Samurai, Snipers, and Soul-Hacking: October’s PlayStation Plus Games Offer a World Tour in Mortality

October’s PlayStation Plus haul landed this week like a diplomatic communique nobody asked for: a game about death in feudal Japan, a game about death in neo-Tokyo, and a game about death in space, all delivered with the cheery subject line “Essential.” Somewhere in a glass tower in San Mateo, a product manager just got promoted for packaging existential dread into 65 GB downloads. The rest of us, scattered from São Paulo to Sapporo, queued them up anyway—because if the planet is busy immolating itself, we might as well respawn in 4K.

Leading the parade is Rise of the Ronin, Team Ninja’s open-world samurai epic. Set in 19th-century Japan, it invites players to pick sides in the Boshin War, a conflict most Westerners know only from the footnotes of Commodore Perry’s Wikipedia page. The irony is delicious: a nation that once banned foreign games now exports one about resisting foreign influence. Meanwhile, back in reality, Tokyo just posted record defense budgets and the yen is doing interpretive dance. Nothing says “global soft power” like letting foreigners virtually defend your sovereignty for the price of a monthly subscription.

Next comes Soul Hackers 2, Atlus’s cyberpunk JRPG where humanity’s last hope is literally a digital devil-summoning app. The game’s Tokyo is a neon autopsy of late-stage capitalism—corporations harvest souls, influencers sell your nightmares back to you, and the subway still runs on time. Players from Manila to Minneapolis will nod in grim recognition: our own data brokers just call their demons “algorithms.” In a world where your smart fridge can probably blackmail you, Soul Hackers 2 feels less like fantasy and more like a patch note for 2024.

Rounding out the trio is Sniper Elite 5, which relocates the franchise to 1944 France and lets you shoot fascists in the testicles with lovingly rendered ballistics. It’s comfort food for a planet that still hasn’t run out of fascists; the only difference is the uniforms change every decade. Gamers in Warsaw, Kyiv, and beyond will appreciate the historical catharsis, while the rest of us can enjoy the irony of an Italian studio selling Nazi nut-shots to an American audience via a Japanese console. Globalization, everybody—come for the trade routes, stay for the groin shots.

Sony’s real genius isn’t the games themselves; it’s the quiet admission that we’ve all agreed to outsource our coping mechanisms to multinational corporations. For the price of a couple of lattes, we rent curated despair, digitally watermarked and region-locked. Your membership renews automatically—so does the news cycle. In Argentina, where inflation could buy its own season pass, the subscription still costs the same in dollars, because misery loves currency arbitrage. In South Korea, where real-world conscription awaits every able-bodied male, at least virtual sniping offers a choice of battlefield.

And yet, cynicism only gets you so far. Somewhere tonight a teenager in Lagos will parry their first katana blow; a nurse in Madrid will hack a demon between shifts; a Ukrainian streamer will pull off a 400-meter headshot while air-raid sirens provide the ambience. These are small, stupid rebellions, but they’re also the closest thing our species has to a universal language. When the servers finally shut down—climate collapse or corporate decree, whichever arrives first—the high scores will evaporate, but the muscle memory will linger: we were here, we played, we pressed X to doubt.

So download, dear reader, before the next geopolitical patch drops. The games are free if you ignore the subscription, the electricity, and the opportunity cost of not fixing the actual planet. But hey, at least the lag is low—until the undersea cables get bored and reroute themselves through somebody’s territorial waters. Until then, keep your blades sharp, your demons patched, and your expectations lower than a speedrunner’s self-esteem. After all, the only thing more global than these games is the sinking feeling that accompanies them. Happy hunting, Earth.