Serious Play:
Minecraft Dungeons: Never would have played this without XGP, but it was a fun ride with Diablo Junior. What appears to be a simplistic gear & trinket system can give you surprising synergies if you pick the enchants that fit well with your play style, and the recycling system makes experimenting painless. All in all a pretty good game.
Die For Valhalla: Castle Crashers on the cheap? Gave it a try because it was leaving XGP and found enough to pass a few days with. Same hit-or-miss aiming as all 2D brawlers, decently imaginative enemy designs, tedious boss fights if you are playing solo. Entirely missable yet reasonably playable. Seven of ten?
Metro Exodus: Played the first few levels up to the train, then petered out. Looks like I stopped right before it got interesting. The first open level with multiple goals was a revelation, but there was so much on-rails gameplay to get there.
Toe-dipping:
Supermarket Shriek: Finished this one to the degree I could before it left XGP. Those last levels are merciless. All I got was the achievement for playing on a Tuesday.
Sonic Forces: The free play weekend did not convince me to buy. Kind of a cool idea to invent your own hero, but the platforming gameplay just isn’t compelling, and doesn’t feel well-tuned. I recall one place in particular where I had to have restarted more than 50 times due to an easily missable transition.
Forza Street: So very weird. Instead of racing, you basically play a rhythm game, pressing buttons to enter and exit corners and trigger the nitrous. And yet they think I’m going to spend real-world money to buy gold so I can buy chances to get more cars that all do the same thing. Or I could spend money to buy “credits,” which can’t actually be spent to buy anything of significance in the game. All of the worst elements of free-to-play garbage gaming with Forza branding.