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

When I was a kid, I used to work in the kitchen of a local pub. It was a small, well-respected little outfit tucked away in a bucolic village somewhere in the Peak District. It was run by a chef that, once upon a time, worked in restaurants that held Michelin Stars. Older, greyer, with less patience and less time for the pretence of it all, he moved away from the city and into the peaks to quietly get on with a more authentic and honest sort of cookery.

From the age of 12 until I the age of 18, I ascended from the rank of pot wash (or kitchen porter, if you want to be fancy) to chef de partie – below minimum wage for most of that because, well, who’s going to pay an underage kid the correct amount, right? At the end of every week, I’d drag my greasy, sweaty self to the bar and the chef’s wife-cum-publican would take a handful of notes, stuff them into an envelope, and send me on my way. I’d head straight to the local Forbidden Planet or GameStation (CEX wouldn’t come along until a bit later) and start perusing all the second-hand games the store had got in over the past week.

Sometimes, it’d take two weeks’ wages to afford something particularly amazing – I remember picking up both Final Fantasy 12 and the official Prima Guide for under £50, once – but it was worth it. I’d worked hard for the money, and I’d be damned if I’d waste it on something shite like Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly again. I’d need to have more discretion now, spend smarter. I was nearly an adult, after all.

This all taught me to summon one very simple rule when thinking of buying games: will it give me more than £1-per-hour of entertainment? It’s a bit of a weird rule – some games will return much more than that, some far less – but it’s dug into my brain in a very severe way, and even as an adult I find it hard to shake. Granted, games are made, released, and consumed differently now: live service setups keep years-old games on life support for as long as they need to be, 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 buying them.

It means we’ve all got a very different relationship with games and money than we used to. Just last week, I was thinking about cancelling my PlayStation Plus Extra subscription – there’s a cost of living, and frankly I have more pressing things to spend that £84 per year on. But then, Sony added a sequel to a game I’ve dumped 100s of hours into the service: the funny, finicky, frustrating and fantastic Rogue Legacy 2.

After only four days’ worth of play, I’ve racked up about 22 hours in Rogue Legacy 2, and I’m not even close to getting my teeth into what the game has to offer. It does everything the first game did well, and more, and refines the formula to the nth degree to make it a compelling, intuitive sequel that’s got a whole set of hooks ready to plant in your brain. It revels in letting you set the challenge for yourself, delights in giving you myriad options and styles to play with, and sadistically laughs as it watches you bump your head against its multiple hazards and enemies until you learn to do better.

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

Thanks to an ever-changing map, and the way you pass on your genes (both good and bad) to your heirs, the ‘just-one-more-go’ rhythm of Rogue Legacy 2 is the kind-of perpetual motion that’ll keep your hands glued to your DualSense for hours past your self-imposed bedtime. Give it a few more weeks, and I will have easily sunk 90+ hours into this. Let alone the 84 I’d want to get out of PS Plus Extra in 12 months.

Yes, yes, I know I could have spent £20 and got the game outright, but having it added to the collection as part of my subscription means I don’t have to take a risk – it’s got a new art style, compared to the old one, what if it’s s**t? Luckily, it isn’t. And I didn’t have to spend a penny extra to find that out for sure. And I got it on the first day it was available on PlayStation.

I have not really turned on my PS5 this year so far. But since Final Fantasy 16 hit PS5 as a console exclusive and Rogue Legacy 2 landed on PlayStation Plus, that’s all changed – it’s now my Xbox that’s sat collecting dust on my shelf instead. Given that Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is also on the PS Plus Extra service now, I think my poor old Series X is going to suffer a bit more neglect as the summer draws on. Sorry, pal.