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Over the last few weeks, we've been running weekly recommendations for the games we are enjoying on the Game Pass service. It's an opportunity for us to highlight underrated titles or simply to talk about our preferred titles. This time around, however, we need to begin by tackling the obvious issue: the latest anti-consumer updates to Game Pass.

On Oct. 1, Microsoft announced a bevy of changes to its subscription service, with the most notable affecting the Ultimate plan — that provides the most games available plus day-one access to new games 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 how they were going to cancel their plans.

This marks the conclusion for the service as the former “best deal in gaming” has ended. Now, gamers have to contemplate if $360 a year for the premium plan provides value to them, especially as everything else in life gets more expensive.

Should you maintain your membership, or seeking justifications to continue justifying it, check out this week's recommendations. These feature one of the best exploration-platformers of recent years, a 2025 Game of the Year contender, and a delightful JRPG sequel. Alternatively, should you prefer to cancel your subscription, see our guide on how to change or cancel your Game Pass subscription.

The Lost Crown: A Prince of Persia Adventure

If you do happen to stick with your Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription, you might require more excuses to justify it. A strong argument for paying the extra cash is that you’ll now have access to a suite of Ubisoft+ Classics. This provides plenty of Assassin's Creed games and Far Cry titles for your $30 a month, but the standout benefit is Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown.

This side-scrolling adventure makes fantastic use of the series, taking it back to its platforming roots in a trap-filled labyrinth that’s a thrill to mantle around. Combine this with some of the deepest, diverse battle mechanics the genre offers, and it creates 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 impressive numbers and a dedicated community on PC platforms, but console adoption was supported initially by subscription services (it also appeared on other services). Player recommendations combined with its ease of access eventually helped the game reach 2 million players.

Checking out a game for several sessions to discover if it's your jam or not is a key advantage of Game Pass, and those seeking immersion in a puzzle should explore Blue Prince. You take the role of the inheritor of a property and large inheritance, but provided that you can locate the hidden chamber. The catch? The building's design is constantly changing, making Blue Prince a roguelike with new information to uncover regularly. After several sessions with it and have been gradually uncovering mysteries and puzzle clues surrounding the mystery at the heart of its manor, and I'm curious to see how it develops as I uncover more.

Ni no Kuni 2: Revenant Kingdom - The Prince's Edition

Is this suggestion Ni No Kuni 2: Revenant Kingdom just because the edition available on the service is the Prince's Edition and that makes it tonally consistent with our previous selections? I'll never tell. What I can share, though, is that Ni No Kuni 2 is delightful follow-up to a top role-playing game of recent memory. Despite the whimsical Ghibli aesthetic and focus on younger characters, Ni No Kuni 2 doesn't shy away from heavy topics, opening with an seeming act of violence on a modern-day city before immediately throwing the main character (a world leader) into an other world where they find themselves involved in a violent Medieval-era coup. Unlike its predecessor, the combat is more action-focused — think more like a action RPG than a Pokémon one — and features a truly complex and complex management in which you have to manage a kingdom. It might be the Prince's Edition, but it feels more like king shit to me.