The four-player shooter for game night

From the makers of Sniper Elite, a co-op shooter that owns everything it is: 1940s Europe, undead Nazis and heads exploding in slow motion. Not a masterpiece, but one of the best games in the catalog to fire up with friends.

The previous game ended with a zombie Hitler banished to hell. That was not enough: the dead rise again, in greater numbers, and the survivor brigade sets out across Italy to find out what drives them. The story is a B-movie fully aware of being one, and that is exactly right.

Rebellion reused the Sniper Elite engine, and with it its signature: careful ballistics and the X-ray camera that follows the bullet all the way to impact. On zombies the effect is more grotesque than disturbing. You snipe at range, finish off up close and chain spectacular takedowns.

The game supports up to four players online. Weapons are upgraded with elemental effects (fire, electricity, divine energy), each character picks their perks, and levels are built as a series of arenas to hold against ever larger waves — armoured zombies, suicide bombers and possessed tanks included.

Solo, the game works but soon goes in circles. With others it is a different thing: you split roles, cover each other, revive each other, and chapter finales turn into genuine moments of group panic. Horde mode, with endless waves, stretches the evenings.

About a dozen hours of campaign, far more to unlock everything. Like Left 4 Dead in its day, it is the kind of game you do not buy for the story, but keep installed because someone always ends up suggesting just one more round.

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Last chance

Yakuza: Like a Dragon is also leaving the PS Plus catalog on October 20. The catch: it is a long game. Here is what you can reasonably see of it before then, and why even a few evenings are worth it.

Ichiban Kasuga is a low-level grunt in a low-level Tokyo yakuza family. Out of loyalty to his boss, he agrees to serve eighteen years in prison for a crime he did not commit. When he gets out, nobody is waiting, his clan is gone, and the man he admired most shoots him. He wakes up in Yokohama, broke, surrounded by homeless men.

It is the first main-series game from Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio to drop real-time brawling for turn-based combat. The game turns that into a running joke: Ichiban, a Dragon Quest fan, sees the world as a role-playing game, and Yokohama's thugs transform before his eyes into RPG monsters. Jobs range from bodyguard to street musician, and attacks pull from the scenery, bicycles and road signs included.

Around the main story is everything the series is known for: dozens of absurd and often touching side stories, kart races, a business to grow, arcades with real SEGA games. And under the comedy, a genuine melodrama about loyalty and the family you choose.

To be honest: the story alone takes around forty hours, far more with the activities. You will not finish it in a week without giving it every evening. But the first chapters stand well on their own, and they are enough to tell whether the series is for you.

If it is, the good news is that the sequel, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, is in the catalog. And if you have already started Like a Dragon, now is the time to push through to the end before it leaves.

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Coming to PS Plus

Sony has announced the games joining the PS Plus Extra and Premium catalog in October 2026, including Dino Crisis 2, Horizon Forbidden West and Tales of Arise – Beyond the Dawn Edition. Here is the full list, ranked by score, with each arrival date.

Dino Crisis 2 · Critic score 86 · Story ~5.3 h

Horizon Forbidden West · Critic score 86 · User score 4.6/5 · Story ~28.7 h

Tales of Arise – Beyond the Dawn Edition · Critic score 85 · User score 4.6/5

The Midnight Walk · Critic score 79 · User score 4.7/5 · Story ~5.1 h

Mafia: The Old Country · Critic score 73 · User score 4.0/5 · Story ~12.3 h

RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 Complete Edition · Critic score 72 · User score 3.1/5 · Story ~20.5 h

Monster Energy Supercross 25 – The Official Video Game · User score 2.7/5

Mycopunk

Poppy Playtime: Chapter 1 · User score 4.5/5

Last chance

The Silent Hill 2 remake is one of the games leaving the PS Plus catalog on October 20. It is among the best-rated games on the departure list, and it fits into a long weekend: if you had set it aside, now is the time.

James Sunderland receives a letter from his wife Mary. She is waiting for him, she writes, in their "special place" in Silent Hill. The trouble is that Mary died three years ago. James goes anyway, and finds a deserted town drowned in fog, where a woman who looks exactly like his wife is waiting and says her name is Maria.

Released on PS2 in 2001, Silent Hill 2 is often called the high point of psychological horror. Bloober Team's remake, published by Konami in 2024, keeps the story, the characters and the puzzles, but moves to an over-the-shoulder camera and rebuilds every location from scratch. The Wood Side apartments, Brookhaven Hospital and Toluca Prison are bigger, more detailed and genuinely more oppressive.

The game frightens less through its monsters than through what it is saying. Every creature, every character you meet, and the pyramid-helmeted figure stalking James, points to something he refuses to look at. The ending you get depends on how you played, without the game telling you: whether you keep James healed, read certain letters, stay close to Maria.

Expect around fifteen hours for a first run, a little more if you search every room. Combat is deliberately heavy: this is not Resident Evil, and running is often the better choice. Sound matters enormously, so play with headphones if you can.

Once it leaves, you will have to buy it to come back. If you only play one game from the departure list before the 20th, make it this one.

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How long does it take to beat?

After two games in the tunnels of the Moscow metro, 4A Games' series comes up to the surface. Metro Exodus is a first-person shooter that plays like a journey, and how long it lasts depends a lot on how you play it.

It is 2036, more than twenty years after a nuclear war. Artyom, hero of the two previous games, is convinced there is life somewhere other than Moscow. With his wife Anna and a handful of soldiers, he seizes a steam locomotive, the Aurora, and heads east. The game, based on Dmitry Glukhovsky's novels, spans a full year of that journey.

The big change is the open maps. The Volga under snow, a desert on the shores of the Caspian Sea, a taiga in autumn: each major stop is a free area to explore, interspersed with linear levels in the series' best tradition. Seasons pass, the day-night cycle changes encounters, and every return to the train is a breather between missions.

The rest is faithful to Metro: gas mask filters to watch, a visor you have to wipe, scrapped-together weapons you modify at a workbench, and ammunition you count. The game also quietly watches how you treat the people you meet: sparing, helping or killing weighs on the ending.

How long does it take? Around fifteen hours following the story, twenty or more exploring the open areas as you should. Completionists chasing every ending and collectible go past forty. It is one of the rare games in the genre where exploration does not feel like padding.

On PS5 the game runs in its enhanced version, with ray-traced lighting, and the atmosphere gains a lot. An excellent pick for anyone who loved the Stalker games or wants a shooter that takes its time.

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Monster Hunter, without the hunt

First released on 3DS, then brought to PS4 in 2024, Monster Hunter Stories takes Capcom's universe and turns it upside down: here you do not track monsters, you hatch them and fight alongside them.

The hero comes from a village of Riders, a community that lives with monsters instead of hunting them. When a creature infected by the Black Blight attacks the village, he sets out to understand where this corruption that drives monsters mad is coming from.

The premise owes something to Pokémon: you raid nests, steal eggs and hatch them into Monsties, who become companions and mounts. Each species has its own traversal abilities — jumping, swimming, climbing — and its own combat skills. A ritual lets you transfer genes from one monster to another to build custom combinations.

Combat is turn-based, a first for the series, and rests on a three-way rock-paper-scissors between power, speed and technical attacks. Reading which type an enemy is about to use is the key, and the series' big monsters switch patterns mid-fight. Easy to grasp, more subtle than it looks.

The tone is that of a cartoon, colourful and without grimness, which makes it a very good entry point to the series for younger players or anyone who finds Monster Hunter too rough. The PS4 version adds Japanese voices and a gallery, without touching the game itself.

Count on around thirty hours for the story, far more to complete your collection. The sequel, Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings of Ruin, more ambitious and darker, is in the catalog as well.

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The PS1 RPG in Final Fantasy's shadow

Released in Japan in late 1996, a few weeks before Final Fantasy VII, Wild Arms had the misfortune of arriving at the wrong time. All four PlayStation episodes are in the Classics Catalog; the first remains the best place to start.

Filgaia is a world slowly drying up, somewhere between medieval fantasy and the Wild West. There are castles and demons, but also saloons, treasure hunters and forgotten firearms, the ARMs, which people regard with suspicion. The tone is set from the opening, carried by a whistled guitar theme that became the series' emblem.

Three heroes, three stories that converge: Rudy, a quiet boy who wields an ARM; Jack, a treasure hunter travelling with a mouse that can squeeze in anywhere; Cecilia, a princess and apprentice mage. After separate prologues they come together to face the return of demons thought defeated a thousand years ago.

What sets the game apart from its contemporaries is its dungeons. Each character has tools — bombs, a grappling hook, a wand — used to solve environmental puzzles: lighting a fuse, fetching an item, crossing a chasm. It sits closer to Zelda than to a string of corridors and fights.

The turn-based battles switch to 3D with polygonal monsters, while exploration stays in 2D sprites. The contrast has aged, but it has a period charm. The original English translation is sometimes clumsy; the story holds up well all the same, with genuine melancholy.

Around thirty hours, at a cruising pace that leaves time to grow attached to the trio. Episodes 2, 3 and 4, all in the Classics Catalog, are waiting afterwards.

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The ruthless PS2 cult classic

Designed by Keiichiro Toyama, creator of the first Silent Hill, Forbidden Siren is one of the most singular horror games on PS2. And one of the hardest. It is in the Classics Catalog.

Hanuda is an isolated Japanese mountain village. One night a siren sounds, the surrounding sea turns red and the villagers become shibito, beings neither dead nor alive who carry on with their routines — and kill anyone who is not like them. The game follows around ten survivors over the three days that follow.

Its core mechanic is called sightjacking: by concentrating, a character tunes in to what nearby shibito can see. You watch their patrols, check through their eyes where they are looking, then slip past. It is a powerful idea, because it makes the enemy your main source of information, and therefore of tension.

The story is fragmented. A grid links characters and hours; finishing a scenario with a secondary objective unlocks another one elsewhere in the timeline. You often have to return to a scene you already played to do something different, and piece together the village's story yourself.

To be blunt: this is a demanding game, sometimes an opaque one. Many characters are unarmed, secondary objectives are rarely spelled out, and failure sends you back to the start of the scenario. The characters' faces, photographed from real actors, give it a strangeness that time has not erased.

Few games have aged so well in their strangeness, and few were played so little in Europe. Allow around twenty hours, and keep a walkthrough at hand without shame. Toyama went on to make Gravity Rush, then Slitterhead in 2024.

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The small Sony game worth catching up on

A bullied teenager, an abandoned harbour town and a magic brush. Concrete Genie, from Sony's small Pixelopus studio, went largely unnoticed in 2019. It is one of the gentlest games in the catalog.

Ash lives in Denska, a former fishing town that pollution has emptied of its people. He spends his time drawing in a sketchbook that the local boys tear from him and scatter. Chasing the pages, he finds a brush that can bring to life whatever he paints on the walls.

The whole game rests on that gesture. You paint by moving the controller, picking motifs from the sketchbook: trees, stars, auroras, campfires. The walls come alive, light returns to the streets, and each district switches back on one string of lights at a time. There is no score and no judgement: you paint what you like, where you like.

Some paintings come alive for real. Genies are small creatures you design yourself, who follow Ash across the walls and help him past obstacles in exchange for drawings. They are the emotional heart of the game, and its best idea.

The last third shifts towards more conventional combat, less successful than the rest. But the game never loses its subject: the bullies have their own story too, and it takes the time to tell it without turning it into a lesson.

About five hours, a bit more to light everything up. Sony closed Pixelopus in 2024: Concrete Genie is one of only two games the studio made, and the best reason to remember it.

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The PS1 classic that hunts you

In 1999 Capcom added to the Resident Evil formula an enemy you cannot shake off. The PS1 episode is in the Classics Catalog, and it still holds things its 2020 version left out.

Raccoon City is falling. Jill Valentine, a survivor of the first game's mansion, is trying to escape a city overrun by Umbrella's virus. The story starts a few hours before Resident Evil 2 and ends after it, making it the link between the two.

Its signature is the Nemesis: a creature built to eliminate S.T.A.R.S. members, which shows up at unpredictable moments, smashes through doors and chases Jill from room to room. You can flee, or fight it for rewards; either way, the fear changes nature. It is no longer dread of the next corridor, it is the feeling of being followed.

The game also introduces split-second choices. At certain points the screen freezes and offers two options — jump out the window or stand your ground, escape through the sewer or stay — that change the next scene, and sometimes the ending. On top of that come a dodge and an ammo-crafting system based on mixing gunpowders.

The 2020 remake opted for a tighter adventure and cut several locations, including the clock tower, along with those choices. The bonus Mercenaries mode, unlocked after the credits, is also unique to this version. If you played the remake, the original is not a rerun.

Fixed cameras, tank controls: it takes about an hour to get used to them again. After that, it is a short game, around six or seven hours, built for replaying, with items and puzzles that shift from one run to the next.

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The reboot that restarted everything

In 2013 Crystal Dynamics started from scratch: no more invincible adventurer, but a young shipwrecked archaeologist learning to survive. The Definitive Edition, released a year later on PS4, remains the best way to experience that fresh start.

The Endurance sinks off the coast of Japan, in the Dragon's Triangle. Lara Croft, barely out of university, washes up on the island of Yamatai with the rest of the crew. The island is held by a cult that keeps its visitors, and something older stops anyone from leaving.

The game tells how Lara becomes the character we know. The opening hours show her wounded, starving, shaken by her first kill; the bow, found early on, quickly becomes her weapon of choice. The violence is brutal and the staging does not soften it, which sparked some debate at release.

As a game, it is an action adventure built from wide corridors, broken up by open hubs you can revisit. Campfires are where you upgrade skills and weapons, and the tools you pick up (climbing axe, rope arrows, explosives) open new paths. The tombs themselves are optional and short: small physics puzzles that nod to the series' roots.

The Definitive Edition adds all the downloadable content to the original and a visual overhaul built for PS4, including a reworked face for Lara. An online multiplayer mode is on the menu too; it is a side dish, the campaign is the reason to play.

Around twelve hours for the story, a little more if you comb the island. It is also the natural entry point to a trilogy the catalog offers in full, with Rise of the Tomb Raider and Shadow of the Tomb Raider to follow, plus Legend and Anniversary from the PS2 era in the Classics.

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Still in your library

Given to Essential subscribers in December 2025, Neon White is no ordinary shooter: its levels last thirty seconds and the goal is not to finish them, it is to finish them faster. If you claimed it over the holidays and never launched it, here is why it deserves better.

You are White, an assassin plucked from Hell to compete in a contest in Heaven: whoever exterminates demons fastest earns the right to stay. Each level is a short first-person course with a timer and a single question: where to cut.

The find is the soul cards. Every weapon you pick up is a card: used, it fires; discarded, it triggers a movement — a double jump, a dash, a bomb that launches you. Choosing between shooting and moving, in a split second, is the game's entire grammar. The perfect level is the one where you almost never shoot.

You finish a course in a minute, earn a medal, and the game then shows a hint: a shortcut exists. You start over. Then you start over to beat your own time, then a friend's. A thirty-second level can hold you for half an hour, and it is the kind of obsession that cannot be explained from the outside.

Between missions, the game takes the form of a visual novel: the other assassins seem familiar, and the story of who you were before Hell unfolds through the gifts you bring them. It is talkative, sometimes too much, but it skips with one button.

About ten hours to see the end, twice that for the medals, forever for the leaderboards. It has been in your library since the holidays: it is the ideal game for a twenty-minute break, and the hardest to leave after twenty minutes.

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Still in your library

Given to Essential subscribers in August 2023, Death's Door is a top-down action game where you play a soul-reaping crow with a desk job. It is funny, it is hard, it is short, and it has probably been gathering dust in your library for two years.

The starting point is an afterlife bureaucracy: crows are civil servants there, each assigned souls to collect, complete with time clock and line manager. The day the soul assigned to you is stolen, you must chase it into a world where death no longer passes — and where everything that should have died has kept on growing.

That sets the tone: dry, dark humour, carried by memorable side characters, and a melancholy that settles in before you see it coming. The game is about the end of life and what you do with the time left, but it says so through a crow grumbling about management.

The combat is precise and lean: a sword, a roll, a bow, a few spells. Mistakes are costly, the bosses are real trials, but every area reads clearly and the checkpoints are well placed. The studio had already made Titan Souls, and that taste for legible, demanding confrontation is all here.

The world is a set of levels connected by doors, each with its own atmosphere and its own tyrant to dethrone, and it is full of shortcuts and hidden corners you unlock by coming back with a new ability. It is not an open world; it is better: a dense one.

About ten hours are enough to see the end, a bit more to understand the real ending. If you were subscribed in summer 2023, it is waiting for you. It is a game you launch without commitment and cannot put down once the first door is through.

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Still in your library

Given to Essential subscribers in May 2024, Tunic looks like a pocket Zelda with a fox. It is a disguise: beneath the soft appearance hides one of the most devious and secret-laden games on PS Plus.

You wake up on a beach, unarmed, with no directions, and the game speaks to you in an invented language you cannot read. The only landmarks are manual pages scattered across the world — an old-fashioned instruction booklet, illustrated, with annotated maps and tips scribbled in the margins. Every page you find explains a mechanic you may already have been using without knowing it.

That manual is the game's big idea. It does more than explain: it hides things. A path drawn where the screen shows none, a repeated symbol that eventually makes sense, a page you reread three times before realising it describes a code. The second half of the adventure is less about fighting than about rereading.

The combat, though, does not mess around. Parry, dodge, stamina: the game borrows the demands of the Souls series, and some bosses will take repeated attempts. Accessibility options exist for those who only want to explore, no shame in it — the puzzles alone are worth the trip.

The world is built in isometric view, and that perspective serves the gameplay: whole passages are concealed behind a wall or beyond an angle, visible only once you know they exist. Returning to an area with a new clue almost always reveals something.

Count a good ten hours to finish it, far more to crack its last secrets — and it has some very deep ones. If you claimed it in spring 2024, it is still there. It is the game to launch when you feel like getting out a notebook and a pencil.

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Still in your library

Given to Essential subscribers in October 2025, Cocoon slipped by somewhat unnoticed between two big names. It is nonetheless the most elegant puzzle game of recent years, from the lead gameplay designer of Limbo and Inside.

You are a small insect carrying a sphere on its back. That sphere contains an entire world. You can enter it, leave it, and — this is where the game tips over — carry one sphere inside another. The whole construction rests on this nesting of worlds, and on what becomes possible once you rearrange them.

There is not a word of text, no tutorial, no skill menu. The game has a single action button, and every puzzle is explained by the space itself: a door, a mechanism, a sphere that is not where it should be. You understand what is expected by looking, never by reading.

Each sphere eventually gains a power of its own — revealing hidden paths, firing a projectile — that only works while you carry it inside another world. The final puzzles ask you to hold three levels of nesting in your head at once, and the moment it clicks is one you do not forget.

Guardian fights punctuate the adventure. They are rare, short, and each introduces a new mechanic rather than a reflex test: you solve them more than you beat them. The game almost never punishes; it waits for you to understand.

Five hours, no dead time, no padding. It is exactly the length of a quiet weekend, and the best reason to pull it out of the library where it has been waiting since autumn.

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Still in your library

Given to Essential subscribers in May 2025, Balatro is the kind of game you claim out of habit and forget in your library. That is a mistake: it is one of the highest-rated games ever to pass through PS Plus, and it rests on a single idea.

The idea: play poker hands — pair, three of a kind, straight, flush — to score points, and clear score thresholds that keep rising. No opponent, no bluffing. Just a hand of cards, a number to beat, and the right to discard what does not help.

Everything happens in the Jokers, cards bought between rounds that bend the rules: multiply the score of a suit, count a card twice, earn money for every pair. There are a hundred and fifty of them, and their interactions mean no two runs look alike. A Joker worth nothing becomes the key to a whole run once the right neighbour shows up.

A run lasts half an hour, won or lost, and every newly unlocked card makes you want to start another. It is the roguelike loop in its purest form, without a single page of rules to read first: if you know what a pair is, you know how to play.

The game is the work of a single developer, and it shows in its coherence: a CRT-television aesthetic, a synth soundtrack that loops without ever wearing thin, and an interface that explains everything on hover. Nothing is there for decoration.

The "main story" playtime means little here: it measures a first win. The real game starts afterwards, with alternate decks, difficulty levels and challenges. If you claimed it in spring 2025, it is still in your library. Launch it on a weeknight: it will not give you back before midnight.

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The most refreshing JRPG

The Yakuza series left real-time brawling for turn-based combat, and left Japan for Honolulu. The result is one of the largest JRPGs in the catalog.

Two heroes meet: Ichiban Kasuga, the absurdly optimistic newer protagonist, and Kazuma Kiryu, the series' historic figure. The adventure spans both sides of the Pacific, between Japan and Hawaii — an unprecedented change of scenery for a series that had never really left its Tokyo and Osaka districts.

The most important change concerns combat. Where the series ran on real-time street fighting, this entry, like the previous one, works turn by turn with classes, skills and elemental weaknesses. That choice, initially presented as an in-joke — the hero is a Dragon Quest fan who imagines his street fights as an RPG — turned out to be a very good system.

What has not changed is the tonal gap, the series' signature. The main plot is an adult crime drama with betrayals and scenes of dry violence. Alongside it, you manage an island, collect creatures, take a licence exam, sing karaoke and play a dating game. The two registers coexist without transition, and that is intentional.

The volume of side content is considerable, to the point that some players spend more time there than in the story. It is not generic filler: most of these activities are complete minigames with progression of their own.

Expect around sixty hours for the main thread, and without exaggeration double that if you take your time. It plays fine without knowing the earlier entries, though many reunions will pass you by.

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PS Plus Monthly Games

The PS Plus Essential Monthly Games for October 2026 are out: Hunt: Showdown 1896, F1 25, Earth Defense Force: World Brothers 2 and Earth Defense Force: World Brothers 2. Claim them from 6 October 2026; here is what they are worth.

Hunt: Showdown 1896 · Critic score 81 · User score 4.2/5 · Story ~55.8 h

F1® 25 · Critic score 80 · User score 4.5/5 · Story ~6.1 h

EARTH DEFENSE FORCE: WORLD BROTHERS 2 · Critic score 77 · User score 4.3/5

EARTH DEFENSE FORCE:WORLD BROTHERS · Critic score 74 · User score 4.7/5

The best game to play with family

“It's a lovely day in the village, and you are a horrible goose.” The game delivers exactly that promise, in three hours, and is one of the most approachable things in the catalog.

You are a goose let loose in an English village that did nothing to deserve you. The game calls itself a slapstick-stealth-sandbox: you make your way through back gardens, the high street and the village green, setting up pranks, stealing hats, honking a great deal and generally ruining everyone's day.

The structure is a list of mischief. Each area offers a set of objectives noted on a clipboard — make a bust wear a hat, force a man to buy back his own belongings, get someone to fall in the lake. There is never a single solution: you experiment, you watch the villagers' habits, you pull an object at the wrong moment.

The controls are deliberately minimal: run, lower your head, grab an object with your beak, and a button dedicated to honking. That last one usually achieves nothing useful, which is precisely why you press it constantly.

The staging does the rest. The village is drawn in flat colours, in an almost architectural style, and the piano accompanying the action responds to what you do — racing when you are chased, cutting out when you stand still. That detail turns every prank into a small comic routine.

Three hours for the main list. This is the game you hand to someone who does not play: no prior knowledge required, and the objective is understood immediately.

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The best cooperative game

Two complete games bundled together, hundreds of levels, and a very simple premise: prepare dishes together, in kitchens designed to make it impossible.

This definitive edition gathers Overcooked!, Overcooked! 2 and all their additional content, brought up to 4K, with online multiplayer integrated into both games for the first time.

The principle fits in one sentence: orders come in, you have limited time, and you must chop, cook, assemble, serve and wash the plates. Each step is trivial in isolation. The difficulty comes entirely from coordination — who chops, who serves, who fetches the clean plate while the rice burns.

The real opponent is the kitchen itself. Levels are built against you: worktops separated by a chasm, conveyor belts carrying ingredients away, a kitchen straddling two trucks that drift apart, slippery floors, rats stealing the food. The game never stops inventing ways to break the arrangement you just worked out.

The result is a game that forces communication. You shout, you divide the tasks, you appoint people to roles, and you start over. It is probably the catalog's finest title for four people on a sofa — and the surest way to discover how the people close to you behave under pressure.

Expect around twelve hours to get through both campaigns, more to chase three stars everywhere. Playable alone, but that is frankly not the point.

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Leaving PS Plus

SILENT HILL 2, Yakuza: Like a Dragon and Gloomhaven Mercenaries Edition are among the games leaving PS Plus Extra and Premium on 20 October 2026. Here is the full list, ranked by score, with how long each one takes so you know what you can still finish.

SILENT HILL 2 · Critic score 86 · User score 4.8/5 · Story ~16.1 h

Yakuza: Like a Dragon · Critic score 85 · User score 4.5/5 · Story ~46.1 h

Gloomhaven Mercenaries Edition · Critic score 82 · User score 3.0/5

Death Squared · Critic score 77 · User score 4.1/5 · Story ~6.1 h

Jurassic World Evolution 2 · Critic score 76 · User score 4.4/5 · Story ~6 h

Lake · Critic score 73 · User score 3.8/5 · Story ~6.1 h

Harvest Moon®: Light of Hope Special Edition · Critic score 62 · User score 4.1/5

Rogue Lords · User score 3.4/5 · Story ~25 h

The shortest game, and the funniest

A game that does not last two hours and has no ambition to last longer. It wants one thing: to make you laugh, and it manages it better than anything else in the catalog.

You are a salesman passing through Barnsworth, a small town in the north of England. While waiting for your appointment you wander the place and meet the locals, who hand you a series of increasingly strange odd jobs.

The game describes itself as a slapformer: a platformer where most of the interaction consists of hitting things. You can jump, and you can slap. That is all. Almost every piece of scenery responds to that slap, usually out of all proportion, and progress consists of discovering what breaks.

All of its value sits in the writing and the drawing. The humour is specifically northern English — absurd, delivered in a thick accent, resting on a sense of nonsense that refuses to explain anything. A butcher with overreaching ambitions, a fishmonger in crisis, a pie of problematic size. Nothing is justified, and that is the point.

Visually it is a distorted cartoon, with stretched characters and saturated colours, animated with energy that never lets up. The sound work is equally remarkable: every object struck has its own noise, and the score feeds on your mischief.

Two hours, maybe three if you hunt for everything. It is short, it is deliberate, and it is exactly the sort of game a subscription lets you try without thinking — which you probably would not do if you had to buy it.

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The best short game in the catalog

Tetris came out in 1984 and had, in principle, nothing left to prove. This one still finds something to add, and holds one of the highest scores in the catalog.

The game comes from Tetsuya Mizuguchi, who also made Rez and Lumines — titles built on the same obsession: making image and sound answer the player's input, until playing feels like playing music.

Here, every rotation of a piece produces a note. Every completed line advances a track. The scene behind the grid reacts, transforms, changes theme as you progress — a seabed, a desert, a field of stars. The mechanical loop of Tetris is untouched; it is the sensory envelope that has been entirely rebuilt.

The mechanical addition is called the Zone: a reserve that, once triggered, stops time and lets you stack pieces onto already completed lines before clearing them all at once. It is both a safety net when the grid fills up and a scoring tool for those who master it. Used well, it reverses a lost game.

The Connected in the title refers to the multiplayer expansion: a cooperative mode where three players share a single grid against an opponent controlled by the game, plus competitive modes online and local. Cooperation on a shared grid is something Tetris had never explored.

Three hours will take you through Journey mode. It is the kind of game you keep installed for months, for twenty minutes in the evening — and the reason you should not judge a game by its length.

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The most generous platformer

A two-dimensional platformer that never stops adding: levels, ideas, worlds, and musical stages that are on their own a reason to play it.

Rayman Legends is the fifth main entry in the series and the direct sequel to Rayman Origins. A century after the previous game, the Bubble Dreamers' nightmares have spread; Rayman and his friends set out to deal with them. The narrative pretext is thin, and nobody pretends otherwise.

What matters is the craft. The animation is hand-drawn, frame by frame, and remains among the most beautiful in the medium — the characters have weight, momentum and micro-expressions that 3D rarely reproduces. The studio's in-house engine was built for exactly this.

Generosity is the guiding principle. The game holds dozens of levels across worlds with strongly marked identities — a forest, an underwater world, a medieval kitchen universe — to which are added almost all of Rayman Origins' levels, unlockable. You never hit the bottom.

And then there are the musical levels, placed at the end of each world. The stage synchronises to a track: every jump, every strike, every falling platform lands on the beat. They are eight minutes of play that on their own explain why this title is cited whenever the best modern 2D platformer comes up.

About ten hours for the main path, considerably more to unlock everything. It plays locally with several people, and that is where it becomes frankly chaotic.

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The best strategy game in the catalog

A turn-based tactics game where failure is permanent and the characters have no story of their own — only the name you gave them. That is where all its power sits.

Earth has fallen under alien control. The imposed order presents itself as an age of prosperity and security; on the fringes of the big cities, some see a dictatorship. XCOM is reborn as a resistance movement, operating from a captured alien ship, the Avenger.

That reversal changes the nature of the game compared with its predecessor. You are no longer the army defending the planet but a guerrilla force: most missions begin in concealment, on a timer, and waiting passively is now a way to lose. The game pushes you forward, which makes it considerably tenser.

The core remains turn-based tactics: two actions per soldier, partial or full cover, displayed hit chances. And 85% shots that miss, which built the game's reputation as much as its difficulty did.

But what XCOM does better than anyone rests on a simple idea: your soldiers are anonymous, renameable, and die permanently. You give one a friend's first name, he survives six missions, earns promotions, becomes your best shot — then falls to a placement error. The game did not script that: you wrote the story, and that is why it matters.

Expect around thirty hours for a campaign, and know that a first run is often lost. Base management — research, recruitment, trade-offs between regions — takes up as much attention as the fighting.

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The best racing game in the catalog

Three games in one, antigravity craft, and no concession to simulation. It is the highest racing score in the catalog, and probably the most demanding.

The collection brings together WipEout HD, its Fury expansion and WipEout 2048, rebuilt for PS4. This is not a straight port: textures were entirely reworked, to the point that you can read the lettering on the ships' hulls for the first time.

WipEout has nothing to do with car racing. The craft float, barely brake, and the track rears up, banks and turns over. Driving rests on two techniques: the airbrakes, which let you pivot through a corner without shedding speed, and pitch control, which handles changes in altitude. Mastering them is the price of admission; without them you hit walls.

There are weapons too — mines, missiles, shields — but they remain secondary. At the higher speed classes the difficulty does not come from your rivals: it comes from the circuit itself, which you must know by heart to anticipate a corner you cannot yet see.

What built the series' reputation, beyond the handling, is the whole aesthetic package: a stripped-back industrial design inherited from The Designers Republic, and an electronic soundtrack that accompanies acceleration rather than commenting on it. Few racing games have so immediately recognisable an identity.

Progression is generous, with campaigns across several speed classes. Expect around fifteen hours to see most of it, and considerably more for the upper classes — the ones where the game truly becomes itself.

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The forgotten PS1 classic

Released a few months after Metal Gear Solid, it paid the price. Twenty-five years later its score remains among the highest in the Classics Catalog.

A terrorist organisation seizes a virus codenamed Syphon Filter. Agent Gabe Logan is sent to track it down. The story is the espionage thriller of its period, with government conspiracies, betrayals and secret laboratories.

The game takes a different approach from its illustrious contemporary. Where Metal Gear Solid imposed a top-down view and strict infiltration, Syphon Filter adopts an over-the-shoulder third-person camera and leaves the choice open: hide, or take the fight. In practice it prefigures what modern action-stealth games would become.

Its arsenal made its reputation, partly for the wrong reasons. The taser in particular lets you hold the charge until the target catches fire — a detail players of the era remembered, and one that says plenty about late-1990s taste for that kind of excess.

What has aged best are the missions: compact, varied, with clear objectives and maps built for several approaches. A subway, a park, an embassy. There is a density here that action games lost as they grew longer.

What has aged badly is the aiming, which is stiff, and the camera, which needs taming. Around ten hours. It is a historical curiosity as much as a good game, and exactly the kind of title you will not find outside the Classics Catalog.

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The best FPS in the Classics Catalog

A 2002 shooter made by the people behind GoldenEye, hopping across eras and taking nothing seriously. It is a reminder of what the genre looked like before it became a tunnel.

TimeSplitters 2 was developed by Free Radical Design, a studio founded by part of the GoldenEye 007 team. The lineage is audible immediately: ten levels across different eras, each handed to two space marines chasing the TimeSplitters, an alien race that manipulates time.

The campaign's premise is its best asset: every level is an era and a pastiche. A black-and-white Chicago in 1932, a Siberian station in 1990, a Wild West town, an 1895 Notre-Dame, a Martian base. The game changes setting, music and tone every twenty minutes, and never takes itself seriously.

Its structure belongs to a generation of shooters now largely abandoned: open levels with objectives to complete in whatever order you like, several routes, and a difficulty setting that adds objectives rather than enemy health. You do not follow a corridor listening to someone talk; you learn a map.

The other half of the game is its arcade mode, and it is substantial: dozens of characters, absurd rule sets, a map editor, and above all a split-screen multiplayer suite that remains among the most generous ever shipped. It is also why its community never let go.

Seven hours for the campaign, and effectively no limit on the rest. Classics Catalog, so Premium subscription required.

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The PS1 gem nobody asks for

Excellent score, almost nobody talking about it. Ape Escape is nonetheless the first game in history to require two analogue sticks — it was designed for the controller we still use today.

The premise is one absurd sentence: an ape named Specter gains enhanced intelligence through an experimental helmet, develops a malicious streak, and sends an army of apes through time to rewrite history. Spike sets out after them with a net.

The interest lies elsewhere. Released in 1999, Ape Escape is the first game to make the DualShock mandatory: it cannot be played any other way. The left stick moves the character, the right one operates the gadgets. Catching an ape with the net requires a motion of the right stick; the lasso, the glider and the club each have their own gesture.

That idea, radical at the time, has become the absolute norm — every three-dimensional game today runs on two sticks. Playing it now means watching the convention being born, before it was a convention.

The game itself has aged very well structurally: compact levels, a crystal-clear objective (capture every ape), each with its own behaviour — some flee, some attack, some hide. It is a collection of small hunts, closer to a capture game than a classic platformer, and the pacing still holds up.

Seven hours covers the essentials. It is in the Classics Catalog, and it is exactly the sort of title that justifies digging through that part of the catalog instead of stopping at the new releases.

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The best classic platformer

In 2001, 3D platformers were carved into levels separated by loading screens. This one fitted an entire world into a single unbroken piece, on PlayStation 2.

A distant planet dominated by the ruins of a vanished civilisation, the Precursors, who left behind eco — an energy that comes in colours with distinct effects. Dark eco, capable of warping living things, is coveted by Gol Acheron, who sends his Lurkers to harvest it. After an accident, Daxter is turned into a hybrid creature; Jak sets out to find a way to restore him.

The technical feat became famous. There is no loading screen between areas: you walk from a fishing village to a snowy mountain and the world unfolds continuously. On the hardware of the time this required a streaming system few studios had mastered, and it changes how you perceive the place — you feel a territory rather than a sequence of stages.

The game itself is exemplary in its clarity. Jak runs, jumps, strikes and glides a little; there is no skill tree and no upgrades to manage. Progress is measured in power cells collected, which open access to later areas. Everything is immediately understandable, including for a child, and none of it dates.

The duo also works through one writing decision: Jak does not speak, Daxter never stops. The permanent sarcastic commentary sets the tone, and directly influenced a generation of talkative sidekicks.

About ten hours for the story. It is in the Classics Catalog, so it requires a Premium subscription — and it is one of that catalog's best arguments.

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The largest sandbox in the catalog

A medieval RPG that refuses magic, elves and enchanted swords. In their place: fifteenth-century Bohemia, documented, and a blacksmith who cannot fight.

Kingdom of Bohemia, early fifteenth century. The realm has fallen into chaos and invaders are pillaging the countryside. Henry of Skalitz, whose family was slaughtered, has become a trusted man of the rightful king. He is sent to escort Sir Hans Capon on a diplomatic mission; the ambush that follows sets the adventure in motion.

What sets the series apart is its refusal of the fantastic. Nothing is supernatural: your opponents are men, wounds become infected, and your character must eat and sleep. Food rots in your bag. Armour gets dirty and must be cleaned, failing which people treat you as a vagrant.

Combat follows the same logic and divides opinion just as much. It rests on attack directions, parries with a very short window, and chains that demand real practice. Above all, Henry starts out incompetent: he shakes, he misses, he loses to a peasant. The power curve comes not from stat points but from the fact that you, the player, eventually understand the system.

The world reacts with rare precision. Steal in front of a witness and you are pursued; be seen bloodied near a corpse and that is enough to accuse you; guards recognise you. The result produces situations the game never scripted, which makes it one of the most credible sandboxes in the catalog.

You have to accept the flip side: it is a heavy game, sometimes stiff, and its opening hours are deliberately frustrating. Expect around fifty hours for the main thread, considerably more if you take your time.

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The best technical showcase on PS5

The very first Souls, rebuilt entirely for PS5. It is both a piece of history and the most convincing technical demonstration on the console.

Demon's Souls is the ancestor. Released in 2009, it laid down the grammar the whole series would reuse: a dark medieval world overrun by demonic fog, a knight killed and brought back, souls harvested from corpses that serve as both currency and experience — and are lost on death until you return to where you fell.

Its structure differs from later Souls games. Where Dark Souls offers a continuous world, Demon's Souls is organised into five distinct archstones, each subdivided into levels and linked by a central sanctuary. It is more legible, more compartmentalised, and paradoxically more approachable for a newcomer: you can abandon a world that resists and make progress elsewhere.

It does keep its most contested mechanic, world tendency: dying repeatedly in an area darkens it, making enemies tougher but rewards better. It is an obscure system, poorly explained, and very much of its time.

Bluepoint's rebuild is the real argument. Everything was remade — models, lighting, sound — without touching level layout or balance. You are playing exactly the 2009 game inside a 2020 production, with near-zero loading times that genuinely change your relationship with death: restarting no longer costs you any waiting.

Expect around twenty hours to finish, far more if the genre is new to you. PS5 exclusive.

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The catalog's lesson in minimalism

Seven hours, no lesser enemies, no chests, no towns. A game built by subtraction, and still, twenty years on, a reference everyone cites.

A young man carries a woman's body into a temple at the end of a bridge, in a forbidden land. A voice offers him a bargain: destroy sixteen colossi scattered across the territory, and she may come back to life. The game says no more, and never really will.

Between the colossi there is nothing. No encounters, no items to pick up, no quests. You ride and cross vast empty stretches, guided by a beam of light reflected from your sword. That emptiness is not a saving of effort: it is what gives weight to the only moments when something happens.

Each colossus is simultaneously a boss and a puzzle. They are immense creatures to be climbed like moving structures, as you look for the handhold, the fur to cling to, the moment the beast lowers its head. Force never suffices; you have to understand how the thing is built.

And the game makes these killings unpleasant. The colossus struggles, groans, collapses slowly, and a black substance strikes you. None of them attacked you before you arrived. The game comments on nothing; it simply lets the discomfort settle — and that is where its reputation and influence live.

Seven hours for all sixteen. The version here is the 2018 rebuild, graphically reconstructed from the ground up, with the original controls that some will find stubborn. It is also a good way in if long games put you off.

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The best remake in the catalog

Most remakes refresh the textures. This one rebuilt the entire game while preserving exactly what made the original frightening.

The plot is unchanged from 1998. Raccoon City is ravaged by a virus; two characters try to get out. Leon Kennedy, a policeman on his first day, and Claire Redfield, looking for her brother. Each has a campaign, their own encounters and their own route through the city.

The heaviest change is the camera. The original used fixed shots and pre-rendered backdrops, with rough aiming that was part of the tension. The remake moves to an over-the-shoulder view with precise shooting. On paper that should have made the game easier; in practice, seeing the enemy come at you proved more distressing than guessing at it off-screen.

The police station remains one of the great pieces of architecture in games. It is a closed space you learn by heart, where every unlocked door reconfigures your routes, and whose shortcuts you end up knowing better than the characters do. That economy of space — few places, many connections — is what survival horror does best.

Added to it is a pursuer who tracks you through the building without a script. He cannot be killed, only pushed back for a few minutes, and he hears your footsteps. His presence turns inventory management, already tight, into constant calculation under pressure.

About ten hours per campaign, and both are worth doing: the routes overlap without repeating. It sits in the Classics Catalog, so it requires a Premium subscription.

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The most debated game in the catalog

One of the highest critic scores in the catalog, and a stormy public reception. That gap is no accident: the game is built to provoke it.

Five years after the first game, Ellie is nineteen and living in Jackson, Wyoming. An act of violence sends her to Seattle with one fixed idea. The game follows that revenge without ever making it satisfying — which is its explicit project.

Its structure is both its masterstroke and the reason for the backlash. Halfway through, the game takes away the character you have been following and places you, for many hours, in the boots of someone you had every reason to hate. It has you live their days, meet their people, understand their reasons. Many players experienced that switch as a betrayal; that is precisely the intended effect.

The game aims for discomfort down to its mechanics. Human enemies call each other by name, cry out when a comrade falls, and the dogs you must put down have names. Killing remains efficient and satisfying to execute, and the game arranges for that pleasure to come back at you. You can find the device heavy-handed — several critics wrote as much — but it is sustained from beginning to end.

Technically it is a demonstration: animation, lighting, and accessibility, where it is cited as an industry reference. Encounters are also markedly more open than in the first game, with real spaces to work around.

Twenty hours or so, dense and draining. It is not a game to recommend lightly, and if you want the comfort of the first one, better to know that before starting.

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The most demanding game in the catalog

An action-RPG that takes the Souls formula and removes the shield. That single subtraction changes everything, and explains why it still stands apart in the catalog.

Bloodborne is the only entry in its series, with no sequel or predecessor and a single expansion. It shares most of its grammar with Dark Souls — same developers, same shortcuts and bonfires, same relationship with death — but shifts its centre of gravity radically.

The shield is gone. In its place, a firearm used not to shoot from range but to interrupt an attack at the right moment, opening a devastating riposte. And crucially: damage taken can be recovered if you strike the enemy within the following seconds. The game does not reward caution, it punishes it. To back away is to lose that health for good.

This system transforms how the game feels. Where a classic Souls is learned by waiting, Bloodborne is learned by advancing, which runs head-on into reflexes acquired elsewhere. The opening hours are brutal for exactly that reason.

The setting supports the design: Yharnam, a gothic city eaten by a disease turning its inhabitants into beasts, slides steadily from Victorian novel into cosmic horror. The game almost never explains it — understanding comes through item descriptions and architecture, which exasperates as much as it fascinates.

Expect around thirty hours, more if you explore the Chalice Dungeons. It is not difficult through sheer volume of enemies, but through the need to unlearn. If you gave up on a Souls out of impatience, this one may paradoxically suit you better.

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The best game in the Classics Catalog

Twelve years on, it still holds the highest score in the Classics Catalog. Not for its technology, long since surpassed, but for what it proved a game could tell.

America, 2033. Twenty years earlier, a Cordyceps fungus crossed the species barrier and turned its human hosts into aggressive creatures. Joel, a hardened smuggler, accepts one more delivery: escorting Ellie, fourteen, out of the quarantine zone. She is immune.

The setup is conventional — a closed-off adult, a child to protect, a road — and the game makes no attempt to hide it. Its achievement lies elsewhere: in how the relationship is built in small strokes, often outside the scripted sequences. A remark thrown out while walking, a silence after a violent scene, a joke that lands badly. Naughty Dog understood before many others that the journey matters more than the twists.

The game is also remarkably stingy. Ammunition is scarce, fights are short and ugly, and stealth is not an elegant playstyle but a fallback. That constant shortage turns every encounter into a decision: go around, or spend what you have left.

It is worth naming what age has done: level layouts are narrow, enemy intelligence is dated, and some combat stretches have aged poorly. Those are the limits of a 2013 game, brought up to date graphically but not rethought.

Fifteen hours or so will see you through. That length suits what it sets out to do, and it stops exactly when it should — its final scene remains one of the most debated in the medium.

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The most widely acclaimed game in the catalog

It holds both the highest critic score in the catalog and one of the highest player ratings, across hundreds of thousands of votes. A rare consensus, and one worth explaining.

America, 1899. The outlaw era is ending and lawmen are hunting down the last gangs. After a robbery goes badly wrong in Blackwater, Arthur Morgan and the Van der Linde gang are on the run, pursued by federal agents and the best bounty hunters in the country.

The story is not about conquest but about an ending. The gang flees west knowing, dimly, that there is no west left to reach: towns are organising, railways are gridding the territory, and the world these people lived off is closing. Arthur Morgan, a loyal enforcer, gradually becomes the clear-eyed witness to that dissolution.

Technically, what stands out is the density of the world. Townspeople have routines that shift with the hour, weather changes the ground underfoot, your horse must be fed and grows in confidence, your beard grows. None of these details is necessary to the game; their accumulation produces a sense of inhabited place that few productions reach.

That choice has a cost, and it should be stated plainly: the game is slow. Travel takes time, interaction animations are long, picking up an object is a full gesture. It is consistent with the subject, but if you want a brisk rhythm you will be irritated within the first hour.

Expect around fifty hours for the main story, comfortably double that if you let the world distract you — which it does constantly, and that is the whole point.

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The best JRPG in the catalog

The longest game in the catalog is also one of the highest rated. Persona 5 Royal asks for around a hundred hours and spends all of them making you want to give it more.

Persona 5 Royal runs two games at once. By day you are a high-school student in Tokyo: you attend class, work part-time, maintain friendships, revise for exams. At night and in the gaps, you infiltrate Palaces — mental worlds born from the distorted desires of corrupt adults — to steal the treasure that sustains them.

The two halves are not merely placed side by side, they feed each other. Bonds formed in the city unlock combat abilities; the social stats you develop open up dialogue and options elsewhere. Every day is a trade-off: time is finite, and choosing to see someone means giving up something else.

Combat rests on elemental weaknesses. Hitting an enemy's weak point grants an extra turn; knocking down a whole group triggers a collective attack. All of it is wrapped in a razor-sharp red-and-black art direction that turns every menu into a small demonstration of style — this is one of the rare games whose interface is cited as a selling point.

Royal is the expanded version of the 2016 release: an additional third term, a new central character, extra areas and mechanics. This is not a coat of paint; a substantial part of those hundred hours simply did not exist before.

It is the kind of game that fills an entire winter. If you hesitate to commit, note that its player rating on the PlayStation Store is among the highest in the whole catalog — the length has evidently discouraged nobody.

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Play it before it leaves the catalog

A real-time tactics game set in a merciless Wild West, where every ambush is a puzzle to dismantle. It is flagged as leaving the catalog soon, so the time is now.

Desperados III is not a strategy game where you command an army. You control five characters, no more, against dozens of enemies who spot you within seconds if you are seen. Direct confrontation is almost always a loss.

Every mission is therefore built as a puzzle. You study the guards' vision cones, their patrol routes, the moments when two of them turn their backs on each other. Then you exploit your team's specialities: the gunslinger who drops two targets with a single shot, the woman who distracts a guard long enough for someone else to knock him out, the trapper and his bear trap, the old doctor and his poisoned case.

The tool that makes all this playable is Showdown mode: it freezes the action so you can plan several simultaneous moves, then trigger them at once. Neutralising three guards at exactly the same instant, because none of them can be taken down alone without the others seeing, is a sensation few games provide.

The story follows a mismatched band across 1870s America and Mexico, chasing a common enemy. Mostly it does its job: giving a pretext and a tone to very large missions, often replayable in radically different ways.

Expect close to thirty hours for the campaign. The game appears in the PlayStation Store's “last chance to play” category, which means it will leave the catalog soon — Sony does not publish the exact date. If the genre appeals to you, do not put it off.

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The best puzzle game in the catalog

You inherit a forty-five room manor, on the condition that you find a forty-sixth that appears on no floor plan. And every day, the entire house reorganises itself.

Blue Prince starts from an idea nobody had really exploited: you build the building you are exploring. At every closed door, the game offers several possible rooms; you pick one, it materialises, and your floor plan takes shape through your own decisions.

Each room has its rules. Some open several doors, others are dead ends. Some supply keys, extra steps, money. Placing a room with many exits too early, or a dead end in the wrong spot, can doom an entire day of exploration. The draw introduces chance, but the game is mostly about taming it.

Because at the end of the day, everything resets. The manor returns to its initial configuration and you start again from the entrance. What persists is what you understood: documents read, mechanisms spotted, codes written down in a notebook — your own, as it happens, because the game genuinely expects you to take notes.

This is where Blue Prince separates itself from other puzzle games. Progress is not in a skill tree, it is in your head. A puzzle solved stays solved, because the solution is a piece of knowledge rather than an object. Many players describe the moment when an apparently decorative detail, seen ten runs earlier, suddenly becomes the key to everything.

Expect around twenty hours to reach the fabled Room 46 — and appreciably longer if you want to understand what the manor is actually hiding.

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The best indie platformer

A demanding platformer where you die hundreds of times, and which is really about anxiety and self-doubt. Celeste pulls off both, without either weakening the other.

On paper Celeste is a two-dimensional platformer: Madeline climbs a mountain across more than five hundred screens spread over eight areas. She can grab any wall and dash through the air. Two verbs, nothing more — and the entire difficulty comes from combining them.

The game is hard, and owns it. You will die a great deal. But respawns are instant and the screen restarts exactly where it left off: you never lose more than three seconds. That very short loop turns failure into learning rather than punishment, and it is probably the most quoted design lesson in the game.

Alongside this, Celeste tells the story of Madeline confronted with her own reflection, literally: a version of herself pursues and contradicts her. The climb becomes a metaphor for an internal struggle with anxiety. It is handled without heaviness, in a handful of well-written exchanges, and the mountain ends up meaning what it needs to mean without anyone having to explain it.

For those who want more, each area hides a markedly harder remixed version, and B-sides built for players who have already mastered everything. There is also an assist mode that can slow time or make the dash infinite: difficulty here is a choice, never a barrier.

Around eight hours for the main story, considerably more if you want to collect everything.

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A short, exceptional indie

Seven hours to finish, deliberately crude visuals, and one of the highest indie scores in the catalog. Undertale really does not resemble anything else, and that is not marketing copy.

The premise fits in two lines. Humans and monsters went to war; the humans won and sealed the monsters underground. Long afterwards, a child falls into Mount Ebott and has to climb back out. You are that child.

Undertale borrows the furniture of the classic RPG — exploration, encounters, experience points — and then subverts its core. Fights play out as bullet-hell minigames where you dodge incoming attacks inside a small box. More importantly, every encounter offers an alternative: strike, or spare. Talk, flatter, flee, work out what the creature in front of you actually wants.

That choice is not decorative. The game remembers what you did. Monsters react, characters behave differently, and the story diverges depending on whether you crossed the world killing everything or killing no one. Some encounters become radically different — sometimes far harder — precisely because you decided to spare.

It is the work of one person, Toby Fox, who wrote the script, the code and the music. That soundtrack became famous in its own right, and a good share of the game's reputation rests on how it carries each character.

Seven hours is short, and it is deliberate: Undertale never pads itself. If you want a game you can finish in a weekend and will still be talking about in six months, the catalog offers little better.

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The best fighting game in the catalog

Released in arcades in 1997 and on the original PlayStation a year later, TEKKEN 3 still holds the highest fighting-game score in the whole PS Plus catalog. Here is why it holds up.

TEKKEN 3 is the third entry in Namco's fighting series, and the one that locked in the formula for the following two decades. This is where Jin Kazama, Ling Xiaoyu, Hwoarang and Julia Chang first appear — faces that became fixtures — in a roster of twenty-three characters that almost entirely replaced the one from the first two games.

What sets it apart technically is genuine three-dimensional movement: you can sidestep, break out of your opponent's axis, go around an attack instead of merely backing away. That sounds unremarkable today because every 3D fighter adopted it afterwards. At the time, it made the two previous entries look dated overnight.

The bonus content explains its reputation too. Tekken Force turns the game into a side-scrolling brawler, and Tekken Ball — volleyball played with the game's own attacks — remains one of the most absurd and most successful extras the genre has produced. With more than 8.5 million copies sold, it is the second best-selling fighting game ever made.

The playtime shown above deserves a word: under two hours is what it takes to clear arcade mode once. That is obviously not the measure of a fighting game, which lives in dozens of hours of practice or in an evening on the sofa with someone else. It is a useful reminder that playtime means very different things depending on the genre.

It sits in the Classics Catalog, so it requires a Premium subscription. If you have never touched a Tekken, this is the ideal way in: more readable than the recent entries, and just as sharp to play.

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