You Can Play Metal Gear Solid V, One of the Best Video Games Ever Made, for Free This Month

If you own a Playstation 4, run and grab a copy of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.

'Metal Gear Solid V' Is Free on Playstation This Month
Konami Digital Entertainment

One of the perks for having a Playstation 4 and subscribing to its monthly online gaming service, Playstation Plus, is the selection of "free" games it throws your way every month. These games are yours to download, keep, and play whenever you want, as long as you remain a Playstation Plus subscriber. That last requirement means these games aren't really free, but they're free enough—you were spending money you would've spent anyway, and got a game you might not have otherwise purchased for no extra cost. More often than not, these games are very good, but sometimes, they're among the best you can possibly get on a Playstation—like Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.

The Phantom Pain is one of two free games this month (the other is the very good and quite scary The Amnesia Collection), and it's a baffling, frustrating, and exhilarating experience, absurd and ridiculous and profound all at once. There's nothing like it in games, and I want everyone to play it.

The latest—and probably last—game in the long-running Metal Gear franchise of games, The Phantom Pain is about a man named Snake who awakens from a nine-year coma in 1984 and embarks on a mission of revenge against the people who destroyed the mercenary army he led. Along the way, he discovers a plot to completely overthrow the global balance of power and give nuclear weapons to just about anyone with deep enough pockets to buy them. You, as Snake, are thrown into this—one man against a nuclear-armed madman and his army, slowly trying to foil their plans one step at a time.

At times, The Phantom Pain's story is downright inscrutable—there are supernatural beings and strange visions and the game doesn't really have an ending—its true conclusion was excised when the game's director, Hideo Kojima, had a much-publicized falling out with its publisher, exiting the project before its finale was ever finished. But even if the game's story is incomplete and a touch ludicrous—there's a woman who never wears more than a bikini because she's been genetically engineered to breathe through her skin (she's clearly there for eye candy). As a pure game, it's perfect. It places you in the wide open mountains and deserts of Afghanistan and the Angola-Zaire border, full of camps and soldiers and weapons of war and asks you to figure out how to outsmart them all—not with brute force, which is an option, but with stealth and subterfuge; with your most conniving and outrageous plan and tools, both lethal and nonlethal. Few games feel as wide open in the range of approaches available to you, crafted with such a meticulous attention to detail.

Even its story—its winding, absurd, unfinished story, steeped in history both real and fictional, leaning heavily on the games that came before it—rises to moments of incisive profundity that you don't see in games of this scale. Because, despite being games about soldiers and war, Metal Gear is a series committed to pacifist ideals, and The Phantom Pain makes a shockingly timely argument for a game that was released over two years ago: The most devastating conflict of all might be the culture war.

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