Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

Uncharted and Tomb Raider are why I play games at all, so a first-person Indiana Jones adventure through the Vatican, Giza and beyond was always going to land. The 1937 setting does what a good history backdrop should, and the story pulled me forward more than the stealth sections did. I would rank it higher on a list built for adventure fans. Here, with several big single-player blockbusters already in the top ten, it loses out on broad appeal. Pick it up if you want a cinematic campaign you can actually finish.

Uncharted and Tomb Raider are part of why I play games at all, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is the nearest thing to them on Game Pass. It is a first-person 1937 adventure with Troy Baker doing a convincing Harrison Ford, and it moves from the Vatican to Giza with a whip, your fists, and whatever is lying nearby, frying pans included. The set pieces and puzzles keep the 15 to 25 hours moving. Stealth is serviceable rather than clever. It does not reinvent anything, which is why it closes the list. On a weeknight, that is plenty.

I finished this one recently, and it was some of the most fun I have had playing games in a long time. I have watched the movies far too many times, and the game catches the feeling. The whip, the improvised brawls, the sense that every location is a set piece. It is first-person, mixing stealth, puzzles and exploring, so you rarely do one thing for long. You do not need to be a fan of the films to enjoy it. Stealth gets fiddly when a plan falls apart, but that is a small price.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is the first-person outlier on this list, and I went in skeptical since almost everything else I play is third-person. It won me over during the first museum heist, when the puzzles turned out to require actually reading the environment instead of just highlighting an interactive object. History always pulls me into a game faster than pure fantasy, the same reason Ghost of Tsushima stuck with me, and the Vatican and Himalaya settings do real work here. Stealth is genuinely optional rather than a chore forced on you between fights. The combat is the weakest part, functional but clearly not the point, and that keeps it a rung below the picks with stronger fighting. Worth playing for the puzzle design alone.

This is the closest thing Xbox has had in years to an Uncharted-style campaign, and I mean that as the highest compliment I've got. You spend most of it sneaking through 1930s locations, solving environmental puzzles, and occasionally punching a fascist, and the whole thing is shot and paced like a genuine adventure film rather than a checklist of open-world icons. Stealth is forgiving. You're rarely punished for one bad read. The Vatican chapter in particular had me pausing just to look around. It's a linear game dressed up as a bigger one, and that's fine by me.