Return To Grace is a smartly written Gone Home-like about piecing together a comatose AI god, and one of those games which doesn't outstay its welcome

An expansive, gilded entry hall in a space station on Ganymede.

The hidden gems of Game Pass(Image credit: Microsoft)We’re checking out the hidden gems of Game Pass over the next few weeks, digging up all the obscure and esoteric games secreted away in our subscription and seeing how they play.

The hidden gems of Game Pass

(Image credit: Microsoft)We’re checking out the hidden gems of Game Pass over the next few weeks, digging up all the obscure and esoteric games secreted away in our subscription and seeing how they play.

(Image credit: Microsoft)

We’re checking out the hidden gems of Game Pass over the next few weeks, digging up all the obscure and esoteric games secreted away in our subscription and seeing how they play.

But Adie—our hero—goes about her task with aplomb. She’s made the six-month journey to Ganymede, one of the moons of Jupiter, with the task of figuring out what happened to Grace—an artificial overlord that, hundreds of years ago, established peaceful dominion over the entire human race and put paid to strife, conflict, hunger and deprivation. Think of the Helios ending from Deus Ex and you pretty much have it.

The deal was pretty sweet right up until Grace mysteriously vanished 900-or-so years back, plunging humanity into a new dark age of, um, strife, conflict, hunger and deprivation. Think of the Tracer Tong ending from Deus Ex and you pretty much have it. Adie, an archaeologist, has spent a lifetime’s work piecing together where Grace came from so she can work out how to bring her back.

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There’s only a little trudging through the Ganymedian ice before you’re safely ensconced in the Spire, the majestic home base of a dead god that now lies dreaming and also some kind of really nice interplanetary Travelodge, which once played host to all manner of human guests in addition to housing the suzerain of the solar system.

A triangular piece of wall art in bronze.

It’s a lovely place, but it’s seen better days—all the systems from the doors to the life support to the in-house rail system have been off for centuries, and Adie’s archaeological training hasn’t really equipped her to deal with any of that. She needs help. Fortunately, elements of Grace still linger in the Spire’s subsystems. Her logic, her control, and her empathy are your first guides through the station, expanding into a roster of new characters as you mix and match those emotions into whole new people.

Crossing a balance beam high in the air.

It’s almost Disco Elysium-esque as Grace’s brain-bits speak up to make fun of you for not knowing what the Phoenician letter taw looks like (it’s X, turns out), or to implore you to spread word of her return like an itinerant preacher, or to ask if you were a flower, what kind of flower you’d be.

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It’s a style of writing that would be very easy to do wrong, andisdone wrong all the time in other games and media, slipping over into grating, quippy, Marvel-ish dialogue. Return To Grace avoids that, threading the needle between humour and weightier stuff deftly. Heck, the extended sequence in which the empathy fragment pretty much walked me through an Apple Fitness meditation section actually made me laugh. In real life! Imagine.

Entering a keycode.

So if you’re on the hunt for a quick, narrative jaunt in our era of 100+ hour RPG titans and infinite live-service somethings, you could do a lot worse than Return To Grace. You can find it onGame Pass,Steam, andEpic.

PC Gamer created this content as part of a paid partnership with Microsoft and PC Game Pass. The contents of this article are entirely independent and solely reflect the editorial opinion of PC Gamer.

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