Umurangi Generation and a new Vampire: The Masquerade game headline this week’s new Xbox releases.
If you haven’t already played Umurangi Generation, then you’re in for a treat when it joins Xbox Game Pass this week. It was one of our best games of 2020, for one thing, but it’s more than the sum of its many, many accolades.
It is a video game, yes, but it’s much more than that. It’s a courier mission with a photojournalism side-jaunt on the descent into authoritarianism in the name of security. It’s a distinctly Māori tale set in a near-future future Tauranga, Aotearoa. It’s simultaneously bleak and strikingly beautiful. Play Umurangi Generation. You won’t regret it.
Elsewhere, RPGs are well-catered for on the Xbox release schedule this week, including Outward: Definitive Edition, which has a survival bent and comes to Xbox Series X|S, and Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong, which is a bit bitey. “Swansong” is an interesting subtitle, given the beloved Vampire universe is on a bit of a resurgence at the moment, with Coteries of New York released a couple of years ago, and Bloodlines 2 still in development.
Other notable releases include the weirdly self-referential Behind Closed Doors: A Developer’s Tale, Divination, in which you play a robot fortune teller, and the very special-looking They Always Run, which is a space opera bounty hunting take, like Flashback by way of Dead Cells.
And let’s be honest, you can never go wrong with a game like Truck Driver.
If this list changes at all, we’ll keep you up to date.
Update: The Xbox Series X|S version of the excellent Deliver Us The Moon releases on May 19.
New Xbox releases: May 16-20, 2022
Monday, May 16, 2022
- TBC
Tuesday, May 17, 2022
- Outward: Definitive Edition (Xbox Series X|S)
- Umurangi Generation Special Edition
Wednesday, May 18, 2022
- Behind Closed Doors: A Developer’s Tale
- Divination
Thursday, May 19, 2022
- Endzone – A World Apart
- Eternal Threads
- They Always Run
- Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong
- Deliver Us The Moon (Xbox Series X|S)
Friday, May 20, 2022
- Deadcraft
- Dolmen
- The Endless Summer Surfing Challenge
- Nirvana: Pilot Yume
- Truck Driver: Premium Edition
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