Despite some recent turbulence involving price hikes, with more players questioning the value of Microsoft's subscription service in 2025, Game Pass remains a strong offering for Xbox owners. It packs hundreds of games and constantly adds new titles, including the hottest releases like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Hollow Knight: Silksong, Balatro, Atomfall, Doom: The Dark Ages, The Alters, Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, and many more.
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Xbox Game Pass is unquestionably worth the subscription fee, but which of the available games are the best use of your hard drive space?
Outside new releases, the Game Pass roster includes a huge number of universally praised games from the past few years in every genre, perfectly suitable for players who don't chase trending titles and just want to pick whatever fits their mood. With offerings for every taste, let's take a look at some of the best games currently available on Xbox Game Pass (as of November 2025) that are so great that players will most likely want to replay them again and again.
Slay the Spire
So Many Roads to Take and Possibilities to Try Out
Xbox Game Pass has some incredible roguelike offerings for fans of the genre, currently featuring acclaimed indie titles like Slay the Spire, Hades, Vampire Survivors, and many more. Due to these games' very nature, they're built to be played over and over, as players enjoy randomized variations, honed gameplay loop, and cross-run progressions that constantly unlock new combat possibilities.
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Slay the Spire is the perfect example of that, designed for multiple runs with each of the four playable characters, as players unlock new combat skills, experiment with relic combinations, and try to defeat the Corrupt Heart superboss. Each run takes players around one to two hours, but to actually “slay” the boss and complete the game, several victories with each character are required, so players are in for quite the journey in mastering every character's combat and building the perfect deck if they want to succeed.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
A Nuanced Story Well Worth Experiencing Again
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 ended up as one of the best day-one Game Pass releases ever, standing among the highest-rated new games of the year, and poised to take plenty of prestige awards in the coming months at The Game Awards 2025 and beyond. From innovative combat and rewarding exploration to stunning visuals, music, characters, and story, Expedition 33 represents everything that a modern RPG should strive to achieve.
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Clair Obscur accomplishes a rare feat for a story-driven game: the next playthrough could be even more satisfying, as players already know every plot twist and can pay attention to subtle hints and clever foreshadowing generously scattered throughout the game's earlier chapters. On top of that, it's a special treat to fully enjoy combat that players have already mastered while experimenting with character builds and inventing new game-breaking combinations of skills, weapons, and pictos.
Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord
Less About the Story, but Rather for Inventing Personal Goals
For hardcore audiences, Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord alone could keep someone busy for months on Game Pass. This deep blend of open-world medieval RPG and grand strategy isn't really about a traditional single-player campaign — it's an ever-evolving sandbox rooted in history where the total time played depends entirely on the goals players set for themselves in each new save.
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In Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord, player actions dictate the flow of the entire narrative, and every fan can delve deeper into the game's elements and mechanics they enjoy the most. From forging alliances, building and upgrading fortresses, to aggressive conquering with large-scale battles of full-fledged armies, Bannerlord is an engrossing experience that could be overwhelming to start. Once everything clicks, though, and players become familiar with its intricacies, it can be too satisfying to just keep playing the game over and over.
Resident Evil 2
Two Playable Characters, Great Gameplay All Around
Amid all the huge games available on Game Pass that offer hundreds of hours of play, Resident Evil 2 Remake is relatively short, taking just around 8 to 9 hours per run, but it's easily among the most essential Game Pass titles that players would most likely choose to play two, three, or even four times. There are several reasons for that.
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First, this is a true survival horror masterpiece, the perfect modern remake, and the title is currently ranking among the best in the iconic Resident Evil series. Second, there are essentially two separate campaigns playable back to back, one for Claire Redfield and one for Leon Kennedy. What's more, each campaign also changes slightly depending on which character players choose first, bringing the total number of runs needed to four. Given how great it is to play Resident Evil 2, hardly anyone will complain about that.
The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim
Offers Plenty of Reasons to Keep Returning To
Yes, Skyrim has managed to get on this list as well, because how could it not? An essential open-world RPG by Bethesda, TES 5: Skyrim remains one of the most-played single-player titles on Xbox Game Pass year after year. Given that players can easily install various mods and unofficial patches on console to customize and enhance their experience (and new mods keep coming every month), few other fantasy games on the service can match Skyrim's endless replay value for RPG fans.
When it comes to reasons to keep returning, Skyrim offers plenty, be it trying new mods, experiencing different story paths and quest branches, joining new factions, or simply continuing to explore the world and master new activities. Even if players skip the main quest on repeat playthroughs, it's not unusual to boot Skyrim up again every now and then just to lose a week or two in it.
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