Xbox Free Play Days adds Grounded 2 and Fallout 76 for the weekend

Xbox has announced the lineup for this weekend's Free Play Days event, granting Game Pass Core and Ultimate subscribers temporary access to Fallout 76, For Honor, Dead by Daylight, and Grounded 2 starting Thursday, January 29. According to the post by Xbox Marketing Manager Kyle Ocean, the trial period is open now and runs through the weekend.

While Free Play Days is a regular occurrence, the inclusion of Grounded 2 is the notable draw here. Obsidian Entertainment's sequel to its 2022 backyard survival hit continues the studio's streak of punching above its weight class in the survival genre. If you missed the original, the premise is essentially Honey, I Shrunk the Kids with better crafting mechanics and significantly more terrifying spiders.

The Live Service Veterans

The rest of the lineup consists of titles that have effectively become institutions in the live-service space. Fallout 76 returns to the free rotation, which is a good opportunity for lapsed fans to check the state of the wasteland. Launched in 2018 to a reception that could charitably be described as "radioactive," Bethesda Softworks spent years patching the multiplayer RPG into a stable, content-rich experience. It doesn't quite capture the isolation of the single-player entries, but the current iteration is a far cry from the empty world that shipped eight years ago.

Ubisoft's For Honor (2017) is also available. This is one of the few fighting games to successfully implement a directional melee system—dubbed the "Art of Battle"—that feels intuitive on a controller. It occupies a strange niche between a fighting game and a MOBA, and despite being nearly a decade old, it retains a dedicated player base that has likely memorized every frame of animation by now. Good luck to any newcomers jumping into those lobbies this weekend.

Rounding out the list is Dead by Daylight from Behaviour Interactive. Originally released in 2016, this asymmetrical horror game has become a sort of museum for horror cinema, licensing characters from nearly every major franchise imaginable. The gameplay loop of four survivors trying to repair generators while avoiding a killer remains stressful, repetitive, and oddly compelling.

Availability

As is standard for these promotions, progress made during the free weekend carries over if you decide to purchase the full game.