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Before the Lights Go Out: The Best Games from the Studios Xbox Is Closing
The CrossBinge Desk · 5 min read
This week, Microsoft confirmed what the industry had been dreading: another round of Xbox studio closures and restructurings, with Double Fine, Ninja Theory, and Compulsion Games among the names caught in the turbulence. The news is a reminder that creative studios are fragile things, even inside a corporation with near-unlimited resources. These three made games that no one else would have made, games with a point of view and a specific strangeness that makes them irreplaceable. Whether or not they survive in recognizable form, their back catalogs deserve your attention right now.
1
Psychonauts 2
Game
The rare sequel that justifies a sixteen-year wait, Psychonauts 2 is Tim Schafer's best game and one of the sharpest platformers of the last decade, built around mental health themes it takes seriously without ever becoming preachy.
2
Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice
Game
Ninja Theory made this on a fraction of a AAA budget and produced something major studios with ten times the money have never managed: a game that genuinely puts you inside a psychotic episode, using binaural audio and visual distortion to create dread rather than spectacle.
3
Grim Fandango Remastered
Game
Double Fine's remaster of LucasArts' 1998 masterpiece hands the best adventure game ever made to people who never had a chance to play it, with updated controls that remove the last excuse not to finish it.
4
South of Midnight
Game
Compulsion Games' most recent release is also their most ambitious, a Southern Gothic action game steeped in American folklore that commits fully to its setting in a way most games set in the American South never do.
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