A new year is upon us. After 2020 has been a rough one, it’s kind of hard to think about what 2021 will bring forth. It’s been a wild year with a lot happening both in gaming and in the broader world in general. Like all months, January of 2021 will also have the usual slate of games for the various subscription services, and Games With Gold is looking to start the year off pretty good.

For the entire month, you’ll be able to get Little Nightmares on Xbox One, just in time for the horror sequel coming out in February. From January 1st-15th is the Xbox 360 fighting game, King of Fighters 13, which was the game right before the most recent entry.  For the 16th until the end of the month on the 31st will see the remaster of the first Dead Rising on Xbox One. From the 16th and into February 15th will see a hidden OG Xbox gem called Breakdown, an experimental first person action game with a very Japanese flavor from Namco before they merged with Bandai.

The games will be available starting on New Year’s day and will be playable on all Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S systems. King of Fighters 13 and Breakdown will also be playable on the 360. They will all be free of charge for those subscribed to either Xbox Live Gold or Game Pass Ultimate.

On their website, Undead Labs, the studio behind the excellent Xbox Live Arcade game State of Decay, have announced that the they have submitted the first piece of DLC for the game to Microsoft for certification; following the approval process, it can be released over Xbox Live Arcade.

The DLC, which is called Breakdown, is essentially complete, and is now going to go through a rigorous QA testing process: Undead Lab estimates that the pre-certification testing should be done by the end of next week, which is when the proper certification process will begin.

The full blog post is actually fascinating, as it seems to give a really different picture of working with Microsoft than recent developments (and comments by people like Jonathan Blow) have painted; the process, while long, seems to be one that Microsoft supports the developers through.

We’ll keep you posted on further developments regarding Breakdown, so stay tuned.