The Best Xbox One Games

If you’ve ever asked yourself, “What if Fallout: New Vegas had spaceships?” then Outer Worlds is your game. It’s a sci-fi RPG set in colorful and creative open worlds, with memorable characters, tough choices, and adorable alien lizardfish. You play the role of a colonist left adrift by one of many greedy corporations that rule the outer reaches of space. You can stick with the companies seeking to tame and colonize space or band together with dissidents seeking a life outside corporate chains—or forge your own path. 

Bringing one of the finest game series ever created together in a remastered release that includes the three original games (with DLC), Mass Effect: Legendary Edition is a must-have title. Take on the mantle of Commander Shepard and battle to save the galaxy from certain doom with your hand-picked crew of colorful characters. There’s plenty of third-person combat in this action RPG, but it’s the well-crafted storytelling and relationship building that make it truly special.

If you somehow missed the trilogy, you are in for a treat, but even if you completed the originals years ago or never stopped, replaying Mass Effect is good for your mental health. The Legendary Edition isn't in Game Pass, but the individual titles included are.

This game is as charming as it is gruesome. You take on the role of a gleeful, always-dancing Grim Reaper named Felix. Your job is to arrange circumstances to end the lives of poor mortals, and this plays out against a background of funky beats and thoughtful puzzles. While you dance around the environment, positioning everything just so, you have to avoid the sun and stay in the shadows.

Also, Patrick Stewart is in it? It’s hard to describe, but well worth buying—or you can get it with Xbox Game Pass or Game Pass Ultimate.

After 2006's macabre platformer Limbo proved to be one of the most enjoyable indie titles available for the Xbox 360, people wondered—OK, we wondered—if Danish studio Playdead could meet its own bar for the following generation. We needn't have worried. Inside begins with the same gloomy monochrome that made Limbo so affecting, and adds a healthy dose of danger; it's not just the treacherous environment you have to worry about as you navigate the world, but people and things that are actively looking to kill you.

You will die, and you will die often. But when the game enters its final act, you'll be treated with that rarest of gaming moments: a true "what the f*ck?" spectacle—a jaw-dropping hybrid of body horror and slapstick that you'll feel, fittingly enough, inside.

If you've ever wondered what a Shawshank Redemption game might feel like, this is it. You must execute a meticulous plan to escape from prison, and you do it entirely with a partner. Just one of you needs to buy the game, and it's playable over Xbox Live or locally via split-screen. The focus on cooperative play leads to some tense and exciting scenarios, including (but not limited to) climbing a shaft together and hiding in a laundry hamper.

It's not a flawless game, but couch co-op is all too rare these days, and the camaraderie you'll build with a friend is worth the admission. It's included in Game Pass.

Styled after old black-and-white cartoons, Cuphead is fast, tricky, and beautiful in motion. It's a sidescroller that proves that 2D isn't out of style just yet. Developed by a small team, it is also one of the most aesthetically impressive games of its generation. And if you think getting into fights with a bunch of cartoon pastiches will be easy, you are sorely mistaken. Cuphead will be a struggle, certainly, but it'll be a charming one.

This creative, comical, carefree adventure melds dungeon exploration and gentle puzzles with slick combat and inventive boss battles. You play as a crow employed as a reaper and tasked with collecting the souls of the dead. There’s a top-down isometric view on enticing environments that harbor countless secrets to uncover. Combat is a mix of hack and slash and ranged fire as you cut through the seriously weird and wonderful creatures standing in your way. Boss battles present layered challenges that get increasingly tough but stop short of frustrating. 

Shades of old Legend of Zelda games poke through here and there. It's skillfully put together and polished, and the biggest criticism we can level at Death’s Door is that it’s over too soon. 

This might be the best curatorial exercise in AAA games: The first four mainline Halo games, packaged together and designed to be experienced in a variety of ways. Want to play every level set on Earth, in a playlist? Do it. Want to just jump into the multiplayer from any of the individual games, or all of them? You can do that too. You also get Halo 3: ODST and Halo Reach for a total of six titles. The collection was marred by some bugs and rollout problems upon release, but it's now the definitive way to experience one of the best first-person shooter franchises in gaming history. It's included in Game Pass. 

This entry is one of the best in the Gears series, according to critics. An adult take on war trauma, Gears 5 brings gravitas and refreshing perspective to the long-running third-person shooter series. It's set against the backdrop of a never-ending war we've seen play out in the earlier four entries and follows in the footsteps of last year's God of War by taking a well-worn franchise and turning a critical eye toward the development of its own characters and world. 

On top of that, the third-person action gameplay is just as polished and satisfying as ever. It's included with Xbox Game Pass and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate.

Puzzle games can't win. Either they're not as clever as they think they are, or they are as clever as they think they are, which is often somehow worse. Either they shoehorn otherwise compelling brainteasers into a threadbare story, or they're so bent on drawing you into their world that the puzzles suffer. These maddening intersections are exactly where The Witness stands.

The brainchild of Jonathan Blow, who managed to thread most of the genre's needles with 2008's Braid, it places you on an abandoned island, where you slowly, sloooooowly begin to make sense of things by solving a series of ever-escalating puzzles. (And even the early ones aren't easy.) It's at once entrancing and infuriating, in the best way possible. We think.

This spooky platformer haunted arcades in the 1980s and spawned several sequels on various consoles over the years, building a well-deserved reputation as one of the toughest series around. Playing as the brave knight Sir Arthur, you must fight your way through graveyards, swamps, and castles teeming with zombies, demons, and other bizarre monsters to rescue your princess. The latest incarnation conjures nostalgic joy with storybook art, fresh arrangements of classic music, and devilish gameplay. It can still frustrate, but saves are more generous, there are four difficulty levels, and co-op gameplay adds much to the fun.

Fortnite has taken a lot of the mainstream attention, but PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds popularized the idea of a 100-player, last-person-standing battle royale first. It's less zany than Fortnite, but more serious players (or players who dislike building) may like it more. It's intense and a ton of fun. Updates since the game's launch have added snowy environments and a snowmobile to traverse them. It comes with Xbox Game Pass and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate.

It may have an animated aesthetic with backdrops that look like a more serious version of recent Rayman games, but Ori and the Blind Forest is no easy walk-to-the-right sidescroller. It is a deep platforming action-adventure—kind of in the vein of Metroid or Castlevania games—and brutally difficult at times. Your goal is to return light to the forest, and you slowly become a very capable little fighter as you progress. Read more about it here. It has since been followed by Ori and the Will of the Wisps. It's included in Game Pass.

It’s always tricky to port a building simulation like Planet Coaster to consoles, but sometimes you crave a gentler kind of gameplay on your Xbox. If you were a fan of Rollercoaster Tycoon and Theme Park World, you will feel at home here. Tutorials guide you in the arts of roller coaster construction as you try to find the perfect balance of excitement, fear, and nausea to delight park visitors. You can delve deep into park details if you like to micromanage, but a lot of the complexity is optional. The career mode provides a fun challenge, or you can build your own park from scratch, and there’s plenty of interesting player-created content to download. It's included in Game Pass and Game Pass Ultimate.

I wish I could tell you that Sea of Thieves is flawless in every way. It's not. The core story and missions are not fleshed out, and the world can feel lifeless at times. That's if you play alone. If you have two to three friends ready to sail the seas with you, the open-ended nature of the game can become a strength. Manning a small sloop or massive galleon takes a lot of teamwork, and fighting off other players (or skeleton crews) while taking on the wind and sea is truly exhilarating. It's free if you have Xbox Game Pass or Xbox Game Pass Ultimate.

Firewatch is sad, slow, and beautiful. A game that's almost a short story of the sort you'd find in The New Yorker, it's the tale of a man in the wilderness trying to find a way to live with his past. As wildfires build on the horizon, you'll explore the Wyoming wilderness with care and earnestness that's rare to find in games. Campo Santo created, in Firewatch, one of the most subtle, adult, and moving stories ever told in a video game. It plays with the storytelling conventions of games, almost crafting a traditional narrative before revealing something quieter and more intimate.

Forza Horizon 4 is the culmination of a series of free-roaming, exciting racing games, and a work of genius for anyone who likes to drive digital cars. Set in a stunning digital rendition of England, it has a bustling, engaging world of drivers and vehicles, race tracks, and off-roading obstacles.

Some games like to fashion themselves as vacations, taking the players to exotic locations and letting them experience things they couldn't otherwise. The idea of driving cars around England isn't, maybe, the most ambitious vacation idea anyone has ever had. But Forza Horizon 4 makes it seem like one of the best. Like many games on this list, it comes included with Xbox Game Pass and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate.

There's no easy way to describe Control. On the surface, it's a third-person action game, but it plays like a mystery thriller that would make David Lynch proud. In the shoes of an agent of the Federal Bureau of Control, Jesse Faden, you explore an endless skyscraper called the Oldest House, while trying to unravel the mysteries surrounding the supernatural threat known as the Hiss. I know, right? If you like genre-bending games with weird premises (like Silent Hill), you'll love Control. You can read more about it in our full review. It's included in Game Pass.