August’s PS Plus games will get a bonus PlayStation Studios freebie

On top of the three main games coming to PS Plus in August 2023, Media Molecule will be releasing Tren as a PS Plus bonus game within Dreams.

August’s PS Plus games will get a bonus PlayStation Studios freebie
Lee Brady

Lee Brady

Published

While those temporarily unavailable Dreams trophies are sure to put some players off, it seems Sony-owned developer Media Molecule is still eager to have you rank its PS4 pet project atop your personal best PS Plus games list. While the game is coming to PS Plus in August 2023, it also happens to be smuggling along a brand-new first-party PlayStation title — Tren, the PS Plus bonus game no one saw coming.

Tren launches day one onto PS Plus via Dreams

We've had bonus games sneak up out of the blue and join the three main giveaways before, but the PS Plus Essential games for August 2023 are doing things a little bit differently. This time, the bonus game is actually inside one of the other PS Plus games — in this case, the brand-new game Tren will launch within the PS Plus game Dreams.
Created by the devs at Media Molecule, whose pre-PS Plus genius also brought us LittleBigPlanet, Tren purports to be a fully-functioning puzzle game in which you delicately (or sometimes indelicately) drive a toy train over a wooden train track. The game will have 95 levels, high scores, and custom track creation options — basically, enough features to justify treating it as its own release that just so happens to be launching inside another game.

While I'm very dubious about Dreams coming to PS Plus in the first place — what with its live-service features shutting down and all those Dreams trophies currently discontinued — I can't help but be utterly charmed by the sudden last-minute addition of Tren to the package.
It looks like a scaled-down version of the quaint first-party games we used to get from Sony — the kind that initially brought us all-time classics like LittleBigPlanet. Plus, I can definitely see myself starting this up, hitting that option to create custom tracks, and waking up two years later on the other end of a wooden train-themed hobby spiral.

Tren is due for release on Tuesday, August 1, 2023, just in time for Dreams' PS Plus debut. Do you think it'll be enough to gain Dreams a spot on the best PS4 games list at long last? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
Written by Lee Brady
Staff Writer Lee keeps one eye on the future (Marvel's Spider-Man 2), one eye on the past (PS Plus Premium, recent Sony news), and his secret third eye on the junk he really likes (Sonic Superstars, Final Fantasy XVI). Then he uses his big mouth to blurt out long-winded opinions about video games.
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