stay frosty from every possible direction.
Sea of Thieves
If ancient Rare games aren’t your thing, consider taking Sea of Thieves for a spin. It first arrived on Xbox’s shores in 2018 with a killer Pirates of the Caribbean conceit and a disappointing dearth of window dressing. Since then, Rare has primed the game with a bounty of new features, making it one of the best co-operative experiences on consoles. You haven’t lived if you and your friends haven’t run your frigate aground on a desert island.
Slay the Spire
Slay the Spire is extremely simple. Players start an adventure equipped with a mediocre deck of cards, and by progressing through the chambers in the dungeon before them, they’ll slowly upgrade the power level of that collection. This mechanic can be found in board games like Dominion and Thunderstone, but it wasn’t fully popularized on consoles until the game made landfall last year. If you ever want to scratch a Magic: The Gathering–type itch but only have about 20 minutes to spare, Slay the Spire is your game.
Starfield
Starfield is an interesting case. Over the last 20 years, Bethesda Softworks has built a legacy on its massive, first-person RPGs — Skyrim and Fallout 4 (both of which are also on Game Pass) — that require a decade’s worth of development time and are rightfully treated like marquee box-office events by gamers. And yet, when Starfield made landfall in late 2023, the reception was fairly muted. It was as if players finally became fed up with some long-standing issues in the Bethesda formula (bugs, jank, and a whole lot of loading screens) that hadn’t yet been ironed out of the code. But, nonetheless, Starfield has found a group of dedicated fans who have lusted over the game’s ability to let them sculpt their dream starship and explore the outer reaches of the Milky Way. It’s worth a download on Game Pass, if only to see if the magic works on you, too.
Vampire Survivors
It really shouldn’t work. Vampire Survivors weighs in at a puny 600 megabytes. It’s rendered in an outrageously garish 8-bit color palette. The combat is basically automated. The soundtrack is mostly MIDI acid jazz. And yet, there is something about Vampire Survivors that gets under everyone’s skin. This is a run-based game about slaying, seriously, thousands of different sprites in 20-minute intervals. That sounds like a tall task, but the builds you can stumble into through the right set of power-ups can break this game in two. A great Vampire Survivors run ends with you setting the controller on the table to savor the bloodlust, while your hero onscreen lays waste to the field without ever breaking a sweat. This game is a miracle, through and through.
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