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Category: XBOX Games Showcase June 10, 2026 Join Us – Creating Calamity Within a Chaotic Cultist Sandbox Mike Nelson, XBOX Wire Editor Summary We go hands-on at XBOX Games Showcase 2026 with the darkly humored Join Us, an upcoming open world sandbox game that has you creating and managing your very own cult. Combat was the central focus of our demo, sampling a variety of weapons you can use in the game, ranging from pistols to machine guns and serrated machetes. Join Us launches March 2027 for XBOX Series X|S, XBOX on PC, cloud and included with Game Pass. Play it on both console and PC at no additional cost with XBOX Play Anywhere. Join Us wastes little time in letting me know how silly things are about to get. Shortly after navigating its cultist creator and adorning my robes in a brightly colored yellow, white, and green checkerboard pattern, selecting a flying saucer as my cult’s icon, and insisting everyone refer to each other as a number, is when I set my expectations for hilarity – and was not disappointed. Join Us has all the markings of an ambitious indie that, on the surface, describes itself as sandbox survival game, but it feels much deeper than that. The 10-person team at Wolf Haus Games has seemingly kept throwing ideas at the wall and instead of rejecting them, found ways to make them work. Want to ride a deer? Sure. What if we had aliens? Yes. Want to drive a forklift? Of course you do. And that’s a big part Join Us’ charm, is giving you a wide range of methods to both enjoy your time in the game’s world and ways for your party of cultists to infiltrate the local populace. Exiting the cultist creator screen, I soon found myself in a large outdoor compound with dozens of fellow cultists adorned in my colors, all in a synchronized dance, guiding me to a makeshift obstacle course to get a feel for the controls and a test of my indoctrination – shooting a pig (or not) at the behest of our great Leader. I’m then sent to the House of Business (a barn) to receive my orders: travel to the nearby county of Bedford and spread the good word of our little cult. And by spreading the good word, we mean violently. Bedford is incredibly rural, surrounded by wilderness, military bases, an abandoned circus, and rusted cars. This is also home to the start of our own little compound, located just outside of town, featuring a variety of followers already on-site, pounding drums, caring for chickens, and harvesting tomatoes. It isn’t long until the locals arrive to take offense to our presence by rushing in guns blazing. Combat was one of the central focuses of my hands-on time with Join Us, giving us a sample of the variety of weapons you can use in the game, ranging from pistols to machine guns and serrated machetes. Cycling through weapons was a breeze and combat felt pretty good for the current state of the demo build — it has good bones and will no doubt see some further refinement leading up to its full release next year. After we took care of the invaders in an extremely bloody battle, I then conscripted other cultists in our compound to pile into a white van and drive over to the nearby farm to take out the rest of these ruffians while “Cielito Lindo” was playing on the radio – there are a half-dozen radio stations to cycle between while driving vehicles, because of course there are (the wall, remember?). Once we arrived at the enemy farm, I looted a nearby weapon cache that uncovered a grenade launcher, flame thrower, and chainsaw – that’s when the chaos really started to unfold as we began to put these enemies out to a bloody pasture. It wasn’t long until the flurry of explosions and hail of bullets attracted the attention of the local police who arrived on the scene and immediately opened fire on us – even a police helicopter arrived – and really laid into my character until he was toast. That was the end of Number 14. My cult was gone, or so I thought… You know all those cultists back at the compound? If your playable character is killed off, you’ll switch over to any surviving follower to continue your game. You can even swap into the body of any nearby cult member at any time, even during combat, with the long-distance swaps functioning like a cult-powered form of fast travel. Join Us also features permadeath, meaning the poor sap I was playing who got caught up in the hail of bullets back at the farm, is gone forever from the game. Now in a newfound body with a desire to spread our cult’s influence even further, I hit the road and explore more of the vast surrounding area. One such stop included a small neighborhood where I walked up to and converted more of the local populace – this not only increases my cult’s following but gives me some additional respawn options should I fall victim to another round of bullets. Pulling this off required influence that can be obtained by putting flyers up all over town, handing out personalized autographs from our Leader, or just threatening them to death. Soon I had a half-dozen new followers adorned in a matching wardrobe, who hilariously ran over to the nearest vehicle, hijacked it, and drove to the compound – which left me without a set of wheels, leaving me to walk all the way back to the compound. Unfortunately, I passed by a police station on the way back home and thus was a swift end to Number 53. There’s much more to Join Us than dispatching a bit of ultra-violence and exploration. Their official channels mention base building, farming, indoctrination of members, domesticating animals, and aliens. It’s all over the place – but that’s part of its charm. Wolf Haus wants to give you one of the wildest and weirdest sandboxes for you to play in and it seems like they’re well on their way in doing so. Consider myself indoctrinated. Look for Join Us to launch in 2027 for XBOX Series X|S, XBOX on PC, cloud and included with Game Pass. Play it on both console and PC at no additional cost with XBOX Play Anywhere. .post-template-default .xwsrc-block-content-block .wp-block-column.flex-basis-50.push--25.column--content { flex: 100%; margin-left: 0; } Related Stories for “Join Us – Creating Calamity Within a Chaotic Cultist Sandbox” Category: XBOX Games Showcase Long Overdue, Bad Magpie Finally Expands the ‘Be a Rude Bird’ Genre Category: XBOX Games Showcase Minecraft Dungeons II Blows the Doors of the ARPG Wide Open Category: XBOX Games Showcase Halo: Campaign Evolved Hands-On Demo – It’s The Halo You Love, But Even Better The post Join Us – Creating Calamity Within a Chaotic Cultist Sandbox appeared first on XBOX Wire. View the full article

Category: XBOX Games Showcase June 10, 2026 Long Overdue, Bad Magpie Finally Expands the ‘Be a Rude Bird’ Genre Will Fulton, XBOX Wire Editor Summary Bad Magpie comes out next year for XBOX Series X|S, XBOX on PC, cloud, and included with Game Pass. Play it on both console and PC at no additional cost with XBOX Play Anywhere. You are a magpie, separated from its family because you lost the ability to fly, trying to win the favor of a disinterested fallen star with shiny trinkets. Gameplay involves exploration, puzzle solving, and light immersive sim elements as you set fires, break glass, and generally cause chaos wherever you go. The immediately appealing pitch of Bad Magpie – a world premiere from developer Milktooth in the XBOX Games Showcase – is right there in the title. Be a bird; cause trouble. Like their fellow corvids, crows and ravens, magpies are particularly intelligent and curious birds, with a reputation for stealing shiny things. Amorally creating problems for everyone around them in pursuit of collecting arbitrary treasures? Magpies sound like gamers to me. In the roughly half-hour demo I got to play, you have been injured and separated from your fellow magpies (like a murder of crows, apparently it’s “a mischief of magpies” – delightful), since you can only hop around instead of flying, with a little band-aid cross on one of your wings. You meet and become obsessed with a fallen star, and at its demand go seek shiny trinkets to earn its favor. The game is presented in lovely 3D isometric minimalism, a little like Untitled Goose Game, but with a pixelated fuzziness and cell shading that gives it a lovely, painterly softness all its own. Untitled Goose Game is the obvious comparison in concept as well, as a sort of simple adventure game about being a rude bird, though where that game felt grounded in realism as you terrorized the quaint little populated hamlet, here people are pointedly absent (at least so far) and there’s an interesting element of magical realism that kept me unsure of what to expect next at any given moment. You start on a section of road and make your way into what looks like an abandoned human schoolyard, populated by mice playing like children (building sandcastles, drawing on the pavement with chalk, etc.) When you do find the trinket, a huge serpent with jeweled rings around its neck snatches it and demands you find 20 of the meteorite shards scattered around the area nearby from when the star fell. The shards were distributed behind simple environmental puzzles. You have three actions: chirping, pecking/picking something up, and contextually interacting with whatever object you’ve picked up (such as shaking a soda can or chirping into a megaphone). .post-template-default .xwsrc-block-content-block .wp-block-column.flex-basis-50.push--25.column--content { flex: 100%; margin-left: 0; } 1 of 82 of 83 of 84 of 85 of 86 of 87 of 88 of 8 True to the spirit of chaos implied by the name, the very first thing that the game teaches you is that pecking or striking wooden objects against the shiny, flint-like boulders scattered around the level will set any nearby wood and grass on fire. One of the very first puzzles I solved was to knock a log from a tree (all of which have the Kirby tree face, making you feel a little bad about it), setting it on fire, then using that to bust through a car window and get through to the crystal on its hood. A lot of the puzzles are solved by setting fire to things, breaking glass with loud noises, or by being very rude to those playing mice (such as smashing their sandcastle to get the shard inside). The game generally revels in satisfying your id for being a little gremlin and causing trouble. I saw other shards that I didn’t collect, and when I went to turn in my 20, a pop-up said that there were 30 in total if I wanted to continue, giving a generous flexibility to ignore any you might have trouble with while providing completionists with more to do. The interactions were all delightfully playful and surprising, so I expect to be among the latter. The systemic nature of the fire and physics objects elevates it above a simple adventure game to feeling like a light immersive sim, which makes me all the more excited to explore and see what surprises they have in store when the game comes out in full next year. Bad Magpie Milktooth ☆☆☆☆☆ ★★★★★ Get it now Bad Magpie is a narrative adventure game about a magpie with one wing, a fixation on shiny things, and no interest in connecting the two dots. — YOU ARE A MAGPIE One wing. No flock. One obsession: a fallen star that wants shiny trinkets and nothing else. Burn a meadow, drain a swimming pool, write off a car… You can't fly but there are plenty of other ways to navigate the world… and you’re going to try all of them. Your plan is simple: Find the trinkets. Win over the star. Cure your loneliness. — A WORLD TEEMING WITH SECRETS Explore a small, densely packed, non-linear open world full of things to peck, steal, combine, and meddle with. Bad Magpie runs on a delightfully elastic cartoon logic. Screech into a megaphone to shatter glass. Peck flint to spark fires. Drop an apple in oil and see what happens. Tear through the world in a fury, or carefully sweep every corner leaving no stone unpecked. There's no dialogue, no text, and no cutscenes. Just a world that rewards anyone curious enough to mess with it. Every puzzle has multiple solutions. Most of them are intentional. — FIND SHINY THINGS You want the star. The star wants trinkets. But trinkets don’t come free. Not when there’s meteorites to be found. So what’s the use of wallowing? You have shiny things to find. — A MYSTERY DRIVING THE WHOLE THING You are haunted by a mysterious vision. What is it? Why is it appearing now? And how long will the star keep you distracted from it? It's probably nothing. .post-template-default .xwsrc-block-content-block .wp-block-column.flex-basis-50.push--25.column--content { flex: 100%; margin-left: 0; } Related Stories for “Long Overdue, Bad Magpie Finally Expands the ‘Be a Rude Bird’ Genre” Category: XBOX Games Showcase Join Us – Creating Calamity Within a Chaotic Cultist Sandbox Category: XBOX Games Showcase Minecraft Dungeons II Blows the Doors of the ARPG Wide Open Category: XBOX Games Showcase Halo: Campaign Evolved Hands-On Demo – It’s The Halo You Love, But Even Better The post Long Overdue, Bad Magpie Finally Expands the ‘Be a Rude Bird’ Genre appeared first on XBOX Wire. View the full article