Sony has announced the free PlayStation Plus Essential games for January 2024, bringing you the opportunity to play with some friendly rats, wreak havoc in a supernatural Old West, and change your shape in the new year. A Plague Tale: Requiem leads the first slate of free games of 2024, followed by Evil West and Nobody Saves the World. All three games will be available to download on Tuesday, January 2, for Essential, Extra, and Premium tier PlayStation Plus subscribers.
A Plague Tale: Requiem is the follow-up to the surprisingly affecting and often disgusting A Plague Tale: Innocence, which follows a girl named Amica and her younger brother Hugo as they flee soldiers through the French countryside in the 1300s. The kids quickly find that they also need to avoid the thousands of plague rats seething through the nation, although the rats can be handy tools if you can open opportunities for them to chow down on your hapless pursuers.
Requiem picks up the story six months after the conclusion of Innocence, extending Amica and Hugo’s terror as they get embroiled in more medieval and supernatural intrigue. And it has even more rats–where the first game could show about 5,000 rats on screen at a time, the sequel brings that number up to 300,000. “There’s a lot to love in Requiem, even if frustration is an all-too-common bedfellow when it comes to gameplay,” Richard Wakeling wrote in GameSpot’s review of Requiem. “There are better stealth games out there, but its unique setting, poignant storytelling, and rat-infested dread make 14th-century France worth returning to.”
Evil West also brings a supernatural lens to a period action game. The third-person shooter pits you against an Old West filled with vampires, mixing your usual lever-action rifles and six-shooters with steampunk-like weapons and some really nasty metal claws. It comes from developer Flying Wild Hog, best known for Hard Reset and the Shadow Warrior games.
Finally, there’s Nobody Saves the World, which gives you magical powers in a cartoonish and often funny top-down action-RPG. After you accidentally get hold of the magic wand belonging to a wizard, you gain the ability to transform the boring and malleable protagonist, Nobody, into various different shapes, including fantasy staples like an arrow-firing Rogue, and weirder options such as a robot. Using the right form for the job is essential both for combat and puzzle-solving as you work through procedurally generated dungeons and try to lift a curse from the land. In GameSpot’s review of Nobody Saves the World, Steve Watts called it “a fiendishly compelling action-RPG with creative ideas that all fit together for frictionless fun.”
You still have a few days to claim December’s PlayStation Plus Essential games–Powerwash Simulator, Sable, and Lego 2K Drive–if you haven’t already.
PlayStation Plus free games for January 2024
Available from January 2 to February 5
- A Plague Tale: Requiem
- Evil West
- Nobody Saves the World