November is off to a flying start on Xbox Game Pass. Gravhounds arrived today, November 2, as a day-one Game Preview release, kicking off a confirmed early-November run of seven games.
So what is Gravhounds? It is a co-op action builder for one to four players from Octopus Panic, a seven-person studio based in Sweden whose developers have past credits on games including Battlefield, Halo, and Star Wars titles. You play as bio-engineered canine workers stranded far from home, sent by their AI supervisor COSMO to set up operations on hostile planets. That means building pipelines, generators, turrets, and fabricators, gathering resources, completing objectives, and then getting out before the enemy pressure becomes too much.
The star is the Grav Beam, which moves resources and equipment, places Build Kits, and turns objects or enemies into improvised projectiles. It is playable on Xbox Series X/S and PC, plus cloud gaming, with Xbox Play Anywhere carrying purchases and saves between console and Windows PC.
One important note: November 2 is not the full 1.0 launch. Gravhounds is entering Game Preview, and Octopus Panic expects the Early Access period to last about six months, while acknowledging it could run longer. More missions, worlds, enemies, playable Gravhounds, weapons, upgrades, and progression systems are planned ahead of the full release.
Here is the early-November Game Pass lineup confirmed so far:
- November 2 — Gravhounds (Game Preview, day one)
- November 3 — Pit of Goblin, a co-op horror extraction game
- November 4 — VOID/BREAKER, version 1.0
- November 5 — Escape Academy 2: Back 2 School
- November 10 — Football Manager 27, with a PC launch preview on November 3 for Ultimate and PC subscribers
- November 10 — Warhammer Survivors, day one
- November 11 — Thronefall, day-one Series X/S release
That list is not necessarily the whole story. The full Wave 1 lineup for November is expected to be announced on November 3, the same day Pit of Goblin joins the service, so keep an eye out for more additions. On the other side of the ledger, 14 games are set to leave Game Pass this month, with players having until November 15 to play them, including Football Manager 26, Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2, and GoldenEye 007. If any of those are on your backlog, this is your warning.
Our pick? Start with Gravhounds tonight with a full pack of four, then clear some space for Escape Academy 2 on November 5. November is stacked, and Game Pass just made the first move.
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