Xbox Game Pass Adds 2023 GOTY Contender, But Not Everyone Can Play It
This is a huge get for Xbox Game Pass users, well some of them.
Xbox Game Pass has been updated with three new games, one of which is one of the biggest games of 2023 and one of the best releases of the year. Unfortunately, not everyone can play this game as it's been added via EA Play, which means it's only available to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers. If you're a standard Xbox Game Pass subscriber, you only have two new games to play, neither of which are contenders for 2023 Game of the year.
The two smaller games are Frog Detective: The Entire Mystery and Mineko's Night Market, both of which were just released yesterday. It's unclear how good the former is because it doesn't have any Metacritic scores, but the latter is apparently not that great, despite being a fairly highly-anticipated indie game for a few years. It currently has Metacritic scores of 66 and 72. What is great is the third new game, the Xbox Game Pass Ultimate addition. Thanks to EA Play, Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers can now play this year's Dead Space remake, a game with Metacritic scores that range from 87 to 89.
"Isaac Clarke is an everyman engineer on a mission to repair a vast mining ship, the USG Ishimura, only to discover something has gone horribly wrong," reads an official blurb about the game. "The ship's crew has been slaughtered and Isaac's beloved partner, Nicole, is lost somewhere on board. Now alone and armed with only his engineering tools and skills, Isaac races to find Nicole as the nightmarish mystery of what happened aboard the Ishimura unravels around him. Trapped with hostile creatures called Necromorphs, Isaac faces a battle for survival, not only against the escalating terrors of the ship but against his own crumbling sanity."
"The remake of Dead Space comes exceptionally close to being a perfect recapturing of the original game: an immaculate, thoughtful, scary-as-ever remake," reads the opening of our review of the 2023 remake. "This redone version of a horror classic takes great care to tidy up unruly parts of the beloved experience while bringing the presentation in line with what modern standards dictate a remake should look, feel, and sound like, and Electronic Arts' Motive Studio team even makes mostly successful efforts to inject a sense of newness and unpredictability into the mix. It's not perfect, but it's exactly what a remake should strive for."
With Dead Space being an EA Play game, it should be a permanent offer for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers. That said, because of this, it may never come to the standard tier of the subscription service.