Last week, we got a look at five indies coming to Xbox in the next two years. All of them are in various stages of development, but we saw gameplay for each, and asked the developers all our burning questions.
Winter Burrow, Outbound, Hela, and Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault look like they fill the cosy game niche, while The Alters is a choice-based RPG. They all bring something different to the table, though, offering a good amount of variety among Xbox’s upcoming indie titles.
Winter Burrow
TBA 2025
I had the chance to play Winter Burrow at Gamescom last year, but the latest preview shows off what happens a little further into the game. Winter Burrow is billed as a “cosy” survival game, and its presentation certainly gets that across. However, during the presentation, we were repeatedly shown all of the ways that the adorable little mouse can die (freezing, starving, losing a fight), so it’s not without risk.
The devs describe Winter Burrow as Don’t Starve meets Animal Crossing, so despite the cosyness you’re seeing in the screenshots, the team isn’t trying to hide that this is, at its core, a survival game. It’s just much more streamlined than your usual survival fare; you have less to keep track of – both in terms of needs and resources – and more of a focus on exploring the area around you. On the whole, I can see this being a great Game Pass release, appealing to those who are put off by more hardcore survival games out there but want something more intensive than your typical cosy game.
Outbound
TBA 2026
Next up is a game I wouldn’t quite label cosy, but, instead, laid back. Outbound is about venturing out of the city to live in a campervan, giving you an open world to explore. We didn’t get a great sense of the scale of the world during the demo, but that’s not the pull here. Instead, it’s the crafting and customisation systems.
Outbound has a day and night cycle, and when the sun sets, you set up at a campsite. From here, it’s a standard crafting affair, but what caught my attention was the mini house customisation menu. By opening up your van, you get a small area to build your own living space, and the limited size reminded me of challenging myself to create tiny homes in The Sims. It looked incredibly satisfying in Outbound, and even more so as you can build both inside of the van, and on top of it.
There are some metres to keep track of, like the charge on your van and a couple for your own health, but this seems to be a very relaxing game on the whole.
Another selling point is that this can be played in multiplayer, with you and up to three other players sharing the van together. I can see this being the better way to play, as you split up duties and build your portable home together.
Hela
TBA
Hela comes from Windup Games, a studio formed by the devs who brought us Unravel, and it certainly shows. I don’t mean that Hela looks anything like Unravel – this looks much, much more ambitious – but that charm is undeniably there, even if the setup is quite different this time.
In Hela, you play as a rat, and you’re let loose in a world inspired by the Scandinavian countryside. You’re a witch’s familiar, and your mission is to take over her various tasks while she’s unable to do so. In practice, this is really just an excuse to get you exploring and solving various puzzles, with a mix of platforming and using the game’s physics creatively.
Hela is both single-player and multiplayer. Some puzzles require multiple players, but if you’re playing alone, you can create a clone of yourself.
In one example that we were shown, the player needed to get past a swarm of bees. So they drag a cake off a table, causing them to move over to it and freeing up the path. The devs say that Hela will be full of unique solutions like this, describing it as a “playground for experimenting” where you’re encouraged to “explore, and find the magic around you”.
The Alters
TBA 2025
This game is like nothing else at the showcase, but honestly, that could probably be said for any showcase where it’s featured. The Alters has been on my radar since I spoke with its star, Alex Jordan, at Gamescom last year. Here, Jordan plays… well… everyone.
The premise is that our lead, Jan Dolski, has to build a crew to help him get off of a hostile planet he’s crash-landed on. The catch? The crew is made up of several clones of himself. They aren’t all the same though – these Alters are versions of him that made different life decisions and thus have their own skills. This also means they have wildly different personalities, and they will clash, which is exactly what I’m looking forward to most.
While we saw some gameplay – building up a base, trying to put together a plan to escape the planet – we also saw the less action-packed side of The Alters through the conversation system. These RPG-like dialogue trees let you try to find common ground with your Alters, and we’re told we can make choices that impact the story.
One of those choices is which Alter you choose to create. We’re told we’ll be limited to eleven Alters, and that we can’t make all of the possibilities in a single playthrough. I am thoroughly looking forward to seeing how that plays out when The Alters launches later this year.
Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault
TBA 2025
This sequel is, like its predecessor, a storekeeper roguelike mashup. This time, however, the devs tell us that they want to go further on both of these aspects of the game, so if you liked the first Moonlighter, you’re getting more of what pulled you in.
There is one major difference, however – the jump to 3D. While we have the same set-up of going off adventuring to find loot, risking what we find if we want to dive in further and further with each run, the dungeons will have more to throw at us this time.
The roguelike elements aren’t just limited to the combat portion of the game too, as there are also randomised perks you can get when you’re selling the items you find. The money you make gets spent on better items for when you venture out again, so it looks like a satisfying loop where the roguelike elements bleed into everything you do.
On the whole, it’s always been the indies that keep my Xbox Game Pass subscription ticking. Hell, I fondly remember 2022 for this reason, as a drought in triple-A releases made me try out games like The Forgotten City, Scorn, and Citizen Sleeper. With more on the way, it shows that Xbox is still platforming these releases that work so well on Game Pass, and hopefully, they will manage to stand out from the crowd when they launch over this year and next.
- Number of Devices Concurrently
-
Five, with Friends & Family (in limited countries)
- Number of Accounts
-
1 Primary Account Holder