Five Little-Known Game Pass Titles to Dip Into This Christmas

The Season of Giving is upon us: colourful lights adorn the streets, mince pies stock the shelves and festivity fills our hearts. As uplifting as this time of year can be, all the gift-giving is known for not leaving much spare change jangling around the pockets for luxuries like shiny new videogames. It seems that the only option is to stick with the same old tired releases until payday rolls around in the new year, right? Wrong! For those of you with Game Pass, there’s a slew of fantastic and intriguing titles hidden within your game library just waiting to light up your living room in these dark December evenings. I’ve put on my woollen mittens and fleece-lined coat to brave the blizzard of Xbox’s Game Pass catalogue. Upon my return, I’ll prove that there’s more to see with Microsoft’s subscription service than Gears 5, The Outer Worlds, Devil May Cry 5 and the other headliners that hog all the major advertising.

Lonely Mountains: Downhill

Sometimes simplicity can work in a game’s favour. Lonely Mountains: Downhill is a perfect example of this, asking nothing of the player except that they ride a mountain bike down a variety of treacherous, downhill mountain trails. The visuals continue the theme of simplicity, capturing the purity of nature with a vibrant but minimalist art-style. It’s tough —the rider falls off his bike about as easily as a blind toddler with inner ear issues— but recovery from a blunder is instantaneous and the game manages to stay relatively relaxing despite the frequency of failure. It’s like a 3D Trials game if it helped you sink into the seat rather than teeter on the edge of it. There are challenges to complete too, which unlock customisation options, new trails and upgraded bikes; this isn’t merely an aimless downhill riding simulator. Lonely Mountains: Downhill is a superb game to boot up if there are some podcasts or audiobooks that need listening to: I’ll be sticking with this title and that’s exactly what I intend to do with it.

EVERSPACE

The thing with space, is that it’s pretty much infinite and —to the layman— a lot of it looks very similar. That’s why the randomly-generated, roguelike aspects of EVERSPACE work so well, they’re perfectly matched up with the space-faring setting. In the game, players take the role of a memory-deficient pilot stuck in a Groundhog Day-esque memory/time loop. An AI driven spaceship guides him through a myriad of dangers on a journey for freedom and to unravel the mysteries of his past. Along the way, players can expect to earn new ships with customisable weapon loadouts; mine and scavenge for resources; and enter plenty of space dogfights —until they inevitably succumb to the dangers of space that is. Not to fear, death may send players back to the start of the game, but any unlocked upgrades remain and the protagonist retains his memory, so the story doesn’t start from scratch either. There’s more meat to this game than can be found in Lonely Mountains, so I’ll need to play more to speak definitively on its quality as a whole. However, I’m intrigued enough already to recommend this to anyone with even a vague interest in space, roguelikes or dogfighting games.

Supermarket Shriek

Inexplicable is the word to describe Supermarket Shriek. Before I even begin to detail this bonkers title, it’s important to note that it opens without context: there’s no discernible reason behind any of the game’s events and —quite frankly— I hope it never gives one. Players control the shrieks of both a man and goat who’ve piled into a shopping trolley. Conveniently, their combined wails propel the trolley through a series of obstacle courses, races and scavenger hunts set in a multitude of shops, spread across multiple British streets. It’s fun and absurd in equal measures. As the gameplay gets more challenging, the addictive ‘one more go’ quality of the title gets its hooks into a player until —before they know it— hours have passed, and they’ve spent the whole time in a surreal, scream-filled daze. I’ll let you figure out why I speak with such confidence on the likelihood of that particular scenario…

Battle Chasers: Nightwar

With an opening cinematic ripped straight out of a Saturday morning cartoon —that I’d have definitely watched if I were 11-years-old— Battle Chasers: Nightwar is an RPG that revels in its comic-book origins. Set in an existing universe with an established band of heroes, the game mixes Diablo style loot gathering and dungeon crawling with traditional turn-based JRPG combat mechanics. The main cast members each bring a familiar fantasy character archetype to the table while seeming —at this admittedly early stage— to provide enough unique character traits to stand out. Players who take pleasure in the strategy of turn-based combat or find themselves cursed with that insatiable loot-lust should check Battle Chasers out. It’s inspired by classic games, yet manages to feel like a new experience. As a quick side-note: the Battle Chasers comic ended its short run with a cliffhanger in 2001. Reportedly —as a result of this game’s successful kickstarter and positive overall reception— three more issues are in the works, although it’s unclear when they’ll be released. At any rate, it’s always nice to see dormant properties reawakened and given another chance to shine!

Westerado: Double Barreled

I’ve got a recipe to share: boil down the Spaghetti Western genre into a heavily stylised, pixel-art adventure game; stir in the ability to shoot any character at any time, regardless of the plot implications; and sprinkle a detective/revenge plot line over the whole thing. That’s how the brilliantly named developer Ostrich Banditos cooked up Westerado: Double Barreled, a modest title with an ambitious and intriguing quirk. Not only can players shoot any character (as mentioned earlier) but they can also draw their guns to threaten or… erm, ‘forcefully persuade’ individuals in conversation. It’s a surprise to see such a dynamic system implemented in a relatively small-scale game: characters react differently —sometimes hilariously— depending on how trigger-happy the protagonist is. That mechanic aside, Westerado tells the tale of a humble ranch hand in the American West who, after losing his family to a mysterious bandit attack, must hunt down the person responsible and bring him/her to justice. With a tongue planted firmly in its cheek, this title is great for anyone after a somewhat silly, laid back experience that doesn’t ask for too much of a time investment.