The first is a game I wanted to talk about in December: Othercide. This tactical RPG battler borrows its color palette from Sin City and sprinkles in some creepy voice lines for melodrama. You're this naked blood goddess, Mother, and you send your Daughters to fight different forms of evil. I love games in this genre, and Othercide was a brisk 10-ish hour platinum. The loop goes that you battle once during the day, recover and battle again the next day until a boss fight at the end of the week. Your Daughters who go into battle gain the same amount of XP after fights, but no one recovers health--up to 50% of their life total--until you rest for the day.
You can play on a harder difficulty where the Daughters don't heal unless you sacrifice one to another of same level. While this is sounds pretty sore, thankfully the sacrificed Daughter passes along stats and traits to her consumer and will get much stronger as a result. The CPU AI isn't too merciless on either difficulty, but you can expect to lose 2-3 Daughters on a really good run of the ~20 days of battles to complete the game. However, dead Daughters can be resurrected with a limited resource, even after sacrifices AND between runs. This really carries you forward through the losses, so the game folds in an element of rogue-likeness. Othercide is an easy recommendation for those who like tactical RPGs.
I also recently made it through the Spyro Reignited Trilogy. Spyro the Dragon comes from Insomniac Games and was one of the Playstation's answers to Super Mario 64. The Reignited trilogy sure looks really nice with weighty 30fps movement and motion blur, but the controls are just a bit floaty, which doesn't combine well with some of the precise platforming. It's a shame because the rest of the game is easy and a relaxing gem-collecting, bad-guy-flaming experience. However, a lot of jumps in the first game require you to start gliding at the apex of your jump and there's no edge-grab mechanic or anything, so I would fall many frustrating times in the first game's 10-hour journey to platinum. Thankfully Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage is much better with platforming, as you have an extra flight-hop that eliminates that previous frustration.
Spyro 2 is as easy and relaxed as the first game with one huge painful glaring, ridiculous-W-T-F exception: Gulp. This boss takes 8 hits instead of the usual 3, can use the items against you that you're supposed to use against him, and this SOB fires motion-tracking predictive projectiles. In a series where I perfected 50% of the bosses I met the first time playing them, this game suddenly drops a 6/10 difficulty boss on you and it's jarring, to say the least. After about 10 deaths, I learned how to beat him without taking much damage, but I imagine it's a wall to some players.
Dirt 5 was the January 2022 PS+ game I was looking forward to for a few reasons. It was one of my only ways to test out 120hz (meh...) on my new tv, it's another game that supposedly uses Dualsense haptics, and racing games are usually gorgeous. This game ticked all the boxes as well as delivered a satisfying sense of speed, an amped up soundtrack and some decent sound design. I think Burnout Revenge and Takedown (from almost two smokin decades ago!) are still the best car games ever made, but those games were built to destroy things with racing as a secondary objective.
Thankfully, Dirt 5 isn't too difficult (and doesn't need to be), and the unlockables and trophies come flowing at you without much need to replay races or--let's be honest--spill your beer or drop that joint. It's a lot of fun and damn-near free, so give it a shot.