PS Plus is pushing Alan Wake 2 as the headline act for this month’s free games, but there’s a far better addition that’s worth subscribing for.
Tuesday, October 7 marks the monthly reset for the PlayStation Plus service’s free games, which means another set of titles you can add to your library and play at no extra cost… so long as you remain subscribed.
This also means today is your last chance to claim Stardew Valley, Viewfinder, and the excellent Psychonauts 2. Remember, you can be subscribed to any tier of PlayStation Plus to take advantage of this offer, from Essential on up.
As for October’s additions, Sony will tell you that the headliner is Alan Wake 2, but that honour should really go to Cocoon, which is one of our favourite games of 2023 and a superb indie game that’s easy to overlook.
Directed by Jeppe Carlsen, who served as lead designer on the excellent Limbo and Inside, Cocoon is another uniquely inventive puzzle game that involves searching for orbs, which serve not only as tools for puzzle solving but contain miniature worlds you can dive into, to solve even more puzzles.
It’s a seemingly simple premise, but one that developer Geometric Interactive takes full advantage of and results in some very inventive and complex challenges. For the studio’s debut game, it’s a phenomenal first effort and one that deserves to be played more.
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We rated it higher than most of 2023’s biggest releases, including Spider-Man 2 and Street Fighter 6, but don’t just take our word for it. It won Best Debut Indie at The Game Awards 2023 and other sites were even more glowing in their praise, with both Eurogamer and GamesRadar giving it perfect scores.
The former called Cocoon ‘rich and imaginative and the result of some insatiable curiosity for putting things together in new ways,’ while the latter simply described it as ‘one of the best puzzle adventure games of 2023.’
Over on Metacritic, Cocoon boasts a very favourable average score of 88 and even the vast majority of user reviews are positive, resulting in an average user score of 8/10.
A number of players also consider it one of the best puzzle games ever made. ‘A masterpiece in both art-crafting and puzzle solving. A must play for all gamers,’ wrote one of them.
Another added, ‘What a lovely game. My brains are melted after the last few puzzles, and I felt like [a] genius when I finally cracked them.’
If you’re already subscribed to PlayStation Plus, there’s no reason not to at least try Cocoon. We’ll go so far as to say it’s worth subscribing, if only for a month, just to play it. Although it was never very expensive.
Alan Wake 2 is available for October too and is certainly a fitting choice considering Halloween is coming up. In theory anyway. The problem is that it’s utterly devoid of scares, and we never cared for its clunky controls and unsubtle storytelling.
That said, it does have a lot of fans, as it’s otherwise seen as a successful sequel, winning three categories at The Game Awards 2023.
We’d probably still recommend Alan Wake 2 over the third PlayStation Plus addition: Goat Simulator 3. The joke here is that there was no Goat Simulator 2 and this is actually the first sequel. Why that’s supposed to be funny is a question you might ask yourself about the whole game.
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