As we tip to the brink of a brand new month, Microsoft has whipped out its message horn to admire Xbox Live Gold subscribers with news of May’s Xbox Games With Gold, which this month includes Yoku’s Island Express and Viva Piñata Party Animals.
Yoku’s Island Express, which will be available for download from 1-31. May is a strange but successful mix of platform games and pinball games that Eurogamer’s Christian Donlan liked a lot when it came out back in 2018, calling it a “wild-breathing adventure to cherish.”
Next up, and available for download from May 16 to June 15, is The Inner World: The Last Wind Monk. This one, developed by Studio Fizbin (responsible for last year’s striking Minute of Islands), is a follow-up to the acclaimed 2013 ‘The Inner World’s point-and-click adventure and once again follows the young, whistle-nosed adventurer Robert on a the quest to save the world.
Hydro Thunder Hurricane, meanwhile, stands for the first of May’s two Xbox 360 titles and will be available to Xbox Live Gold subscribers from the 1st to the 15th. May. Released in 2010, it is the sequel to Midway’s 1999 arcade speedboat racer Hydro Thunder and was called a “hyperactive celebration of balls-out, dumbass” video game-ness in Eurogamer’s 7/10 review.
And finally, to round off Microsoft’s latest Games With Gold line-up, Viva Piñata Party Animals is the less-than-lovingly remembered party game spin-off of Rare’s much-loved Viva Piñata gardening sim series, which will be made available to Xbox Live Gold subscribers from 16-31. May.
Developed by Krome Studios, Eurogamer beat Viva Piñata Party Animals with a damning 3/10 in 2007, saying: “There is very little challenge or strategy, and very little imagination has gone into anything other than the visual, which was made by other people anyway. . ”