Now that 2025 has begun, new games are slowly trickling onto Xbox Game Pass. While heavy hitters like Avowed and South of Midnight aren’t here just yet, Microsoft is kicking off the new year by bringing back two amazing indie titles to its gaming subscription service and bringing some entertaining survival games down to the Game Pass Standard tier on console. If you’re looking for something to play this weekend, these are the games that I’d recommend.
Road 96 is a narrative adventure game about teenagers attempting to escape a fictional country called Petria, which is run by an authoritarian machine. It couples the choice-driven structure of Telltale adventure games with a roguelike structure, as each run technically follows a different teenager trying to get to the border. Some are more successful than others, and players can even die if they make the wrong decisions. It makes your individual experience as a player feel more special compared to other choice-based games. As Road 96‘s themes will only continue to become more relevant this year, it’s perfect to kick off 2025 by playing Road 96 on Xbox Game Pass.
The PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S versions of Road 96 are now available through PC Game Pass, Game Pass Standard, and Game Pass Ultimate. It’s also on PS4 and PS5 via the PlayStation Plus Extra game catalog and Nintendo Switch.
Like Road 96, Devolver Digital and Phobia Game Studios’ Carrion also returned to Xbox Game Pass this month. The idea behind Carrion is that it’s a reverse-horror game where players control the grotesque monster that’s killing people rather than being the one running and hiding from it. The result is a game with a 2D Metroidvania-like structure where players slowly become a more powerful mass and annihilate anyone who gets in their way. It’s a testament to how there will always be creative ways for game developers to recontextualize preexisting gaming cliches, and it’s worth playing if you’ve never tried it before.
The PC and Xbox One versions of Carrion are available across Game Pass Ultimate, Game Pass Standard, and PC Game Pass. It’s also part of the PS Plus Extra subscription on PS4 and PS5 and available on Nintendo Switch, iOS, and Android.
If you’re the kind of person who has lost countless hours to games like Stardew Valley or Fields of Mistira, then you’ll enjoy My Time at Sandrock. In My Time at Sandrock, players slowly build up a desert town by gathering resources, farming, constructing buildings, and fighting any threats to the town. The fact that My Time at Sandrock is a more ambitious 3D open-world game also sets it apart from similar titles.
While the PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S versions of My Time at Sandrock have been available as part of the Game Pass Ultimate catalog since the summer of 2025, Microsoft made it available to Game Pass Standard subscribers earlier this week. It’s also on PS4, PS5, and Nintendo Switch.
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.