Don’t sleep on these charming Xbox Partner Preview 2025 indie games

The Xbox Partner Preview for November 2025 featured trailers and announcements from several of Xbox’s third-party developer partners. With the Game Awards fast approaching, major announcements from big studios are still going to be on hold. However, this year’s Xbox Partner Showcase still had some surprisingly interesting games to look forward to.

All of the titles featured during the Preview are part of Xbox’s ‘play anywhere’ initiative, meaning you only need to buy them once to play them across multiple devices. In many cases, you won’t need to buy them at all thanks to Xbox Game Pass and Xbox Cloud Gaming. Read on to see our run-down of the best AA games and best indie games on offer at the event.

✓ VideoGamer Summary

• The Xbox Partner Preview showed off many cinematic and gameplay trailers for upcoming third-party games.
• There were several strong-looking action games, with the biggest emphasis on the vibrant fantasy action title Tides of Annihilation.
• A chain of horror games is also being primed to arrive on Xbox, including the latest game from the original Little Nightmares developers.
• Roguelike games continue to flourish.
• A couple of more comedic games round out this list, though Erosion looks to balance this with some heart and more than a few interesting mechanics.

Heavy-hitting action games

One particular trailer rose above the rest, as Tides of Annihilation got to show off one of its spectacular boss fights. The gameplay trailer offered an elaborate take on Arthurian legend, headed by Game Awards-nominated voice actor Jennifer English. It seems to be a spectacle fighter that’s somewhere between Black Myth Wukong and Bayonetta. It is, frankly, gorgeous.

If you’re already finished up with Hollow Knight Silksong, but thought it could do with a little more Bloodborne inspiration, then Crowsworn might grab your eye. This game was clearly made to fill the long gap while Team Cherry plugged away at development, but now, fans will simply have to settle for two metroidvanias with fluid movement and captivating art styles.

Zoopunk is also running with an interesting style all its own, as it pulls something like Star Wars Jedi Survivor by way of Beyond Good and Evil. The sequel to a sidescrolling action game called FIST Forged In Shadow Torch, the developer has taken more of a third-person action style, where you can switch between characters and their varied action styles. If you want to be a rabbit in a dangerous anthropomorphic cyberpunk world, this might be for you.

A new season of horror

Tarsier Studios is best known for the Little Nightmares series, but after it was acquired by the Embracer group, the original IP got left behind with Bandai Namco. Their new game, Reanimal, seems to be Little Nightmares again in all by name, so anyone left disappointed by the series’ latest offering will no doubt be excited to see a return to form from the original studio.

Presenting what seems to be a unique survival horror spin on the co-op extraction shooter, The Mound Omen of Cthulu pits you against increasingly violent horrors on your quest for cursed treasure. The main pull looks to be on messing with your perception of reality, throwing illusions at you to trick you into turning against your friends. This swashbuckling shooter takes on Lethal Company and will almost certainly blow Call of Duty Black Ops 7’s ham-fisted attempts at mind-bending level design out of the water.

Available now, Total Chaos is a first-person survival horror that’s actually a remake of a Doom 2 mod. You’re left on an abandoned island fort, forced to survive Silent Hill-like nightmarish foes while working with Resident Evil inventory management. Total Chaos appears to have an interesting non-linear approach to its exploration, and you can even try a demo before you buy it in full.

Roguelites are in vogue

Top of the Xbox Partner Preview was Armatus, a roguelite shooter that appears to be a fantasy take on Returnal through the ruins of Paris. The end is never the end as you fight through horrors to try and reach a lost gateway to heaven, armed with mystical powers and SMGs as you carve your way through some interestingly designed demonic forces.

The devs behind Vampire Survivors have now announced their own take on the recent glut of deckbuilding roguelike games, with the fantastically named Vampire Crawlers The Turbo Wildcard From Vampire Survivors. The twist with Vampire Crawlers is the emphasis on not thinking too much about strategy, but looking to speed. The title places an emphasis on using a combo system and triggering cascades to clear enemies while pushing for a Balatro-style visual extravaganza as you multiply effects on top of each other.

Bucking the trend on the usual deckbuilding roguelike that Vampire Crawlers is prodding is Echo Generation 2, which, while it does involve the building up of decks for combat, doesn’t position itself as a roguelike. Rather, Echo Generation 2 is a dimension-hopping deckbuilding RPG that keeps its charming voxel style from the original game, showing that you can use cards in your games without needing to constantly reset progress.

Tongue-in-cheek additions

Of everything announced at the Xbox Partner Preview, Erosion is shaping up to be my favourite. It’s a voxel recreation of a western with a humorous slant, echoing games like West of Loathing and Weird West.

However, Erosion boasts a very distinctive mechanic at its heart. You’re on a journey to save your daughter from a warlord, but, every time you die, the world jumps forward another decade without you. This doesn’t just act as a ticking clock, but also makes the world dynamic, as your choices impact the future of the world in which you wake up.

Roadside Research, on the other hand, almost completely passed me by until I saw the brilliance of its iteration on simulator games. If you get hooked into something like Supermarket Simulator, you can sink in countless hours, all to a game that could explode from jank at any moment. Roadside Research takes that style of janky simulator and actually puts a game inside it. You’re a group of aliens gathering knowledge on humans while keeping out of the government’s eye, all while running a store, leading to inevitable co-op chaos, as well as being prime streamer bait.

Indie and AA games are the beating heart of the industry, and this year’s Xbox Partner Preview offerings remind us that there’s plenty in store for those willing to venture off the beaten track. Those looking for an antidote to overproduced AAA spectacle will find it here.     

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