What you need to know
- Grounded, a co-op survival game developed by Obsidian Entertainment and published by Xbox Game Studios, is coming to Nintendo Switch.
- Pentiment, a medieval narrative RPG also developed by Obsidian Entertainment and published by Xbox Game Studios, is also heading to Nintendo Switch.
- This news was shared during a Nintendo Direct presentation focused on third-party launches for the Nintendo Switch.
- Grounded arrives on Nintendo Switch on April 16, 2024, with full cross-play with Xbox consoles and Windows PC. Meanwhile, Pentiment arrives tomorrow on Feb. 22, 2024.
The backyard and the town of Tassing are getting bigger.
During the February 2024 Nintendo Direct, Obsidian Entertainment and Xbox Game Studios shared two games, Grounded and Pentiment, are coming to Nintendo Switch.
The former title, a co-op survival game that takes place from a "Honey I Shrunk the Kids" bugs-eye view perspective, is coming to Nintendo Switch on April 16, 2024, with full cross-play with Xbox consoles and Windows PC. Meanwhile, medieval narrative RPG Pentiment is launching on Nintendo Switch tomorrow.
As first-party games, both of these titles were already available to Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, and Windows PC, as well as being available in Xbox Game Pass.
What Xbox games are coming to other platforms?
This news comes shortly after a business update on Xbox, where Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer confirmed that four games were coming to other consoles. At the time, Spencer noted that two of the titles were smaller games, while two of them were live-service titles. Now, it appears that Nintendo Switch players can look forward to one of each in the coming months.
While the remaining two games heading to other consoles are not currently known, they are heavily rumored and reported to be Sea of Thieves and Hi-Fi Rush, from Rare and Tango Gameworks, respectively.
Even before this recent change, Microsoft already shipped some first-party games on other consoles, with Minecraft spinoffs like Minecraft Legends making their way to PlayStation and Nintendo Switch. Microsoft is also committed to keeping the Call of Duty franchise multiplatform for at least the next 10 years, and is working to expand it so these games launch on Nintendo hardware.
Xbox players can also look forward to multiple console exclusive games this year, with Obsidian Entertainment's Avowed, Ninja Theory's Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2, and MachineGames' Indiana Jones and the Great Circle being just some of the first-party titles slated to arrive this year.
Analysis: Hopeful for success
Both of these games make sense on Nintendo Switch, so I hope players on that platform will buy them, especially Pentiment. It's an excellent narrative experience and one of my favorite games from 2022.
In our review of Pentiment, staff writer Zachary Boddy wrote that "The decisions you make appear simple, and the story that unfolds due to those decisions is more about humanity than drama, but Pentiment still manages to unequivocally capture your attention with the genuine way it expresses those aforementioned themes, and the characters it uses as a vessel to deliver them."
