XBOX Demo Fest 2026 is Live While 'No Rest For The Wicked' Skips XBSX at Launch

If you haven't checked it out yet, the XBOX Demo Fest is live with over 40 games available to play completely free. You can head over to the Store and jump into any of them from June 4th to June 30th across XBOX One and Series X/S. They themselves put out a reminder that these are early looks at games still in development.

So the final versions you see at launch may look a little different, including availability by country, as developers keep polishing things up. So just keep that in mind going in. There is a solid mix of indie and smaller titles in there, and if you are someone who enjoys indie games, this is honestly worth your time. Indie games undeniably tend to be some of the most creative ones out there.

The XBOX Demo Fest has a genuinely large amount of games worth jumping into.

There is just a lot of interesting stuff here that you are going to be able to get into, and a good chunk of it is the kind of thing you probably would not have heard about otherwise. One that stands out is Surf Punk, which has a brawler feel to it, almost like a Hades-style game, and that one looks pretty cool. If you want to get hands-on with games before they officially release and then support the ones you enjoy when they do end up dropping, this is a good way to do it.

Now shifting over to something a little more frustrating: No Rest for the Wicked is not coming to XBOX at the same time as PlayStation, and this is not new information. The original assumption was that it would release at the same time as on PlayStation, but that turned out to be wrong. The reason comes down to Series S optimization, which Moon Studios had already mentioned before.

Thomas Mahler responded to a player saying that the Series S is making things rough and that they will ship it after, once it is properly optimized. He also threw in a comparison, saying that XBOX Series S specs and mobile specs are not too far apart at this point, which is a take that not everyone is going to agree with, but that comparison is a bit of a stretch, and it is not entirely clear that it holds up.

What this means in practice is that the No Rest for the Wicked delay on XBOX is real, and the game is going to come out on PS5 and PS5 Pro first while XBOX owners wait. We are in 2026, and this conversation about XBOX Series S holding games back is still going, and honestly it is starting to feel kind of ridiculous at this point. This has come up so many times now.

It is true that there are real development challenges when it comes to memory and optimization on the Series S.

But 99% of games on the console run well, and the ones that are there run very well. You can look at recent 2026 releases like Forza Horizon 6 and 007, both of which just came out and are running fine on XBOX Series S. Those developers found a way to make it work and get things properly optimized, and those are not light titles either.

No Rest for the Wicked does not even look as technically demanding as some of those titles, which makes the XBOX Series S situation harder to take seriously. The more likely reality is that Moon Studios simply does not have the developer resources right now to get it running on Series S in time for the console release. That is a bad move, because not only does it affect Series S owners, it also means the Series X version is not dropping at launch either.

The whole version is being pushed back, and that means losing out on a bunch of sales right out of the gate that they are probably not going to get back. It is not entirely clear how many people are over the moon waiting for No Rest for the Wicked on console, and how well it is going to sell is still an open question. It will probably do okay. But the game was a bit underwhelming when it first dropped on PC.

There was a lot of hype around it going in, but it did not land with quite the critical acclaim people were expecting, and that perception is still sitting there. So the question becomes: by the time the No Rest for the Wicked delay on the Series X/S finally gets resolved, and it does eventually land on XBOX consoles, will the release still carry any momentum, or will the window have already closed by then?