One Of The Best Game Pass Games Is Leaving Later This Month

It seems over half a dozen Xbox games, including the beloved open-world mystery game Outer Wilds, will be leaving Game Pass later this month. So if you are a Game Pass subscriber and you’ve not played Outer Wilds, Iron Harvest, or Secret Neighbor yet, well, you don’t have much time left to do so.

Every month, new games come to Xbox’s popular video game subscription service. It’s nice, if you’re a subscriber. Sometimes these new arrivals are announced and teased by Xbox, but other times games will just randomly appear on Game Pass, which is also great. But sometimes, a few games get removed from Game Pass every month. And this month—as the year wraps up soon—it seems a few more than usual are shipping out.

As first spotted by PureXbox, at least nine Game Pass games are listed under the “Leaving Soon” section of the app. That seems to imply they are set to be removed later this month, with the unofficial date being set at December 31, 2022. Here’s the full list!

• The Outer Wilds — Console, PC
• Scarlet Nexus — Console, PC
• Secret Neighbor — Console, PC
• The Pedestrian — Console, PC
• Tropico 6 — Console, PC
• Embr — Console, PC
• Gorogoa — Console, PC
• Immortal Realms: Vampire Wars — Console, PC
• Iron Harvest — PC

There are some really good games on this list, including the fantastic space adventure, Outer Wilds. Not to be confused with the other game set in space also on Game Pass, Outer Worlds. (I still have to double-check if I’m right whenever I write about these two games…) I’m also sad to see 2D puzzler The Pedestrian get removed as I kept meaning to play that and never did. I’ll try to play it before it leaves, but considering how much time I’ve had to play it before…I’m not counting on it.

Of course, technically this hasn’t been confirmed by Microsoft, but in the past games that were set to be removed via the “Leaving Soon” tab would leave soon after. Kotaku has reached out to Microsoft and Xbox to see precisely when or if all of these games will be removed, but if you really want to play Tropico 6 via Game Pass, I’d download and start playing sooner than later.

Thankfully, while some great games are gett yanked from Game Pass, Microsoft has already added some replacement bangers earlier this month, including Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga and historical point-and-click Pentiment.