PlayStation 5 owners can now play a free trial of Death Stranding and Sackboy: A Big Adventure. That’s a whole six hours of gaming in Sackboy: A Big Adventure and just over a quarter of the first cut scene from Death Stranding. Aha, I’m such a comedian!
To get the trials just head over to the PlayStation Store and select the free trial version of the game to download. The release from Sony does state this is for PlayStation 5 only but looking at the web store it seems to be valid for the PS4 version of Sackboy: A Big Adventure, give it a try it may work.
But, there’s a big, huge problem with all this that Sony needs to sort out. You have a six hour trial window, but that ticking clock starts from the moment you hit download, as opposed to being six hours spent within the game or from the first time you launch it. These trials could be completely useless, unless you have super speedy internet.
The work around, per Reddit, is to create a second account with which to download the games, and then play the full six hour trial on your main one.
Sackboy: a PS5 free game trial
We rather liked Sackboy: A Big Adventure, giving it a solid 7/10 in our review. “Sackboy: A Big Adventure starts off slow, feeling like a hollow reflection of the franchise, but eventually grows into its new 3D platforming elements,” said Stefan. “It’s at its best when it blends the new with the old, when there’s power-ups, side-scrolling and a meaningful challenge, but it takes a bit too long to get it together.”
I reviewed both the PS4 and PS5 versions of Death Stranding and can highly recommend it, but also noted “Death Stranding Director’s Cut is not a Director’s Cut, it’s Death Stranding Plus Some Frivolous Extra Bits, but for five quid or ten dollars you can’t really complain. If you’ve never played the game then you are getting the best version, so it’s win either way.”
A sequel for Death Stranding does not appear to be on the horizon, perhaps because it is rumoured than Kojima Productions are working on Silent Hill. The story in Death Stranding does wrap things up quite nicely so unless Norman Reedus teleports back to the age of the dinosaurs then there’s not much room for a second game anyway.
That will make sense if you played the game.
Updated: Added issue over download and trial times.
MrYd
You’ve missed the important detail there.
Sackboy is 31.43GB, according to the store (it may be more or less after updates – the store is rarely accurate)
Death Stranding is 69.33GB according to the store (and 69.26GB once installed – I just checked)
Sackboy gives you a 5 hour trial, and Death Stranding gives you a 6 hour trial. But the time starts “from the time you click “Download Trial” via console, or, “Add to Library” via web”
So 5 or 6 hours to download the game and play as much of it as you can in the remaining time.
This is clearly a bit rubbish. You’ll need a minimum speed of 14.3Mbps for Sackboy, and 26.3Mbps for Death Stranding to just download the game in the time allowed. But then you’d have no time left to actually play it.
There’s allegedly a work around for it though. If you download it on a second account (I’m guessing it needs to be the same region), then you can play it for however long you’ve got left after the download. But if you then switch to a different account, it’s already installed so you don’t have to do the download again and get the full 5 or 6 hours. Probably best to download it on the second account and then play the full 5/6 hours on your main account so you can carry on if you decide to buy it.
Although I suspect a 6 hour trial of Death Stranding might put people off more than it’d tempt them to buy it. The first 10 to 15 hours are slow and an enormous test of your patience, full of frustrating gameplay mechanics, and cut scenes that go on for far too long and the words “Hideo Kojima” popping up every 2 minutes. (I’m not sure, but I think he might have had something to do with the game ;)
Stefan L
Yeah, I’ll add that point in.
MrYd
Well done. But I’m not sure it’s entirely fair to blame Nintendo for it ;)
Stefan L
Well, that was quite the slip of the mind this morning…