16 Games like Thirty Flights of Loving on Xbox that you should try

FPS with RPG elements, Bioshock invites players to experience horrors of underwater isolation in the city of Rapture, the failed project of the better future. After surviving the plane crash, the protagonist has only one way to go – to the giant lighthouse that opens a way to the underwater utopia.

A short follow-up focused almost entirely on Alyx as a companion — the AI and dialogue work is what it was really testing, and it holds up. Roughly four hours. It is the slightest of the three: much of it is dark corridors and elevator sequences, and it functions more as a bridge than as a game in its own right.

The strongest of the Half-Life 2 releases: open forest driving, the best encounter design in the series, and a Hunter fight that remains a high point of enemy AI. Roughly six hours. It ends on the cliffhanger that was never resolved, which for many is harder to sit with now than it was in 2007.

Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is a first-person horror game that combines intense action and adventure elements. You will draw upon your skills in exploration, investigation, and combat while faced with the seemingly impossible task of battling evil incarnate.

The reset that pulled the series back to survival horror: first-person, confined to a single decaying Louisiana estate, with scarce ammo and a family that hunts you through it. The Baker house section is among the best horror the series has produced. After you leave it the game becomes far more scripted and linear, and the boss design is the weakest part of the package.

Gordon Freeman became the most popular nameless and voiceless protagonist in gaming history. He is painted as the most famous scientist and a hero within the world of Half-Life, and for a good reason.

A first-person puzzle game structured like a metroidvania: a small sandbox where new tools retroactively open earlier areas, and almost every corner hides something. Puzzle design is genuinely clever. Combat is the weak part — enemies are simple damage sponges that interrupt the puzzling — and the art style is plain enough to look cheap.

Gunslinger is the fourth installment of the Call of Juarez series of western-inspired games. The frame story, told in cutscenes, begins in 1910, in Kansas, where Silas, a patron in the pub, brags about his adventures in the Wild West.

In the far-distant future, far, far away in space (to be exact, a thousand light-years from the Earth), on the planet Far, Far Range, mega-corporations (they, it turns out, will be with us in the distant future!) discovered the ideal source of income, universal natural resource - Plort.

Its enemy AI is still the reference point twenty years on: soldiers flank, suppress and call out movements, so firefights unfold differently each time. Slow-motion makes that legible instead of trivial. The horror sections have not aged as well — the same office corridors repeat for hours, and the scares telegraph themselves long before they land.

Wider environments and better lighting than the original, with the slow-motion shooting mostly intact and a mech section that breaks up the pacing. The AI is noticeably less sharp than in the first game, though, and the horror leans on jump scares rather than the dread the original built. Competent, rarely surprising.

A conventional military shooter wearing Quake's skin: corridor combat with heavy weapons, at its best in the mid-game once the Strogg conversion sequence gives it a hook. Level design is repetitive metal hallways for long stretches, and the squadmates who accompany you do little beyond soaking damage and opening doors.