Xbox Game Pass Adds Day-One Game From Award-Winning Studio

Xbox Game Pass has added Blood Dungeon to its ever-rotating content catalog, in addition to making one slightly older title available to even more subscribers. The day-one platformer is officially the 128th new addition to Xbox Game Pass in 2026, yet only the sixth brand-new Xbox Game Pass release since the beginning of August.

Messhof first gained wider attention with its viral fencing tug-of-war game Nidhogg in 2014. The original won multiple indie honors, while Nidhogg 2 later earned award recognition. Together, the games built a following with short PvP matches that were easy for newcomers to pick up but offered enough depth to reward practiced play. Blood Dungeon takes a markedly different approach as an entirely single-player experience; one that’s also an unconventional genre hybrid of a platformer and a roguelite auto-shooter likely to appeal to Vampire Survivors fans.

Blood Dungeon Is Messhof’s Second Day-One Xbox Game Pass Release in a Row

After 8 Years of ‘Avoiding’ Game Pass, the Developer Gave it 2 New Titles in 13 Months

Blood Dungeon officially launched worldwide on August 20 at noon EDT, when it also joined Microsoft’s subscription service. It is the second Messhof title to do so in just 13 months, following Wheel World‘s Xbox Game Pass debut in summer 2025. Prior to that, the service spent its first eight years without a single game from the award-winning studio, though admittedly it only launched one new title in that period: Nidhogg 2, launched in August 2017, when Xbox Game Pass was barely two months old.

Aerial_Knight’s DropShot Now Available on Xbox Game Pass Premium

Blood Dungeon is available on PC Game Pass and XGP Ultimate, the only two tiers with access to day-one releases. XGP Premium members will likely have to wait for it until at least February 2027. In the meantime, they have just received something else: Aerial_Knight’s DropShot, a colorful action game from Detroit-based solo developer Neil Jones. It is technically a rail shooter, though its “rails” take the form of freefall trajectories. That distinctive parachuting premise makes for a decidedly fast-paced experience, requiring players to think quickly and shoot even faster if they hope to survive, let alone land first.

Like Blood Dungeon, Aerial_Knight’s DropShot was a day-one Xbox Game Pass title, having originally joined the Ultimate and PC tier of the service on February 17, 2026. Premium-tier subscribers have been able to play it since around midnight local time.

What’s Ahead on the Xbox Game Pass Schedule

1 More New Arrival in August 2026 + 7 Confirmed Release Dates for the Next 6 Months

Dominik Bošnjak / GameRant | Source images: Xbox, Messhof

The next stop on the Xbox Game Pass schedule for late August 2026 comes on the 27th, when Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy is set to join the service as its fifth and final day-one release of the month. The last catalog addition before September is scheduled for August 31, when cozy life sim Young Suns joins the Premium tier after spending nearly a year in the XGP Ultimate and PC GP libraries.