Xbox Game Pass ended October with a bang and November is already off to a great start. The first-party drought is temporarily over with Obsidian Entertainment’s Renaissance-era crime RPG Buses on the way in the next few weeks. However, if you just want to turn your brain off, console owners will soon be able to get their hands on Steam’s most witty hit of the year: Vampire Survivor. Here’s everything coming to the Microsoft subscription service first half of November:
November 1st
The Legend of Tianding — (Cloud, Console and PC)
The Walking Dead: A New Frontier – The Complete Season — (pc)
The Walking Dead: Michonne – The Complete Season — (pc)
November 3rd
ghost song — (Cloud, Console and PC)
November 8th
Football manager 2023 — (pc)
Football Manager 2023 console — (Cloud, Console and PC)
Return to Monkey Island — (Cloud, Console and PC)
November 10th
Vampire Survivor — (console)
15th of November
Buses — (Cloud, Console and PC)
Somerville — (Console and PC)
Vampire Survivor is a clever arcade style bullet hell game which Steam adopted earlier this year for its accessible premise and habit-forming gameplay loop. You choose a character, a map, and then start slaying mobs of monsters while choosing between a cavalcade of upgrades and power-ups over the course of each game. It only takes a minute of play for the stimulus to kick in, and then Dozens more will pass in no time. While best described as an auto-battler roguelike, it’s actually the best 8-bit meditation game of 2022. It was previously only available on the PC side of Game Pass, and after the recent 1.0 release, it’s gone received a lot of new content in Early Access for almost a year.
It is booked by Return to Monkey Islanda nostalgic but confident return to the classic point-and-click adventure series and two of the games I’m most looking forward to for the rest of the year. The first, Buses, is an open-ended medieval art-style adventure game about solving the murder of a friend. The second, SomervilleIt is led by a co-founder of the studio Behind Inside, one of the most beautiful, haunting and impactful games of the last decade. Unlike this game, it’s not a cinematic puzzle platformer. Director Chris Olsen previously said the gameplay it’s harder to pin down than that. What we do know is that it’s about a father trying to reunite with his family during an apocalyptic alien invasion, and the presentation is moody as hell and foreboding.
As always, some games are leaving the service this month. Here’s everything that’s disappearing from Game Pass through November 15:
- Football manager 2022 (pc)
- Football Manager 2022 Xbox Edition (Cloud, Console and PC)
- Art of Rally (Cloud, Console and PC)
- Fairy Tactics (Cloud, Console and PC)
- The next space rebel (Cloud, Console and PC)
- A step from Eden (Cloud, Console and PC)
- supraland (Cloud, Console and PC)
Above all, lots of decent games Art of Rally, but nothing major has moved out of rotation so far this month. If you want a wild modern twist Mega Man Battle Network combining deck building with roguelike mechanics definitely exists A step from Eden one try. It’s a perfect candidate for streaming to your phone.