Two previous Xbox exclusives are heading to PlayStation and Nintendo, officially announced this week during the Nintendo Direct presentation on February 21st. The games, 2023’s Pentiment and 2022’s Grounded, were developed by the RPG heavyweight developer, Obsidian Entertainment, famous for 2015’s Pillars of Eternity, 2019’s The Outer Worlds, and co-developing 2010’s Fallout: New Vegas.
Obsidian, to date, has only released two Xbox exclusives since their acquisition in 2018 by Xbox Game Studios. The first game was Grounded, a survival action-adventure game inspired by films like Honey, I Shrunk The Kinds (1989), which puts the player into the shoes of a shrunken character who must battle to survive in the harsh landscape of a back garden. The second game was Pentiment, an adventure RPG with a medieval storybook style that sees players control Andreas Maler on his quest to solve a series of murders.
Both games received good critical reception upon release (82/100 and 86/100 respectively on the aggregate score site, Metacritic), with Grounded in particular gaining a sizeable following helped bolstered by Obsidian’s commitment to updates and new content.
The initial announcement that Xbox would be “… bringing more games to more players around the world” came during the official Xbox Podcast released on February 15th, where Microsoft Gaming CEO, Phil Spencer, confirmed four games would make their way to other consoles. At the time, Spencer did not reveal which games these would be but confirmed that neither of those titles would be 2023’s Starfield nor the highly-anticipated Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.
While Nintendo did the job of confirming the first two games, revealing that Pentiment would be available from February 22nd and Grounded would follow with a release on April 16th, Xbox quickly followed the presentation to state the remaining two games would be Hi-Fi Rush on March 19th, and Sea of Thieves on April 30th (both not available on Switch consoles).
Currently, it’s unclear if more games will follow in the months and years to come, but Xbox’s commitment to bringing more players together, regardless of their gaming system, is clear.
Words by Sam Pegg
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