The skies and the exclusion zone are calling.
November is a time for reflection, gazing out of the window at a carpet of dead leaves, and convincing yourself that you’ll rake them up some day. Which, let’s be real, is about as likely as you ever clearing your teetering backlog of games to play.
So instead of trying to battle the backlog, let’s embrace it, and dive into the infinite game plunge that is PC Game Pass. This November, I will be taking to the skies, packing supplies for a jaunt around an anomaly-laden wasteland, and honing my reflexes to scalpel sharpness in a game that some (me) are calling ‘2D Sekiro.’ It’s a varied selection, so let’s take a look at PC Gamer’s top picks.Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024
Four years on from its glorious comeback, Microsoft’s iconic flight sim hits the runway once more. With refined mechanics, improved physics, and new avionics tools to play with such as the Universal UNS-1 FMS and Honewell Primus Epic 2 (my personal favourite), developer Asobo is making all the moves to improve on a flight sim that is, by our account, one of the best ever made.
Nice new touches like preflight inspections pull you into the whole holistic flight experience that bit more, while Earth is more detailed than ever, boasting big numbers like over 2000 handcrafted points of interest, thousands of airports, not to mention the procedural generation of 1.5 billion buildings and 3 trillion trees scattered across our planet. Oh, and for the first time, you can land anywhere in the world, with a whole bunch of biomes to explore on the ground.S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl
Back in 2007, the original STALKER was a ruthless, atmospheric open-world shooter that incorporated survival elements—hunger, weapon durability, radiation, injuries that can’t always be patched up with a bandaid—way before it became the norm in gaming.
