The recent batch of games that arrived on Xbox Game Pass included a number of titles including Power Wash Simulator and Escape Academy but it turns out another game from that group that was catering for a much younger audience gained a lot of buzz and at least in my time made for another useful case for highlighting how cloud streaming of games can be a great addition to the gaming landscape.

Now the game in question, My Friend Peppa Pig, is very much geared towards the younger audience. The best way to describe it is “my first adventure game” and it does a good job of keeping things simple while having a presentation that’s identical to the source material. For what it is, it’s not bad at all and it does a great job of putting the player inside their own little episode. A lot of the more experienced gamers also noticed that it was easy to earn all of the achievements and get the full 1000 gamerscore. It’s something that can easily be done in an hour or two and that makes it appealing to some parts of the community. It’s got a lot of positive press from it! Seeing as I love my fair share of achievements of course I needed to check it out. 🙂

The nature of the gameplay, involving only left/right movement and a single button press plus the short completion time actually makes it the perfect cloud streaming game for testing the experience from start to finish. For me it worked out well streaming to my console – it was responsive and there were only a few moments toward the end of my time where I saw any visual issues (compression artifacts) and that could have been because my home Internet was heavily used at the time. I know I’m not the only one who occasionally leverages streaming from their Game Pass subscription – I’ve used it to check out Flight Simulator updates to avoid the long console download and even played a few races in Forza Horizon 5 on my mobile – but I’ve rarely leaned on it for playing through a whole game. Considering I’m playing most of my games on a Series X, that streaming can be “good enough” in some cases is a nice option for myself and other players to have at their disposal. It certainly highlights one of the advantages of having cloud streaming combined with Game Pass – you can easily try it out before you download or buy.

I’m sure there’ll be more games in the future I will play this way. Not necessarily for chasing gamerscore, though could still happen (!), but because the experience works so well via streaming that the download is unnecessary. For other gamers this might be all they need in the future and now Samsung TVs are starting to roll out apps for game streaming maybe we will see again the TV regain its dominant position as the centre of all home entertainment rather than being a link in a long chain of devices. And all of this rumination because I played a kid’s game… nice work Peppa Pig! 🙂