A photography game built around a cartoon dog may turn out to be the most delightful addition to Xbox Game Pass this month. Bluey’s Happy Snaps, the much-anticipated follow-up to 2023’s Bluey: The Video Game, launches as a day-one title on October 15, 2026, and it comes included at no additional charge for subscribers on both console and PC.
That alone is a strong selling point. Over the years, Game Pass has quietly put together one of the most impressive catalogues in the medium, the sort of collection that would demand enormous spending and aggressive measures to replicate even in small part. All that expenditure has carried serious fallout of its own, and Xbox is currently working to redefine what it stands for while the industry goes through a historic upheaval. Still, the releases keep rolling in, and if the subscription fee is already coming out of your account, there is every reason to extract maximum value from it.
The October slate is broad and varied. Part of it, Battlefield 6 included, amounts to titles that already exist finding a fresh home (and, ideally, a fresh audience) on the service. Several others are brand-new day-one launches Microsoft shelled out a premium to lock down, and every Game Pass Ultimate subscriber gets them entirely free. The camera-wielding dog counts among them.
Where the original fell short
Bluey: The Video Game arrived in 2023 as a faithful, warmly received take on the wildly popular animated series. It gave children and fans the chance to roam around the show’s vivid world and talk with its cast of characters, and for a time, that proved plenty.
The problem was how quickly it wrapped up. The adventure ran notably brief, a frustrating shortcoming considering its fairly steep asking price.
A different developer picks up the camera
Bluey’s Happy Snaps is best described as a spiritual successor, and the team behind the first game has nothing to do with it. Australian studio Gameloft Brisbane is handling both development and publishing, and it is promising a deeper, more polished experience with a stronger shot at winning over the entire household.
The core loop takes clear cues from Pokémon Snap. You roam open environments as Bluey, snap pictures, and paste them into a scrapbook. The art direction is charming, and the easter eggs, characters, and settings fans would hope for are all present. Most importantly, everything runs offline with absolutely no microtransactions, and beyond solo play you can pass a second controller to a friend, who takes on the role of Bingo.
Watching a series this beloved continue to receive video game adaptations is encouraging, if only because it builds on an experience that is as enriching and educational as it is fun. For anyone who has been holding out for a worthy successor to the 2023 adaptation, this is the Game Pass release to circle on the calendar.
Mark down October 15. Hand the spare controller to a kid, cast them as Bingo, and get to work on that scrapbook.