12 March 2026

Xbox Game Pass Premium Adds One of the Highest-Rated Series X Games Ever

By newsgame

Xbox Game Pass Premium members are able to play Hollow Knight: Silksong via their subscriptions starting today. Premium-tier catalog expansions hardly get any more renowned, with Silksong arriving as one of the highest-rated titles ever to grace Xbox Game Pass.

The follow-up to the 2017 indie darling Hollow Knight went through a famously protracted development cycle spanning more than seven years. It was at last released on September 4, 2025, debuting to critical acclaim and fan adoration. As of early 2026, Silksong holds OpenCritic’s highest honor: the aggregator’s “Mighty” rating, resulting from an average score of 91 and a near-flawless reviewer recommendation rate of 97%. Those figures place it inside OpenCritic’s list of the top 30 highest-rated Xbox Series X/S games ever made. The aggregator also ranks Silksong as the sixth best-reviewed game of 2025, or fifth if ignoring the Switch 2 edition of Tears of the Kingdom and only looking at brand-new releases.

A composite image featuring a circular poster-style blue-and-pink Xbox Game Pass sign superimposed on a stylized screenshot of Night City from Cyberpunk 2077.

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Hollow Knight: Silksong Joins Xbox Game Pass Premium After 6 Months

Team Cherry’s widely lauded metroidvania officially joined Microsoft’s Premium-tier content catalog on March 12, 2026. That is exactly six months and eight days after Hollow Knight: Silksong was added to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass. Although Microsoft never divulges the lengths of its content licensing agreements, there is precedent to suggest Silksong will not be leaving its on-demand game library anytime soon. Namely, Hollow Knight: Voidheart Edition is still available on Xbox Game Pass as of today, nearly seven years after it first joined the service in summer 2019.

Who’s That Character?

Identify the silhouettes before time runs out.

Who’s That Character?

Identify the silhouettes before time runs out.

Easy (7.5s)Medium (5.0s)Hard (2.5s)Permadeath (2.5s)

Microsoft’s next content catalog update is scheduled for March 15, when the service is set to lose half a dozen games, including Enter the Gungeon, F1 23, Bratz Rhythm & Style, Lightyear Frontier, and Mythwrecked: Ambrosia Island. While those five are multi-platform titles, the next wave of departures will also include He Is Coming, an old-school indie roguelike that’s been available to PC Game Pass subscribers since July 2025.

Xbox Game Pass Release Calendar

Date	Game	Game Pass Tier(s)	Platform(s)	Notes
Mar 12	Hollow Knight: Silksong	Premium	Cloud, Console, Handheld, PC	Available on PC GP and XGP Ultimate since Sep 2025.
Mar 17	DreamWorks Gabby’s Dollhouse: Ready to Party	Ultimate, Premium, PC	Cloud, PC, Series X/S
Mar 26	Nova Roma	Ultimate, PC	PC	Day-one release.
Apr 14	Replaced	Ultimate, PC	Cloud, PC, Series X/S	Day-one release.
May 19	Forza Horizon 6	Ultimate, PC	Cloud, PC, Series X/S	Day-one release.
Aug 4	Beast of Reincarnation	Ultimate, PC	Cloud, PC, Series X/S	Day-one release.

The mid-month removals will be followed by the family-friendly adventure game DreamWorks Gabby’s Dollhouse: Ready to Party. Developed by Spanish studio Infinigon and published by long-time Xbox Game Pass partner Outright Games, the tie-in game is scheduled to reach three tiers of Microsoft’s subscription service on March 17. That is also the most likely date for Microsoft to announce this month’s Wave 2 lineup, based on the typical cadence of the company’s content library updates.

Xbox Game Pass has already received 45 new games since the beginning of the year, averaging 0.65 releases per day. Seven other titles that previously debuted on the Ultimate tier of the service have since trickled down to its Premium counterpart during the same period, with Silksong being the eighth to do so. Looking ahead, nearly 30 upcoming games that are currently entering their final stretch of development have already been announced as day-one additions to the Xbox Game Pass library. Be that as it may, all but a handful are still waiting for release dates. That group includes Super Meat Boy 3D, Witchbrook, Tropico 7, There Are No Ghosts at the Grand, and Microsoft’s own Halo: Campaign Evolved remake. Fable, Erosion, Buckshot Roulette, and Kiln are in the same boat.