On Wednesday, Nintendo hosted its latest Nintendo Direct to give third-party partners a chance to show off their upcoming Switch releases. Among the announcements were the first two Xbox exclusives being ported to the Switch: Grounded and Pentiment.
During the latest episode of the Official Xbox Podcast, Phil Spencer announced that four games that were previously exclusive to Xbox and PC would be making their way to other platforms. He would not reveal the identity of those games, but The Verge reported at the time that they were likely to be Grounded, Pentiment, Hi-Fi Rush, and Sea of Thieves.
It’s unclear when we’ll see the other two games, but let’s look at the two we know about.
First up is Grounded, a survival game from Obsidian Entertainment that entered early access in 2020 and officially launched on September 27, 2022. In Grounded, you play a character who has been shrunk to the size of a bug and has to survive in a backyard full of threats. You build a base and gather supplies while fighting off spiders, bees, and other insects.
Obsidian also developed Pentiment, and it couldn’t be more different. Pentiment is a narrative-focused RPG about a traveling artist from Nuremberg who attempts to solve a series of murder mysteries in the fictional town of Tassing. You’ll spend most of the game gathering evidence by exploring the town and chatting with the townsfolk you meet.
These should both be great fits for the Switch and will give an entirely new audience the chance to catch up on two fantastic and underrated games. Pentiment will be available on the eShop on February 22, and Grounded launches for Switch on April 16.
