PS Plus October 2026: F1 25, Hunt: Showdown 1896, EDF: World Brothers 2 — Every Big Release This Month

LOS ANGELES — October is the best month on the gaming calendar, and this one is doing its absolute best to prove it. PlayStation Plus subscribers get three free games starting Tuesday, October 6 — F1 25, Hunt: Showdown 1896 and Earth Defense Force: World Brothers 2, claimable through November 2. And around that lineup sits one of the most jammed release months in recent memory: Hellraiser: Revival, Valor Mortis, Planet Zoo 2, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 and Phantom Blade Zero, all landing before the calendar flips to November.

The announcement came September 30 on the PlayStation Blog from Adam Michel, Sony's senior director of content acquisition and operations, and the pitch is pure variety: a licensed racing sim, a gothic extraction shooter, and a deliberately unserious voxel co-op game. Each one is built for a completely different kind of player — which is exactly how a monthly lineup should work.

F1 25 (PS5): the fastest freebie of the year

Leading the month is EA Sports F1 25, the official game of the 2025 FIA Formula One World Championship — and this one has real staying power. With EA releasing a 2026 Season Pack in lieu of a full F1 26, this installment gets an extended second life: the free in-game update adds the 2026 season regulations, the updated driver grid and the brand-new Madrid MADRING circuit. You're not just claiming a racing game; you're claiming the next year and change of Formula 1.

For solo drivers, Career mode and My Team 2.0 return — My Team 2.0 now puts you in the team owner's chair, hiring staff, developing upgrades and growing a constructor from scratch — alongside the Braking Point story mode's third chapter and the squad-based F1 World multiplayer where friends race together against AI drivers. If you've ever looked at a racing sim and thought "that looks amazing but I'd be lost," this is the most approachable entry point the series has offered in years, and at zero marginal cost there's no excuse not to find out.

Hunt: Showdown 1896 (PS5): spooky season done right

The horror pick is Hunt: Showdown 1896, and the timing is no accident. Crytek's PvPvE extraction shooter drops you and your squad into a corrupted backwater of the southern US, where you track supernatural monsters, send them to hell, and claim the bounty — all while rival hunters are gunning for the exact same prize. You can go solo or roll with up to two teammates, and every round is a knife's edge: lose your hunter and you lose the character and their equipment permanently.

It's addictively unforgiving, and it's arriving exactly when you want a game like this — October, dark evenings, headphones on, every twig snap meaning something. Extraction shooters don't get more tense than this one.

Earth Defense Force: World Brothers 2 (PS5, PS4): giant bug blasting, zero shame

Rounding out the trio is the palate cleanser: Earth Defense Force: World Brothers 2, the voxel-art spin-off that turns the planet's defense into a blocky toy box. Assemble your own squad from more than a hundred characters drawn from the mainline series and its spin-offs, then deploy into battle against waves of giant insects and robots with four-player online co-op or two-player split-screen on one console.

It's the only one of the three playable on PS4, which means last-gen owners get something here too. EDF has never taken itself seriously, and that's the whole point — sometimes you want to vaporize a horde of giant ants with friends, and this is the premium version of that.

Deadlines, departures, and the October extras

Two dates matter this week. First: September's four Monthly Games — Sniper Elite: Resistance, MLB The Show 26, Wobbly Life and Chained Echoes — must be claimed by Monday, October 5, before the new trio replaces them. Second: the Extra and Premium catalog additions get announced October 14, so there's more coming mid-month.

October 20 is the flip side — seven titles leave the Extra and Premium catalog that day: Silent Hill 2 (PS5), Yakuza: Like a Dragon (PS5, PS4), Gloomhaven Mercenaries Edition (PS5, PS4), Jurassic World Evolution 2 (PS5, PS4), Rogue Lords (PS4), Lake (PS5, PS4) and Death Squared (PS4), with Harvest Moon: Light of Hope Special Edition departing in some regions. Losing Silent Hill 2 right before Halloween genuinely hurts — it's one of the best survival horror games of the past few years. If it's sitting in your backlog, this is your deadline. Yakuza: Like a Dragon is the longer commitment at well over 40 hours for the story, but it remains the perfect entry point for newcomers to Ichiban Kasuga's saga.

Plus members also get a handful of October extras: limited-edition Spider-Man: Brand New Day avatars land October 6 exclusively on Sony Pictures Core, free for subscribers in-app; and there's a run of horror-themed in-game bundles — the Call of Duty: Warzone Horror Bundle (October 1), a Hunt: Showdown 1896 Starter Pack (October 6) and an Overwatch 2 Halloween pack with the Draugr Reinhardt skin plus five tier skips (October 7).

The release calendar: early October

The month is already moving. Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve has been out since October 2, and early reviews are calling it one of the better flight combat games in years — a strong start to the month. October 6 is a double hit: Star Wars: Galactic Racer, a runs-based reinvention of racing set in the lawless Outer Rim where syndicates bankroll an unsanctioned Galactic League, lands on PC, Xbox Series X|S and PS5 alongside Gears of War: E-Day, the brutal Emergence Day origin story, on PC and Xbox — straight into Game Pass.

October 8 belongs to horror: Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival takes the legendary series into first-person action horror, putting the Genesis Configuration puzzle box in your hands as you strike a bargain with the infamous Pinhead. It's on PC, Xbox Series X|S and PS5. October 9 follows with Dragon's Dogma 2: Dark Arisen, the expanded version of Capcom's epic with the new region of Norgan, the enigmatic Eir and the undying Fallen Dragon, arriving on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S and Switch 2.

Mid-month: the $40 soulslike and the zoo

October 13 is quietly the most interesting day of the month. That's when Valor Mortis arrives — a first-person soulslike from One More Level, the studio behind Ghostrunner, set in a plague-ruined Napoleonic Europe — and it's making the smartest pricing move of the fall: $39.99 instead of the now-standard $70, day one on Xbox Game Pass. The developer says the decision came straight from confidence, not desperation — a 20-hour campaign it believes can stand toe-to-toe with full-price titles, and no pre-orders because the team wants the finished game to speak for itself. For Game Pass subscribers, the barrier to trying it is effectively zero.

Sharing the date is Planet Zoo 2 on PC, PS5 and Xbox, which goes bigger than its predecessor with fully aquatic and flying species, and lets you take your animals beyond the zoo into expansive Wildlife Reserves. Two days later, on October 15, Castlevania: Belmont's Curse marks the triumphant return of one of gaming's most beloved franchises on PC, Xbox Series X|S, PS5 and Switch — and Xbox players should note that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 leaves Game Pass the same day. Our full breakdown of October's Game Pass additions has the rest of the rotation; the leaving list is the part that stings.

Late October: the heavy hitters

The back half of the month is where the blockbusters land. Final Fantasy Resonance arrives October 22 on PC, Xbox Series X|S, PS5 and Switch. The next day, October 23, is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and — for the first time for a modern Call of Duty — Nintendo's Switch 2, on the same day as every other platform. The DMZ world-builder trailer gave an early look at what's coming, but Modern Warfare 4 will dominate multiplayer conversations for the rest of the year regardless.

And October closes with Phantom Blade Zero on the 29th — S-Game's Chinese action RPG that blends kung fu, steampunk and dark fantasy in a world the developer calls "kungfupunk." You play Soul, an elite assassin who has been framed, mortally wounded and left with only 66 days to live, in combat choreographed with consultation from action star Donnie Yen. It was pushed back 50 days from its original September date, and it arrives as one of the most hyped PlayStation and PC games of the year.

One thing is driving this whole pileup: everyone is shipping before November, when GTA 6 takes over the entire conversation. October is crowded because publishers would rather fight each other than fight Rockstar. The result is a month where you could spend every evening on something different — claim your free games Tuesday, finish Silent Hill 2 before the 20th, and clear your schedule for the last week of the month. Your backlog never stood a chance.