PS Plus October 2026: F1 25, Hunt: Showdown 1896, and EDF: World Brothers 2 Land Tomorrow

Sony has confirmed October's PlayStation Plus Monthly Games, and it's a genuinely strong trio: F1 25 (PS5), Hunt: Showdown 1896 (PS5), and Earth Defense Force: World Brothers 2 (PS4, PS5) will be claimable by all PS Plus members starting Tuesday, Oct. 6 — and they'll stay claimable through Nov. 2. But before you start planning your October, handle today's business first: September's games — Sniper Elite Resistance, MLB The Show 26, Wobbly Life, and Chained Echoes — can only be claimed until Oct. 5. That's tonight. Go add them to your library right now; it takes ninety seconds and future-you will be grateful.

Let's talk about the trio, because there's something here for almost every kind of player. F1 25 is EA Sports' official Formula 1 racing game — the annual, obsessively detailed recreation of the F1 season, with the full grid of teams and drivers, career modes, and the kind of handling model that makes you feel like a genius on a clean lap and a clown in the barriers. If you've ever been even slightly curious about F1 games, this is the one to try: it's the most polished the series has been, and October is a great time to start a career mode you'll still be playing in February. Racing games are also the perfect PS Plus genre — easy to dip into for twenty minutes, impossible to put down once the lap times start falling.

Then there's Hunt: Showdown 1896, which is the spicy pick of the month and honestly the most interesting game on this list. Crytek's extraction shooter drops you into a grim, monster-infested bayou as a bounty hunter: track the target, kill the boss, grab the bounty — and then try to extract while every other hunter on the map tries to take it from you. It's tense, it's mean, and it's one of the best-sounding games ever made; playing it with headphones in a dark room is a genuine thrill. The 1896 rebrand brought the game to current-gen consoles with a visual overhaul, so PS5 players are getting the definitive version. Fair warning: this game will stress you out in the best possible way. Bring a friend, or at least bring a strong heart.

And then there's Earth Defense Force: World Brothers 2, which is pure joy in voxel form. The EDF series has one pitch and it has never changed: giant alien bugs are invading, and you and your friends shoot them with increasingly absurd weapons. World Brothers 2 wraps that formula in a charming blocky art style and leans hard into co-op chaos — four-player bug-blasting with hundreds of weapons and a difficulty curve that goes from "fun afternoon" to "the screen is entirely explosions." It's the palate cleanser of this month's lineup: after the white-knuckle tension of Hunt and the precision of F1, sometimes you just want to shoot a 40-foot ant with a rocket launcher while a friend screams with laughter. EDF understands this need at a molecular level.

The value math here is straightforward and it's why PS Plus remains one of the better deals in gaming even after the price hikes. Three full games — a current sports title, a live-service extraction shooter with a long tail, and a co-op blast — for a month of Essential at £7.99. Claim all three, play any of them for more than a few hours, and the subscription has paid for itself. And the rhythm matters too: claimable Oct. 6 through Nov. 2 means a full four weeks, so there's no excuse to miss them. Add them to your library even if you won't play them immediately — claimed games stay in your library as long as your subscription is active.

For Extra and Premium subscribers, there's a second wave to watch. Co-op shooter Mycopunk joins the Game Catalog on Tuesday, Oct. 20 as a day-one release — making its console debut on PS Plus and the PS Store simultaneously, after already becoming a hit on PC. The setup is gloriously weird: you're a ragtag squad of robot rejects hired by the SAXON corporation, part of the New Atlas Hazard Crew — exterminators sent to uncover the mysteries behind a planet-wide fungal catastrophe across a series of dangerous planet-side missions. Day-one launches on the catalog are exactly the kind of thing that makes the higher tiers worth it, and a co-op FPS with that premise landing in the same month as the Monthly Games trio makes October a genuinely stacked month for the service. The full Extra and Premium October lineup gets announced Oct. 14.

All of this lands in the middle of a rocky stretch for Sony's relationship with subscribers, and it's worth being honest about it. The controversial price hike that pushed Essential to £7.99 a month, Extra to £11.99, and Premium to £14.99 annoyed a lot of people — and then Sony's plan to scrap physical releases from early 2028 had players threatening to cancel en masse. But here's the twist: a new report found the cancel threats had "no measurable impact" on player engagement. Gamers, it turns out, are excellent at threatening to leave and terrible at actually leaving — especially when the monthly games keep being this good. Sony knows it. You know it. We all know it.

That's the real story of this month's lineup, if you step back. Sony is betting that content beats controversy — that a month with F1 25, one of the most distinctive shooters on the market, a beloved co-op chaos engine, and a day-one catalog debut will do more for subscriber sentiment than any pricing apology tour. And honestly? It's hard to argue with the lineup. October is historically one of the biggest gaming months of the year, and PS Plus members are getting a racing sim, an extraction shooter, and a bug-blasting party without spending an extra cent beyond their subscription. It's a good month to be a PlayStation owner, period — between this and the rest of October's releases, your backlog is about to get violent.

So here's your October PS Plus checklist. Today, Oct. 5: claim September's games (Sniper Elite Resistance, MLB The Show 26, Wobbly Life, Chained Echoes) before they rotate out tonight. Tomorrow, Oct. 6: claim F1 25, Hunt: Showdown 1896, and EDF: World Brothers 2. Oct. 14: check the full Extra/Premium lineup announcement. Oct. 20: download Mycopunk day-one if you're on Extra or Premium. That's a month of gaming sorted for the price of a pizza. Not bad for a service people keep threatening to cancel. And if you need something else to play while you wait, tomorrow's a big day too. There's a demo worth your time as well.