Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Leaves Game Pass on October 15 Along With Pacific Drive and A Plague Tale: Requiem
By CriticalPixel ·
Game Pass is about to lose the best argument it ever made for itself. According to Kotaku, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 leaves the service on October 15, which gives subscribers just under two weeks to finish it or start it. Sandfall Interactive's debut RPG landed on Game Pass on day one, swept the awards season, and has sat in the catalog for over a year as the game you point at when someone asks why they should keep paying. Now it is on the exit list next to eight other titles, and the timing is awkward for Xbox. A subscription that sells itself on never having to buy games is about to remind a lot of people that the catalog is a rental shelf, and the clock is ticking.
The full October 15 exit list
Per Kotaku and GameRant, nine games are leaving on October 15: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Pacific Drive, A Plague Tale: Requiem, Evil West, The Casting of Frank Stone, Donut County, Crime Scene Cleaner, Superball and Nova Roma, which is still in Game Preview. That is a stacked list for a single fortnight. Pacific Drive is Ironwood's haunted station wagon survival game, and A Plague Tale: Requiem is Asobo's rat plague sequel, and both fit a spooky October better than most of what the service is adding. Donut County is a light puzzle game you can finish in a couple of hours, while Superball is a 3v3 multiplayer sports game and Nova Roma is an endless city builder, so neither has a real runtime. If you were planning a backlog sprint, the list is long enough that you have to pick.
Why Expedition 33 is the one that stings
Kotaku calls it one of 2025's best games and one of the best third-party releases ever to join Game Pass on day one. GameRant notes it carries a Top Critic Average of 92 on OpenCritic with a 98 percent critic recommendation, and its own review handed out a 10 out of 10. At The Game Awards it won nine awards in total, including Game of the Year, Best Game Direction and Best Narrative. It is a turn-based RPG whose dodge and parry system injects real energy into a genre people keep declaring tired, and it broke through to an audience that normally skips this kind of game. Losing a title like that is not a normal rotation, it is the service handing back its trophy. And the trophy is only a year old.
How much time you actually need
The good news is that you do not need a month. According to HowLongToBeat figures cited by GameRant, the main story takes about 29 and a half hours and a completionist run averages 69 hours. Kotaku also puts the main run at under 30 hours, and says a full sweep of the expanded content takes more than twice that. That means a focused player can clear the story across a few evenings and a couple of weekends before October 15. Something else will compete for that time, though. GameRant says Gears of War: E-Day and Valor Mortis are joining Game Pass this month, which is a decent way of making sure nobody has a free weekend. The service is handing you a great game and a great reason not to play it in the same breath.
What the community is saying
Reaction looks limited and mostly resigned, so I will not pretend there is a big consensus. In a Reddit thread titled Leaving GamePass mid October on r/XboxGamePass, the poster calls it a nightmare of a fortnight, says they are mid playthrough of Clair Obscur and will focus on that, and recommends Evil West for a PS3 and PS4 style action fix. The first replies are people kicking themselves for waiting so long to start Expedition 33, with one saying that starting it now is probably worse than just letting it be. That is a handful of voices, not a movement, so treat it as a mood rather than a verdict. The mood is what you would expect: nobody is angry at Sandfall, everybody is annoyed at the calendar.
The CriticalPixel take
Rotation is how Game Pass works, and nobody should be shocked that a game leaves after a year in the catalog. What bothers me is the pitch. Xbox sells the service as the place where you can try everything, then lets the single most celebrated game of the last two years walk out the door while Gears of War: E-Day gets dangled as compensation. Subscribers pay every month and still own nothing when the license window closes, and that is a harder sell when the game leaving is a Game of the Year winner. If you want to keep it for good, the Steam store page is where it lives off the subscription, and it was showing a 20 percent discount when I checked.
Bottom line: if you have been sitting on Expedition 33 through a Game Pass subscription, you have until October 15 and roughly 30 hours to see the story through. Pacific Drive and A Plague Tale: Requiem are worth a look too, but be honest about how much time you have. Everything else on the list is short enough to squeeze in around the big ones. Whether Gears of War: E-Day fills the gap is the question for the next fortnight. Either way, this exit is a reminder that a catalog you do not own is a calendar, not a library.
Sources
Kotaku: Game Pass Is About To Lose Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 And Some Other Incredible Games
GameRant: Xbox Game Pass is Losing One of the Best Games Ever This Month