There are so many great games to play on Xbox Series X/S, which is made even easier by Game Pass Ultimate, which presents new games to you every month at no extra cost. Microsoft’s first-party releases are very hard to to miss, but there are hundreds of fantastic Xbox games that could easily have gone under your radar.
That’s where we come in. Here are three of the best Xbox Series X/S games you’ve probably never heard of.
Tinykin
Not to be confused with Nintendo’s Pikmin series (though definitely at least partially inspired by it), Tinykin is an absolute gem of a puzzle-platformer that you should seek out. Especially if you enjoy collectathon games and have fond memories of the N64 era.
You play as a human boy named Milo who’s been shrunken down to insect size and teams up with the similarly miniature tinykin who he can command, Pikmin-style, to solve puzzles and help him explore a giant house.
Refreshingly, there’s no combat of any kind in the game, putting all the focus on the superbly realised environments and polished-to-perfection platforming.
Jusant
Climbing is in a lot of games, but it’s rarely particularly challenging or engaging. Jusant is an exception.
It's a game built entirely around an innovative climbing system that sees each trigger on your controller become one of your hands, and tasks you with scaling a huge tower that you quickly learn was once the home of a past civilisation.
The minimalist, meditative experience manages to test you as a player despite there being no risk of in-game (or, thankfully, real-world) death when you fall. And once you’ve experienced Jusant’s climbing, it’s hard to go back to all the games that effectively do it for you. It’s a bit of a graphical stunner, too.
Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders
Launched at the beginning of 2025 and available to play on Game Pass, Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders is the follow-up to the also excellent Lonely Mountains: Downhill from 2020.
Both games are about getting to the bottom of huge mountains in one piece, but Snow Riders trades its predecessor’s mountain bikes for skis. It can be both a relaxing chill-out game, with its almost non-existent soundtrack and low-poly landscapes, or a nail-bitingly tense series of time trials, and this one adds multiplayer for the first time.
Whatever your playstyle, we can think of very few snowsports games – and we’re talking ever, here – that feel as good to play when you get into a flowstate.
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