It’s the next big game for the PlayStation 5, and Sony is in its DNA – but there’s still something very Nintendo about Astro Bot. It’s in the way the game is so perfectly designed around the controller you play with, taking advantage of all the bells and whistles of the DualSense controller. The spatial aesthetic, with different planets representing different colorful worlds to jump into, is reminiscent of Super Mario Galaxy. And there’s also the sense of pure joy you feel when you play it. On a console whose best-known hits are quite self-serious – think God of War and The Last of Us – Astro Bot prioritizes playfulness.
“I think Sony has the mentality of coolness in its product design, but there is also playfulness,” says Nicolas Doucet, studio director at Team Asobi, the Japanese studio behind Astro Bot. “They are not mutually exclusive or seen as hostile… The [PlayStation] hardware team really liked it, no one was precious. These are products that are manufactured to a very high standard, so you can imagine that their designers don’t want them to be tampered with – and that’s where we set our eyes on a PSVR and turned it into a mothership.”
The first Astro Bot game, Rescue Mission, was the best thing ever made for PlayStation’s VR headset, a clever platformer packed with new ideas. Astro’s Playroom was a treat that came with the PS5 when it launched in 2020, designed to show off what Sony’s new console and controller can do. It did this admirably, with levels themed around the PS5’s super-fast SSD hard drive, or with a soundtrack of a singing GPU, where every little gimmick of the PS5 controller, from the microphone to the haptic triggers, is at its best. was fully utilized. But Astro’s Playroom was also, unexpectedly, an interactive museum of Sony gaming hardware: as you played, you collected consoles, peripherals and other trinkets that slowly filled a laboratory with PlayStation history. It was delicious.
During the development of Astro’s Playroom, Team Asobi worked closely with the people who made the PS5 and its controller – to the point where they were running between buildings with prototypes in paper bags, says Doucet. “They lend us prototype controllers that are twice the normal size, sometimes two controllers are connected together because more power is needed… you really realize how much effort it takes to miniaturize all that into a controller that looks good looks and feels good in your hands… those guys, they come up with features like adaptive triggers and haptics, because they have a feeling about how it will be used. Our job is to come up with as many ideas as possible and validate, or sometimes even debunk, that gut feeling. The bottom line is that we’re not selling technology – we’re selling an experience, a magical experience, that is comes of technology.”
Now Team Asobi has been given the freedom to make a bigger, longer game (around twelve hours) that isn’t tethered to a piece of PlayStation hardware like an extended tech demo – although it’s still a clear tribute to everything related to Sony has to deal with. It contains many ideas that didn’t make it into the 2020 game. Astro Bot now flies around between levels on a controller-shaped spaceship whose exhaust consists of PlayStation button symbols. I ran around a few levels as the cute robot, whizzed down a water slide with a bunch of beach balls, dove off a high shelf into a pool, defeated a giant angry octopus by hurling myself in its face with some extendable frogs. He donned boxing gloves, used magnets to bring metal shards together into a ball big enough to crush things, and blew Astro up like a balloon before propelling him around with expelled gas.
It’s extremely cute and funny, and packed with playful details. I discovered that I could cut up wooden logs with the flame blast of Astro’s jetpack, for no other reason than it’s fun, and when I jumped on a turtle to see if I could ride on its back, Astro took a confident surfing stance On. When I found a secret room after tickling some sad-looking anemones, I was greeted with a chorus of “seee-cret!”. These details are unimportant, but as Doucet notes, “they do matter, because all these little things are memories.”
The levels are like a solar system that slowly expands outwards as the challenge increases: in the middle are the safest places, where a five-year-old can have fun kicking a football around, jumping through water and occasionally to punch a bad guy, and towards the edges are the most testing levels. There are more than 150 little tributes to PlayStation games, from PaRappa the Rapper to Journey, in the form of cosplay robots for you to rescue. Challenge levels put my not-inconsiderable ’90s 3D platforming skills to the test with time-suspended platforms and precision jumps across miniature ice rinks suspended in space. It’s the most straightforward fun I’ve had playing a game in a long time.
Team Asobi is relatively small – about 65 people – and relatively international. Three-quarters of the team is Japanese, Doucet says, and the rest represent 16 different nationalities. Some worked on previous PlayStation projects like Shadow of the Colossus or Gravity Rush, but others were new arrivals. They’re all invested in earning Astro Bot’s true PlayStation mascot status, Doucet says. “We want Astro to grow into a really powerful franchise – we want to take this little guy to the next level,” he tells me. “We have a lot to live up to at PlayStation, but we also never forget to be underdogs – that’s part of the successful mentality, you always want to chase something. When you become complacent, games start to lose their soul.”
Astro Bot certainly has a lot of soul. It’s clearly the product of a development team having a really good time. “We have a lot of nerd enthusiasm – I’m a PlayStation collector myself,” says Doucet. “It sounds a bit cheesy, but it’s important that we are happy so that players feel happy.”
• Astro Bot releases on September 6 on PlayStation 5
• This interview and play session took place at Summer Game Fest in Los Angeles. Keza MacDonald’s travel and accommodation expenses were paid by Amazon Games.