Games with Gold for April 2018: Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, The Witness, Dead Space 2 and Cars 2

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Some free-game months are worth it for quantity, and some for variety: April 2018 was both. On March 28, Microsoft announced the next month’s Games with Gold, the games Xbox Live Gold subscribers could claim at no extra cost.

The list, with the claim periods:

The Witness (Xbox One), throughout April
Assassin’s Creed Syndicate (Xbox One), April 16 to May 15
Cars 2: The Video Game (Xbox 360), April 1 to 15
Dead Space 2 (Xbox 360), April 16 to 30

The two Xbox 360 games ran on Xbox One through backward compatibility, so you could enjoy everything on the same console.

The highlight, for design lovers, was The Witness. The game by Jonathan Blow, creator of Braid, came out in January 2016 and takes place on an island full of line-puzzle panels on grids, about 650 in all, without needing to solve all of them to reach the end. What stands out is that the game barely explains anything: the rules teach themselves, panel by panel, and many solutions are hidden in the scenery itself, in the shadow of a tree or the reflection on the water.

Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, from Ubisoft Quebec, from 2015, takes the series to Industrial Revolution London, with the twin siblings Jacob and Evie Frye. You can see the care in recreating the Victorian city, with trains, carriages and the Thames. Dead Space 2, from 2011, brings back engineer Isaac Clarke in a tense space horror, on a station overrun by necromorphs. And Cars 2, based on the Pixar movie, was a breather for the kids.

What came next

Games with Gold ended on September 14, 2023, when Xbox Live Gold became Xbox Game Pass Core. Xbox 360 games that were claimed stayed with players forever; Xbox One ones now require an active subscription.