Sony has announced the free PlayStation Plus Essential games for January 2024, bringing you the opportunity to play with some friendly rats, wreak havoc in a supernatural Old West, and change your shape in the new year. A Plague Tale: Requiem leads the first slate of free games of 2024, followed by Evil West and Nobody Saves the World. All three games will be available to download on Tuesday, January 2, for Essential, Extra, and Premium tier PlayStation Plus subscribers.

A Plague Tale: Requiem is the follow-up to the surprisingly affecting and often disgusting A Plague Tale: Innocence, which follows a girl named Amica and her younger brother Hugo as they flee soldiers through the French countryside in the 1300s. The kids quickly find that they also need to avoid the thousands of plague rats seething through the nation, although the rats can be handy tools if you can open opportunities for them to chow down on your hapless pursuers.

Requiem picks up the story six months after the conclusion of Innocence, extending Amica and Hugo's terror as they get embroiled in more medieval and supernatural intrigue. And it has even more rats--where the first game could show about 5,000 rats on screen at a time, the sequel brings that number up to 300,000. "There's a lot to love in Requiem, even if frustration is an all-too-common bedfellow when it comes to gameplay," Richard Wakeling wrote in GameSpot's review of Requiem. "There are better stealth games out there, but its unique setting, poignant storytelling, and rat-infested dread make 14th-century France worth returning to."