It feels like forever ago (cue up a cigarette drag), but looking back, 2025 was an uncharacteristically stacked year for new video games. Kirby Air Ride got a decades-overdue sequel! Battlefield 6 was actually good! Blue Prince redefined puzzle games! Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 — can you believe that only just came out last year? (Cue up another cigarette drag.)
The under-the-radar games of 2025 were also operating on another level. In a year stacked with shiny new entries in long-running AAA series, we also got indie gems like And Roger…, Ball x Pit, Despelote, Is This Seat Taken?, and Wheel World. Though the real story of 2025 was the emergence of AA games — moderately scoped projects that nevertheless tend to take up multiple GB of your hard drive. One such game, Hell Is Us, is getting a second lease on life a year after its release.
Hell Is Us is a must-play Soulslike on Game Pass
Developed by Rogue Factor, Hell Is Us is a semi-open-world action adventure game with heavy Soulslike influences that was saddled with some seriously unlucky release date timing: Sept. 4, 2025, a date those who lived through remember as Silksong Day. But Hell Is Us is seeing a resurgence one year on. As of this writing, it’s currently the third most-popular game on Xbox Game Pass, having been added to the service in July. (Microsoft does not publicly share extra numbers for how many streams or downloads a Game Pass game has received.) The studio announced in early August that Hell Is Us has been played by a million people to date.
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