Bloodborne Meets Deus Ex: Human Revolution in the Best Sleeper Hit on Game Pass

It’s hard to believe how long ago it feels, but 2025 turned out to be an unusually crowded year for new games. Kirby Air Ride finally received a sequel after more than twenty years. Battlefield 6 turned out to be genuinely great. Blue Prince reinvented what a puzzle game could be. And Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 only arrived last year, which is hard to wrap your head around.

The quieter releases of 2025 were just as impressive. Alongside polished new entries in big-budget franchises, indie standouts like And Roger…, Ball x Pit, Despelote, Is This Seat Taken?, and Wheel World found their audiences. The real story of the year, though, was the rise of AA games: mid-sized productions that still demand plenty of hard drive space. One of them, Hell Is Us, is enjoying a second wind a year after launch. Its arrival on Xbox Game Pass and its Nintendo Switch 2 release have both helped.

Hell Is Us Is a Must-Play Soulslike on Game Pass

Created by Rogue Factor, Hell Is Us is a semi-open-world action adventure with strong Soulslike DNA. It had the misfortune of launching on Sept. 4, 2025, a day gamers will remember as Silksong Day. A year later, it’s finding the attention it missed. The game joined Xbox Game Pass in July and climbed into the service’s top three by late summer. Microsoft doesn’t publish stream or download figures for Game Pass titles, so there are no exact numbers. In August, the studio announced that one million people had played the game.

The story follows a peacekeeper who goes back to his homeland to look for his parents. It’s a welcome change from the usual setup of rescuing a kidnapped loved one. He soon finds that the country has been overrun by supernatural horrors. Hell Is Us includes plenty of genre staples, including a lot of parrying. Its signature feature is a stripped-back interface that pushes you to explore the world to find your objectives. The game opens by telling you that there are no maps, quest markers, or other conventional guides. It’s built for people who love to explore.

Critics were divided. The game currently holds a 77 on Metacritic, based on 60 reviews. Polygon’s resident Soulslike expert, Austin Manchester, gave it a largely favorable review. He praised its carefully balanced but deliberately demanding mission design, though he found the limited enemy variety repetitive. “While the game has the look and feel of a Soulslike, thankfully it doesn’t lean into all the trappings of the genre,” he wrote. “Hell Is Us is still a wonderfully gripping game. Over the course of my 25 hours in Hadea, I frequently spent entire afternoons scouring its levels or stayed up way past my bedtime so I could keep exploring further.”

Here’s a lesser-known reason to give it a try. Hell Is Us is directed by Jonathan Jacques-Belletete, who was the art director on both Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. If you miss Adam Jensen’s richly detailed sci-fi world, this game is an unexpectedly good fix.

Hell Is Us is available now on Xbox Series X through Game Pass. You can also play it on PlayStation 5 and Windows PC. It arrived on Nintendo Switch 2 a few weeks ago, and a physical edition is scheduled for Oct. 27.