Astro Bot
Released: September 6th, 2024
Developer: Team ASOBI
Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment
Systems: PS5
God help me if Sony decides to sell toys of Astro Bot, one of those programmable robots you see lining the shelves of Smyths. Like the gullible consumer whore I am, I already want one.
Astro Bot is such a good boy.
Astro’s Playroom may very well be the best tech demo ever made, and quite honestly it’s still one of the PlayStation 5’s finest games. At least the former part of that statement is rarely in contention - people loved Astro’s Playroom and clamored for a full videogame starring Sony’s cutest merchandising opportunity.
As inherently masturbatory a festival of nostalgia as it is, Sony’s answer to those requests is a more than worthy one. Astro Bot is adorable, it’s gorgeous, and as well as providing fantastic entertainment it’s also an autistic delight.
They don’t make ‘em like this anymore, which I say not just to praise the game, but to shame a mainstream game industry that’s all but shunned the concept of making players happy.
Happy is exactly how I’ve felt throughout Astro Bot’s roughly 20 hour adventure. With its colorful visuals, lavish animations, accessible gameplay, and creative use of PS5 hardware, Sony has put together a captivating production that devotedly focuses on joy. That’s its primary concern - pure unbridled joy.
At its heart - and there’s a lot of heart on display - Astro Bot is the kind of collect-a-thon mascot platformer that used to dominate the 90s before videogame executives arbitrarily decided nobody liked them anymore. The titular Astro Bot flies from level to level on his DualSense-shaped spacecraft, picking up coins, rescuing fellow Bots, and uncovering puzzle pieces.
Conceptually it’s simple and it’s got a distinctly retro flavor to its setup. It nonetheless feels perfectly contemporary.
Astro scurries, jumps, hovers, and boops his way around colorful environments full of gimmicks and puzzles. Being an all-ages game, rarely is anything particularly hard - checkpoints are generously provided, enemies are simple to dispatch, and there’s a clear attitude that “challenge” is taking a back seat to a more simple kind of fun.
Ideally, a game wants to be played. Many these days are more concerned with financially preying on their customers, but the good ones have a more appropriate goal. Astro Bot doesn’t just want to be played, it wants to be played with. That may seem like a pointless distinction, but I think anybody who’s played with it would get what I mean.
Astro Bot is very much a toy - something to be messed around with, looked over, and enjoyed for more than its structured gameplay. There’s loads of stuff packed into levels that are of no direct utility other than making players smile.
You can smack almost anything to get something out of it - a satisfying sound, a funny animation, a showboating demonstration of object physics. Robotic creatures and artificial plants abound, and they’re enjoyable to simply watch. There are areas that do nothing other than function as ball pits full of acorns, screws, or jewels. They exist for you to jump into, to throw stuff about, to enjoy how they sound and feel.
That sense of feeling is an important part of Astro Bot’s appeal. The DualSense is capable of vibrating in many different ways, using various patterns and intensities to communicate actual texture. It’s one of my favorite hardware features of any console but until now only Astro’s Playroom has used it to any significant degree. It makes sense for this one to follow suit.
Astro Bot’s physical textures are absolutely amazing. The controller ripples while you walk on grass and will start tapping out footsteps as soon as you cross onto pavement. There’s a tactile difference with every surface, from metal to glass to snow. As one might expect, the DualSense’s inbuilt speaker is used constantly and works with the vibrations to enhance their emulation of tangibility.
Those “ball pool” areas I mentioned? Your girl merrily hopped into every one to run around whatever was in them, knocking objects around and luxuriating in how they felt and sounded. When I said this game was an autistic delight, I meant it - my neurodivergent brain was utterly entranced by how much of an outright stim toy Astro Bot is.
One must stress - there is an actual videogame happening here, and it’s great. The meat of it is straightforward action-platforming with plenty of pits to jump across, traps to avoid, and enemies that can be punched or fried with the lasers Astro uses for hovering.
Some enemies need specific tricks to beat - one is a combined nut and bolt, impervious to regular damage but able to be unscrewed if you charge your attack into a spin move. There are all sorts of clever interactions like that woven into the action, and I haven’t grown tired of any of them.
Well, it is hard not to get sick of the goo monsters that spit slime and are often positioned to really fuck you off in later levels. Fuck those little shits.
Of course, Astro Bot grows off of its tech demo roots with various machines and abilities designed for gyroscope controls and Sony’s touted but generally uncomfy adaptive triggers. It is actually quite notable that I wasn’t once pissed off by Astro Bot’s use of the latter - I usually hate adaptive trigger mechanics, finding they add nothing to a game but stodgier controls. Here, none of them pushed back too hard and deftly conspired with the controller’s other features to enhance the immersion one’s hands feel while playing.
There’s an octopus you can wear that inflates and deflates with a very rewarding PFFFFTTT, a bulldog that acts as a jetpack and goes WHOOOOSH, a Metroid-style ball transformation that rolls over spikes with a grinding TNGTNGTNGTNG. Yes, they’re there to help solve environmental puzzles, like when the magnet sucks up metal debris to form a throwable ball, but the important thing is the magnetizing is all like CLINKCLINKCLINK!
Astro Bot has stimming down to a science.
It would be easy to write all this off as gimmicky, and it is, but being gimmicky isn’t a bad thing if the gimmicks are good enough and the game’s as well designed and engaging as this one. Every single new plaything introduced is used in a variety of ways to overcome obstacles and solve puzzles - the hand-mounted frogs are not just springy boxing gloves that hit stuff, they can also grab poles for swinging and latch onto posts that’ll allow you to slingshot across wide gaps.
Every element of Astro Bot is like this, maximized to provide as much enjoyment as possible.
So concentrated on being fun is Astro Bot, the best part of it isn’t the platforming or even the tactile exploration. It’s rescuing the many Bots cosplaying as characters meaningful to Sony’s hardware over the decades. The highlight of this game is watching their shenanigans after you bring them to safety.
There’s a “hub world” of sorts, a crash site where Astro is trying to fix his spaceship. Rescued Bots end up here, picking a spot around the ship to muck about. They’re adorable on their own, but you can unlock a special interaction for each one by spending your coins on a Gacha machine to find their special item, a prop that completes their cosplay. Should you then hit that Bot, they’ll perform a silly animation.
Psycho Mantis, for example, gets a television with a PlayStation One controller to levitate over - if you boop him, he’ll fall over as the TV blinks off, prompting him to frantically bash it until it turns back on. If you find a Resident Evil loading door for Jill Valentine, you can make it open to knock her over and let two "zombie" dogs through.
The slapstick routines are brilliant. Some are cute, some are legitimately funny, and I love them so much. There are incredibly deep cuts when it comes to the characters you can find - as soon as I rescued Kain, I figured there'd be some more obscure pulls, but his discovery didn’t prepare me for the surprising references to come.
I don’t want to spoil any truly astounding ones, but suffice to say I was constantly wondering who or what I’d find next. The ship from Resogun? Daniel Fortesque? Just don’t expect anything from Square Enix, whose characters are conspicuously missing.
Even with my general distaste for exploitative nostalgia and meaningless crossovers, I was captivated by these seemingly throwaway yet utterly engaging discoveries. The fact they’re all cute robots in costume (except, weirdly, the actual Spyro) really helps, and they’re all part of a genuine, if somewhat self-congratulatory, celebration of PlayStation history.
Each of the sequentially unlocked Galaxies around this starting world house a series of stages leading to a boss battle. These are huge and visually impressive encounters against big robot animals, all of them genuinely lovely fights. After every boss comes a stage based entirely on another game with Astro himself dressing as that game’s star. For an example, there’s an Uncharted level where you take the role of Nathan Drake shooting enemies with a NERF-like gun. As you might guess by now, such stages are darling.
The only levels I’d say aren’t particularly fun are the obstacle courses themed around each of the PlayStation controller’s face buttons. Lacking checkpoints and containing the most unforgiving platform sequences, some feel downright mean-spirited and I don’t know how most children would be able to play them. That said, they’re still tightly designed and the “gamers” out there may prefer them. They just don’t fit into the otherwise friendly vibe, and a few of them come off as trial-and-error.
I would have liked more unlockable stuff. If you collect puzzle pieces, you can build facilities that allow for such things as spacecraft recolors and costumes for Astro. It takes quite a long time to get them all, though, and when you do there’s not a lot of aesthetic changes on offer. Compared to what the game already does though, this is a minor complaint that largely amounts to just wanting more of a good thing.
Considering there’s a Gravity Rush outfit of all things, I can only yearn for so much.
This is also among the prettiest games out there The vibrant colors, the incredible way every aspect of the world moves and interacts, the pleasing sounds and the lovely music, it’s all so endearing. Even my husband, who typically gets overwhelmed by noises, remarked how for once they liked the sounds coming out of the controller’s speaker.
Astro Bot is one of the best games I’ve played, period. A jubilant little adventure that dedicates itself fully to making an audience happy. For a neurodivergent player the visuals, sounds, and DualSense textures are indescribably satisfying. The accessible design makes it perfect for both children and adults. It’s a wonderful mascot platformer, the likes of which I’ve severely missed, and it’s the most tasteful way a game company has ever patted itself on the back.
For once, the pats are well earned.
10/10
