🔗 Share this article

For the past month, we have been sharing weekly recommendations for the games we are enjoying on the Game Pass service. This is a chance for us to spotlight hidden gems or simply to talk about our preferred titles. This time around, though, we need to begin by tackling the obvious issue: Microsoft's recent unfavorable changes to Game Pass.

On Oct. 1, Microsoft announced a series of adjustments to its subscription service, with the most notable affecting the Ultimate plan — that provides the largest game library plus immediate availability to latest releases from Xbox Game Studios. It'll now cost $30 monthly, increased from $20. As expected, users expressed dissatisfaction, and numerous voices on social media and in comment sections about their plans to terminate their subscriptions.

This marks the conclusion for Game Pass as the former “best deal in gaming” is no more. Instead, players must consider if $360 a year for the premium plan provides value to them, especially as daily expenses continues to rise.

Should you maintain your membership, or seeking justifications to keep it active, check out our current picks. They include one of the best exploration-platformers of all time, a potential award-winner from 2025, and a delightful JRPG sequel. Or, if you're inclined to cancel your subscription, see our guide on how to change or cancel your membership.

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown

Should you decide to keep your Ultimate membership, you might require more excuses to justify it. A strong argument for paying the extra cash is that it includes to a collection of Ubisoft titles. This provides multiple Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry games for your $30 a month, but the standout benefit is Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown.

The 2D Metroidvania brilliantly leverages the series, returning to its origins in a trap-filled labyrinth that’s a thrill to mantle around. Pair that with exceptionally rich, most varied combat the category includes, and you have the recipe for a premium exploration game. Pair it with both Hollow Knight: Silksong and The Rogue Prince of Persia and the value becomes clear on a quarter of your annual fee.

Blue Prince

This investigative puzzle title Blue Prince debuted to strong sales and a dedicated community on PC platforms, but console adoption was supported initially by subscription services (it also appeared on PlayStation Plus). The word of mouth combined with its simple availability eventually helped the game attract two million users.

Checking out a game for several sessions to discover if it's your jam or not is a key advantage of the service, and anyone looking to get lost in a mystery should explore Blue Prince. You take the role of the heir to an estate and large inheritance, but provided that you can find the mansion's secret room. The challenge? The mansion's layout is constantly changing, making Blue Prince a procedural game with new information to discover every day. I've spent a few hours with it and have been gradually uncovering mysteries and hints surrounding the mystery at the heart of its manor, and I'm eager to discover how it develops as I uncover more.

The Prince's Edition: Ni no Kuni 2

Is this suggestion Ni No Kuni 2: Revenant Kingdom just because the version included on the service is the Prince's Edition version and that makes it tonally consistent with our preceding two recommendations? I'll never tell. What I will tell, though, is that Ni No Kuni 2 is excellent sequel to one of the best JRPGs of all time. Despite the whimsical Ghibli aesthetic and focus on younger characters, Ni No Kuni 2 doesn't shy away from serious themes, beginning with an seeming act of violence on a modern-day city before immediately throwing the protagonist (the literal president) into an other world where they find themselves involved in a historical power struggle. Unlike its predecessor, the battles are real-time — think more like a Tales game than a Pokémon one — and features a truly complex and complex management in which you must oversee a kingdom. While called the Prince's Edition, but that sounds more like king shit to me.