A game’s opening moments are make or break, especially in an age when people can quickly bounce from game to game on subscription services like Xbox Game Pass. Those opening moments, whether they’re action-packed or character-driven, have to grip you before you move on to the next game in your backlog.
This weekend, gamexplore is celebrating dramatic entrances, like the best way to get into the Yakuza series or how Clair Obscur spoils its big twist in its opening moments. With this week’s recommendations, we wanted to spotlight a handful of games on Game Pass that feature the strongest opening sequences, including a Wild West vampire hunting game, a Metroidvania with a heart-shattering opening, and an arcade racer that goes from 0 to 60 in approximately 0 seconds flat.
Forza Horizon 5
Forza Horizon 5 is all rise, and it starts from the top. Playground’s 2021 racing game opens with you driving a Jeep out of a military cargo plane and down the side of an active volcano. From there (and mind, every vehicle in the intro is dropped out of a cargo plane), you end up driving a sports car through a sandstorm and a souped-up up Porsche through a jungle. The sequence eventually culminates in a sprint, in which you push a hypercar north of 200 mph, ultimately outpacing the airplane you fly out of. Forza Horizon 5‘s impressive opening minutes are meant to illustrate the types of races you’ll undertake in its open-world, to show off the spectacle the game is capable of, but arguably feel intentionally designed for one purpose: to grab Game Pass subscribers from the jump. In that regard, Playground succeeds more than any other. —Ari Notis
Ori and the Blind Forest
When you’re sampling games on a subscription service, the first 10 minutes of a game can be make or break. You want something that will hook you in immediately so that you’re not tempted to back out and try something else. In that sense, Ori and the Blind Forest might be the most powerful game on Xbox’s service. The movement-heavy Metroidvania famously begins with a gutting prologue that didn’t leave a dry eye in the house when the game first released in 2015. It only gets better from there, with fluid platforming that ramps up in difficulty as you go and striking art direction that reimagines the great outdoors with fairy tale whimsy. It’s not just a great introduction to the Ori series, but the Metroidvania genre as a whole. —Giovanni Colantonio
Evil West
Evil West is like if Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter was adapted into a video game. It follows vampire hunters in the wild west of 19th-century America. As its opening narration explains, vampires have been “preying on America” since the country’s founding. Players meet their vampiric foes in the game’s opening moments after vampire hunters blow up a bridge as a train barrels across it. What follows is a blood-soaked tutorial that puts Evil West‘s thrilling combat on full display amidst a fiery wreckage. Like a train leaving the station, the rest of Evil West only picks up steam from there. —Austin Manchester
