You can play with some friendly rats, cause havoc in a ghostly Old West, and alter your body in the new year with the PlayStation Plus Essential titles that Sony has revealed will be free to play in January 2024. Nobody Saves the World and Evil West are the next two free games in the 2024 schedule, with A Plague Tale: Requiem at the top. For PlayStation Plus members in the Essential, Extra, and Premium tiers, all three titles will be available for download on Tuesday, January 2.
The sequel to A Plague Tale: Innocence, which follows a girl called Amica and her younger brother Hugo as they elude troops across the French countryside in the 1300s, is A Plague Tale: Requiem. It is unexpectedly moving and sometimes nasty. Thousands of plague rats are roiling across the country. Although the rats might be useful tools if you can create opportunities for them to feast on your unfortunate pursuers, the youngsters soon discover that they too must escape them.
The plot continues in Requiem, which takes up six months after Innocence ends, with Amica and Hugo experiencing more fear as they become entangled in further supernatural and medieval intrigue. It also contains even more rats the sequel shows up to 300,000 at a time, compared to the previous game’s 5,000 or so onscreen representations.
In his review of Requiem for GameSpot, Richard Wakeling wrote.
“There’s a lot to love in Requiem, even if frustration is an all-too-common bedfellow when it comes to gameplay. There are better stealth games out there, but its unique setting, poignant storytelling, and rat-infested dread make 14th-century France worth returning to.”
Nobody Saves the World, Evil West, and A Plague Tale: Requiem
Another supernatural viewpoint is added to a historical action game by Evil West. In this third-person shooter, steampunk-inspired weaponry and some deadly metal claws are mixed in with the standard lever-action rifles and six-shooters to face you against an Old West overrun with vampires. It is produced by Flying Wild Hog, the company best known for the Shadow Warrior and Hard Reset video game series.
Last but not least is Nobody Saves the World, a colorful and frequently humorous top-down action RPG that grants you magical abilities. You receive the power to change the bland and pliable main character, Nobody, into various shapes after you unintentionally get a wizard’s magic wand. These shapes include fantasy mainstays like an arrow-firing Rogue and more unusual choices like a robot.
As you navigate arbitrarily generated dungeons and attempt to remove a curse from the land, using the appropriate form for the task is crucial for both fighting and puzzle-solving. “A fiendishly compelling action RPG with creative ideas that all fit together for frictionless fun,” is how Steve Watts described Nobody Saves the World in his review for GameSpot. The PlayStation Plus Essential games for December are Powerwash Simulator, Sable, and Lego 2K Drive. You have a few more days to claim them if you haven’t already.