One PlayStation Plus June 2023 addition is making my entire year’s subscription feel worthwhile

As a child, he used to work in the kitchen of a local pub. They were a small, well-respected group tucked away in a bucolic town somewhere in the Peak District. It was run by a chef who, in his day, worked in Michelin Star restaurants. Older, grayer, with less patience and less time to fake everything, he moved away from the city and into the mountains to quietly dedicate himself to a more authentic and honest cuisine.

From the age of 12 to 18, I rose through the ranks of dishwasher (or kitchen boy, if you want to be fancy) to chef de partie, below minimum wage most of the time because, well, who’s going to go? pay a minor child the correct amount, right? At the end of each week, I’d drag my greasy, sweaty body to the bar and the chef’s wife turned bartender would take a handful of notes, put them in an envelope, and send me on my way. She’d head straight to the local Forbidden Planet or GameStation (CEX wouldn’t be coming until a bit later) and start perusing all the secondhand games the store had picked up over the last week.

Sometimes it would take two weeks’ salary to pay for something particularly amazing (I remember buying both Final Fantasy 12 and the Official Prima Guide for under £50, once), but it was worth it. He’d worked hard for the money, and he’d be damned if he wasted it on something like Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly again. He would need to have more discretion now, spend more wisely. I was almost an adult, after all.

All of this taught me to invoke a very simple rule when thinking about buying games: will it get me more than £1 per hour of entertainment? It’s a bit of a strange rule – some games will return a lot more than that, others a lot less – but it’s ingrained in my brain very severely, and even as an adult I have a hard time getting rid of it. Of course, games are created, released, and consumed differently now: live service setups keep years-old games on life support for as long as needed, developers design narratives and features around battle passes. , and many of us rely on PS Plus or Game Pass to try new things, rather than buy them.

It means that we all have a very different relationship with gaming and money than we used to. Last week, I was thinking about canceling my PlayStation Plus Extra subscription – there’s a cost of living, and frankly I’ve got more pressing things to spend that £84 per year on. But then Sony added a sequel to a game I’ve spent hundreds of hours on the service: the fun, fussy, frustratingly fantastic Rogue Legacy 2.

After just four days of playing, I’ve clocked in around 22 hours into Rogue Legacy 2, and I’m not even close to getting a taste of what the game has to offer. It does everything right in the first game, and more, and refines the formula to the nth degree to make it an engaging and intuitive sequel that has a whole set of hooks ready to plant in your brain. It delights in letting you set the challenge for yourself, it delights in giving you myriad options and styles to play with, and it laughs sadistically as it watches you bang your head against its many hazards and enemies until you learn to do better.

There’s even a chef class there (who, obviously, loves to set things on fire) that allows me to live out fantasies of a very different life than I might have had, had I opted for the pan and not the pen.

Thanks to an ever-changing map and the way you pass down your genes (both good and bad) to your heirs, Rogue Legacy 2’s “just one more time” pace is the kind of perpetual motion that will keep your hands glued to your DualSense for hours after your self-imposed bedtime. Give it a few more weeks and I’ll have easily put 90+ hours on this. Not to mention the 84 I’d like to get out of PS Plus Extra in 12 months.

Yeah yeah, I know I could have spent £20 and gotten the game straight away, but adding it to the collection as part of my subscription means I don’t have to take any chances – it’s got a new art style, compared to the old, what if it’s bullshit? Luckily, it isn’t. And I didn’t have to spend an extra penny to find out for sure. And I got it the first day it was available on PlayStation.

I haven’t really turned on my PS5 this year so far. But ever since Final Fantasy 16 came to PS5 as a console exclusive and Rogue Legacy 2 landed on PlayStation Plus, that’s all changed: now it’s my Xbox that’s gathering dust on my shelf. Since Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is also on the PS Plus Extra service now, I reckon my poor old Series X will suffer a bit more neglect as summer approaches. I’m sorry friend.