Xbox Game Pass is one of the best deals in video games. Here is a list of our favorite Game Pass games, including Clair Obscur, Avowed, and Stardew Valley.
Microsoft’s Game Pass subscription service enters 2025 bigger than ever, after finishing 2024 by adding two massive day-one blockbuster games: Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.
In fact, as we approach the midpoint of 2025, Game Pass is enjoying perhaps its best year ever, with great day-one releases on a monthly basis (if not weekly, or even within the same week) while the back-catalog offering continues to be very solid. In the first four months of the year alone, we’ve played and loved blockbuster role-playing games Avowed, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered as well as indie gems Blue Prince, Citizen Sleeper 2, and Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders, and much more besides.
Microsoft just keeps dropping brand-new, original games to enjoy, on top of maintaining an impressive back catalog that spans everything from the original Diablo and StarCraft to epic AAA fare like Assassin’s Creed, Grand Theft Auto 5, Fallout, and Halo. You’ll find many of the Polygon team’s favorite games from across the years here, including the likes of Inscryption, Balatro, and We Love Katamari.
To help you sort through it all, we’ve put our heads together and curated this list of the 25 PC and Xbox Game Pass games that you should be checking out if you subscribe to Microsoft’s flagship service.
Our latest update to this list on April 30 added Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which virtually everyone at Polygon is playing. It was a tough choice between this and two other recent additions that have been hugely popular with the team, Oblivion and Blue Prince. We may add these in future updates — if Microsoft can just slow down for a second.How we pick the best games on Game PassAvowed
Where to play: Game Pass on Windows PC and Xbox Series X
You can scarcely get a better demonstration of what Game Pass is all about than Obsidian Entertainment’s role-playing game Avowed. It’s the kind of game that used to fill release schedules: an original story and a competent, characterful take on a beloved genre, made by an experienced team, with a scope that’s just enough to feel satisfying, but not too much to overwhelm. But in 2025, games like this are rare, squeezed out by bloated mega-productions in well-known franchises.
Their savior comes in the form of Microsoft’s publishing model and its Game Pass offering, both of which are crying out for medium-sized hits to keep rolling. Avowed slots in perfectly, showcasing not just Obsidian’s well-known writing talent but also some of the most striking art and well-honed combat the studio has ever produced. It’s also just a fun place to be — until the next one comes along. —Oli Welsh
Read Jay Castello’s full review of Avowed.The Case of the Golden Idol
Where to play: Game Pass on Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X
Are we ready to call Color Gray Games’ The Case of the Golden Idol one of the greatest detective games of all time yet? Often compared to Return of the Obra Dinn, and not just for its historical setting, this fabulously intricate point-and-click mystery unravels a sinister conspiracy across 40 years as 12 apparent murders in the 18th century, centering on the titular golden idol, an object of power, intrigue, and maybe magic.
The grimly hilarious and grotesque illustrations lay out crime scenes of great complexity in the game’s “exploring” phase, where you collect information and clues. In the “thinking” phase, you fill out details of the crime and the participants in a virtual notebook, but you’ll probably need to use a real notebook of your own to stay on top of the intricate logic puzzles within the cases, and the sophisticated echoes between them. A richly rewarding and atmospheric puzzle classic. —OW
Read Nicole Carpenter’s full review of The Case of the Golden Idol.Cities: Skylines
Where to play: Game Pass on Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X
There’s a reason Cities: Skylines is often held up by literal city planners as the pinnacle of the genre: It doesn’t fall into the trap most city-builders do of treating all its resources and systems as mere data points on a list, gaming by way of a spreadsheet. Cities: Skylines is the real deal, letting you get into the weeds of urban micromanagement and understanding how and why metropolises morph in response to the needs of their citizens. (It’s also proof that planned cities are a crime against humanity.)
Cities: Skylines forces you to grapple with the beautiful, messy truth of what your citizens are: people. In other words, Eric Adams, please play Cities: Skylines! —Ari NotisCitizen Sleeper
Where to play: Game Pass on Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X
Citizen Sleeper is a hyper-stylized tabletop-like RPG set in space. In a capitalist society, you find yourself stuck on a space station. You’ll need to manage your time, energy, and relationships to survive the collapse of the corporatocracy and the anarchy that follows. You’ll roll dice and make decisions to get paid and help those around you.
Aside from its interesting setting, Citizen Sleeper features a vibrant cast of impactful characters, making each interaction memorable. It follows an excellent trend of tabletop-inspired games to encourage you to find your own objectives, and to revel in the story when things fall apart. It’s packed with tense decisions, great writing, and striking visuals. —Ryan Gilliam
Read Alexis Ong’s full review of Citizen Sleeper.Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Where to play: Available via Game Pass on Windows PC and Xbox Series X
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has a ridiculous title, but the game is mostly sublime. A deeply French role-playing game that recalls the Final Fantasy games of the 2000s, it’s both very sincere and unafraid of its own silliness. Put that vibe together with a rewarding turn-based combat system, endearing characters, arresting art direction, and a moving, grandiose story, and you’ve got a game from smallish debut developer Sandfall Interactive that punches far above its weight.
In a steampunky world inspired by the Belle Époque, the very Paris-coded city of Lumiere is threatened by the Paintress, an ethereal entity who claims the lives of everyone of a certain age each year, then brings that age down by one. Now it’s the turn of the 33-year-olds, in their last year, to set off on a perilous expedition to stop this remorseless doomsday clock. It’s a morbidly clever setup for a richly satisfying fantasy adventure and a brilliant RPG. —OW
Read Isaiah Colbert’s full review of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.Cocoon
Where to play: Game Pass on Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X
A mysteriously beautiful, exquisitely paced puzzle adventure from some of the minds behind Limbo and Inside, Cocoon shares those games’ wordless delivery and stark aesthetic. But it’s more abstract and contemplative, and perhaps even more involving. It’s a game of pocket universes, one inside another, inhabited by buglike techno-organic life-forms — including the player character, a scurrying little beetle-thing. The conceit is that you can step up out of one reality and move it around another on your back, in a gently glowing sphere that also interacts with the world around it, before diving back in — or swapping it for another entirely.
Like so many puzzle adventures, it’s essentially a game of locks and keys, plus the occasional ingenious boss fight. But like the very best of them — Fez, for example, or Portal — Cocoon plays games with perception and reality that rewire your brain in pleasantly tortuous ways. —OW
Read Grayson Morley’s full review of Cocoon.Control
Where to play: Game Pass on Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X
Before Alan Wake 2, the Remedy Entertainment renaissance began in 2019 with this astonishingly confident and technically adept action-adventure set in a strange, modernist nightmare. Part spy thriller, part cubist horror, Control is a game about what happens when architecture turns against you. As Jesse Faden, an agent of the Federal Bureau of Control, you explore the confounding, bigger-on-the-inside Oldest House, the paranormal headquarters of the FBC, which is under attack from a malevolent force intent on corrupting reality itself.
This is all pretty heady stuff, and Remedy delivers it with its usual cinematic eye, technical polish, and storytelling prowess. (The game is loaded with references that connect its universe to that of the Alan Wake games, if you want to join some dots.) In combat, Control is a pretty enjoyable third-person shooter, but the real fun is in the nonlinear exploration of the Oldest House’s impossible spaces. —OW
Read Dave Tach’s full review of Control.Crusader Kings 3
Where to play: Game Pass on Windows PC and Xbox Series X
Imagine if Succession unfolded between the years 867 and 1453, in the throne rooms, banquet halls, and torchlit back corridors of European castles. Monarchs rise and fall, small-time fiefdoms become bona fide kingdoms, and nonmarital children exact revenge after decades of being shunned. Crusader Kings 3 is the story of the Roy family if we could pick any character, see them through to their death, and assume control of their orphaned heir — at which point, we can completely alter the course of the dynasty through petty gossip and underhanded murder attempts.
In Paradox Interactive’s vast suite of grand strategy games with complex systems that give way to thrilling emergent storytelling, none have made me cackle with glee quite as much as Crusader Kings 3. In one playthrough, I wed my firstborn son to the daughter of a powerful neighboring king, only for said daughter to declare a holy war on me one decade later.
