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For the past month, we have been sharing weekly recommendations for what we're playing on the Game Pass service. It's an opportunity for us to highlight underrated titles or simply to talk about our favorite games. For this week, though, we need to begin by addressing the elephant in the room: the latest unfavorable changes to Game Pass.

Starting October 1, the company revealed a bevy of changes to its subscription service, with the most notable coming to the service's Ultimate tier — which offers the largest game library plus immediate availability to latest releases from Microsoft's game studios. The new price is $30 a month, increased from $20. Understandably, users expressed dissatisfaction, and numerous voices on social media and in comment sections about their plans to terminate their subscriptions.

It's the end of an era for Game Pass as the once celebrated gaming bargain is no more. Now, gamers have to contemplate if the annual $360 cost for Game Pass's top tier provides value to them, especially as everything else in life continues to rise.

Should you maintain your membership, or looking for reasons to continue justifying it, read on for this week's recommendations. They include a top-tier exploration-platformers of all time, a 2025 Game of the Year contender, and a delightful JRPG sequel. Or, should you prefer to do away with Game Pass, see our guide on how to change or cancel your membership.

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown

If you do happen to stick with your Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription, you’re probably going to need additional reasons 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 multiple Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry games for your $30 a month, but the best perk is Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown.

This side-scrolling adventure makes fantastic use of the series, returning to its origins in a trap-filled labyrinth that’s a exciting to explore. Pair that with exceptionally rich, diverse battle mechanics the genre offers, and you have the recipe for a top-shelf Metroidvania. 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 launched with impressive numbers and a committed player base on PC platforms, but its console player base was supported initially by subscription services (it was also available on PlayStation Plus). The word of mouth alongside its simple availability eventually helped the game reach 2 million players.

Trying a title for several sessions to see if it suits your taste or not is a key advantage of Game Pass, and anyone looking to get lost in a mystery should check out Blue Prince. You play as the heir to an estate and significant wealth, but only if you can find the mansion's secret room. The catch? The building's design is constantly changing, making Blue Prince a procedural game with new information to discover every day. After several sessions with it and have been drip-fed secrets and puzzle clues surrounding the mystery at the heart of its manor, and I'm curious to see where the game goes as I progress further.

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

Am I recommending Ni No Kuni 2: Revenant Kingdom just because the version included on Game Pass is the Prince's Edition and that creates thematic harmony with our previous selections? That remains unconfirmed. What I will tell, however, is that Ni No Kuni 2 is excellent sequel to one of the best JRPGs of recent memory. Although featuring charming animation-style visuals and focus on younger characters, Ni No Kuni 2 doesn't shy away from serious themes, beginning with an apparent terrorist attack on a modern-day city before quickly transporting the main character (a world leader) into an alternate dimension where they find themselves involved in a violent Medieval-era coup. Compared to the first game, 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 have to manage a kingdom. While called the Prince's Edition, but it feels more like king shit to me.