PS Plus August 2026 Free Games: Full Essential Lineup for PS5 and PS4

Three games, one of them brand new, and one of the three is a same-day launch. August’s PlayStation Plus Monthly Games are Dying Light 2 Stay Human: Reloaded Edition, Big Walk and Signalis, claimable from Tuesday 4 August until Monday 31 August.

One thing to know before anything else: July’s three are gone. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, For the King II and CrossCode were claimable only until Monday 3 August. The two sets never overlap — August’s three replace July’s three rather than joining them, and the same will happen to these on 31 August.

What are the PS Plus free games for August 2026?

Sony has announced three, and the mix is unusually lopsided: one big open-world game you have probably heard of, one cult horror game from 2022, and one game that nobody has played yet because it comes out the same day.

All three go to every PS Plus tier — Essential, Extra and Premium — because Monthly Games are the one benefit the cheapest tier and the most expensive tier share. Claim them while you are subscribed and they stay in your library as long as the subscription runs.

Can you play all three on PS4?

No — only one of the three is on both consoles. This is the part the headline number hides, and it is worth a minute before you get excited about “three free games”.

Sony lists each game with its own platform, and they are all different:

So the month reads differently depending on what is under your TV:

• On a PS5 you get all three. Signalis is the PS4 build, which a PS5 runs through backward compatibility — normal for PS Plus and nothing you have to set up.
• On a PS4 you get two. Big Walk is a PS5 game and there is no last-gen version, so the month’s newest and most talked-about title is the one you cannot have.

If you are still on a PS4 and Big Walk is what brought you here, that is the answer, and no subscription tier changes it. The limit is the game, not the plan — the same distinction that decides which Game Pass tier you actually need over on the Xbox side.

When can you claim the August 2026 PS Plus games?

From Tuesday 4 August to Monday 31 August. That is four weeks less a day, and Sony’s own wording is “until Monday August 31” — not 1 September, which is when the next lineup arrives.

Here is the whole month in order:

The lack of overlap is the trap. July’s games and August’s games never coexist: the moment the new set appears, the old set is gone, and there is no grace period. If you missed the free Call of Duty on 3 August, it is not coming back with this lineup.

Why is Big Walk the headline this month?

Because it launches into PS Plus on release day, which almost never happens on PlayStation. Xbox built Game Pass around day-one releases; Sony has consistently declined to do the same with its own big titles, so a new game arriving free on the day it goes on sale everywhere else is genuinely unusual here.

Big Walk comes from House House, the four-person Melbourne studio behind Untitled Goose Game, published by Panic. It is only their third game in ten years, after Push Me Pull You in 2016 and the goose in 2019. It is a co-operative adventure for 2 to 12 players in an open world of puzzles and terrain, built around the problem of staying in touch with people who have wandered off — Sony’s description promises “an assortment of tools and toys” for keeping in contact, and “new ways to communicate when you suddenly find yourself speechless”.

Two things worth knowing before you commit an evening to it:

• It is multiplayer only. There is no solo campaign hiding inside it. If you have nobody to play with, this is not a game you can enjoy alone.
• It launches everywhere at once, at a price. The same day it appears free on PS5, it goes on sale on Steam for $19.99 — with a 25% launch discount for the first couple of weeks — and on Nintendo Switch 2. It supports cross-platform play, so PS5 players can walk with friends on PC, Mac and Switch 2.

That last point is the actual value of the month. Whatever you think of the other two games, one of the three is a full-price new release you are not paying for.

Is Dying Light 2 Reloaded Edition the whole game?

Yes, and then some — Reloaded Edition is the version Techland assembled after two years of updates, not a trimmed-down giveaway build.

Introduced in February 2024, it folds in every prior update including the Firearms Update, which added guns to a game that shipped without them, plus the Bloody Ties story DLC, co-op survivor missions and board quests. Techland gave it free to everyone who already owned the standard edition, which tells you what it is: the definitive version, not a special edition.

The game itself is a first-person open-world survival game set in Villedor, a city where a virus has turned most of the population and you move mostly by parkour across rooftops — daylight belongs to hostile human factions, night belongs to the infected. It runs up to four-player co-op, and choices you make change the shape of the city in ways that differ from your friends’ games. It reviewed as a good-not-great big-budget game: 76 on Metacritic for the PS5 version.

What is Signalis?

A 2022 survival horror game with a much better reputation than its budget suggests — and the one on this list most likely to be new to you.

Made by the two-person German studio rose-engine, it puts you in a dystopian retro-futurist world as Elster, a technician “Replika” searching for a lost partner. It plays like classic survival horror on purpose: a top-down 2.5D view, safe rooms to store things in, puzzles that expect you to take notes, and an inventory capped at six items — weapons, ammunition and key items all competing for the same slots.

Critics liked it a great deal — 80 on Metacritic for the PS4 version, and on OpenCritic 86% of 72 reviewers recommend it — with the praise going to atmosphere and environmental storytelling and the complaints going to that inventory, which is either the point or the problem depending on your patience.

It is a solo game and a short one by the standards of the other two. It is also the least likely of the three to be sitting in your library already.

What else do PS Plus members get in August?

One extra: a MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls PlayStation Plus Pack, free from 6 August. It contains five PlayStation Network avatars — Captain America, Storm, Spider-Man, Doctor Doom and Ghost Rider — and 20 in-game Result Screen Character Poses.

It sits in the PlayStation Plus section of the PlayStation Store rather than with the Monthly Games, and it is on a much longer clock: available until 6 August 2027. There is no rush on that one.

What is not announced yet is the Game Catalog — the larger library that Extra and Premium subscribers get. Sony reveals it separately, usually in the middle of the month, so August’s Extra and Premium additions are still to come. Nothing in this article covers them.

Is August 2026 a good month for PS Plus?

Better than it looks on paper, and it depends almost entirely on whether you have friends to play with.

The case for: a brand-new full-price game on release day is the rarest thing PS Plus offers, and Big Walk is from a studio with a genuine hit behind it. Signalis is a real critical favourite rather than a filler indie. Dying Light 2 is a hundred-hour open-world game in its most complete form.

The case against is narrower but sharper. Big Walk is multiplayer only and PS5 only, so it is worth nothing to a solo player and nothing at all to a PS4 owner. Dying Light 2 has been given away and discounted often enough that a lot of subscribers already own it. And three games is on the light side — the same count as July, which was itself a quiet month.

Set against $10.99 a month for Essential at US list price, one new release you would otherwise buy covers roughly two months of the subscription. That arithmetic works this month in a way it does not most months. For comparison with the other service, our rundown of Xbox Game Pass in August 2026 covers three day-one releases — but those come with a tier ladder, and PS Plus gives its Monthly Games to everyone.

The bottom line

Dying Light 2 Reloaded Edition, Big Walk and Signalis are yours to claim until 31 August, and claiming is the whole job — they stay in your library for as long as the subscription runs, whether or not you play them this month. July’s Modern Warfare III, For the King II and CrossCode went at the same moment these arrived.

If you are on PS5 with people to play with, this is a strong month — Big Walk is the sort of thing PS Plus almost never gives you on launch day. If you are on PS4, or you play alone, it is two decent older games, and that is a fair description of most months.

Sources

Checked on 3 August 2026, rechecked on 4 August.