Astro Bot captures what is for many a long-forgotten sense of play, and wonderfully uses the haptic controller to bring players into the world. (Team Asobi)
In the mail room of my apartment building, I often watch kids play among the stacks of boxes on the floor. The children are tiny, and the boxes are big enough to form a believable cityscape for imaginative siblings. I’ll never forget that when we are young and the world feels that big, the possibilities of play feel endless.
I think about those kids and my own childhood experiences when playing Astro Bot, the latest PlayStation Studios title from Team Asobi. There’s a level that gives the robot hero the ability to shrink at any given moment. At the touch of a button, a child’s bedroom can become a treacherous, yawning cavern.
I relate this all to studio director Nicolas Doucet, who has a keen understanding of how a child’s first impressions of the world can last forever. He thinks of what he felt as a child and how recapturing that feeling was a priority for him and the 65-strong at Team Asobi in Tokyo. He thinks of what he saw in his 5-year-old daughter when she finally picked up a controller and moved characters on a screen.
“When she played a video game for the first time, I saw in her eyes something that happened that I am not capable of having anymore,” Doucet said in an interview from his Tokyo home. “That bit is too precious. The generation before, they dedicated themselves to make us feel that way. So we have to dedicate ourselves to give that back.”
Capturing that long-forgotten sense of play is why Astro Bot, now out for PlayStation 5, is not only the best game created for modern-day consoles but sits comfortably alongside Nintendo’s Mario titles as among the finest games ever made.
Astro was first introduced in 2013 as a demonstration of the PlayStation 4’s augmented reality capabilities. In 2018, Team Asobi (it means play in Japanese) created Astro Bot Rescue Mission, a revolutionary virtual-reality platformer that centered the player’s head as the camera. Moving and swiveling your head revealed new secrets as you controlled Astro Bot around a virtual world that appeared around your body. And for the PS5’s launch, Astro’s Playroom was a pack-in title that demonstrated the DualSense controller’s immersive haptics and audio technology, as well as a celebration and museum of PlayStation history.
The new Astro Bot expands on Playroom in every way, celebrating 30 years of PlayStation and referencing 169 video game titles and characters that got their start on Sony’s platforms. But the game’s greatest achievement is its ability to throw in fun gameplay mechanics and ideas every few minutes. The first level alone features a waterslide funneling into a big pool complete with floaties and fish before letting players exit as an inflatable, floating balloon. That level then lets you shrink down to size, jolts the controller with the nearby footsteps of now-giant cats and walking across a giant clock will rattle the controller in time with the giant ticking hands.
The gameplay inspirations for Astro Bot are obvious and plentiful, but Asobi still innovates by taking full advantage of the PlayStation 5 and its capacity for high-fidelity visuals and CPU-pushing physics. Moment to moment jumping and enemy bopping feels just as good as Mario, but it’s often enhanced by the number of things on screen that are moving and reacting to the player - all while this action is reflected back into your hands with delightful accuracy in the controller haptics. Thanks to Team Asobi’s previous role as a research and development firm, Astro Bot demonstrates the full potential of a medium made possible by fusing art and science.
Much like how Astro’s VR game created the sensation of placing your body in the game world, playing Astro Bot feels like reaching into the game through the controller. When inflating or deflating the aforementioned balloon robot, the R2 button flaps and flutters under your finger like a trigger-activated fart.
Ideas like the balloon began with engineers poking and prodding to create new haptic sensations that pair with gameplay elements, said Animation Director Jamie Smith. Animators and art designers didn’t get involved until the entire team decided it was a fun idea worth building out. Smith’s team breathed life into this action on screen.
“We knew from that demo that this feels great; this is a really fun feeling of haptics,” Smith said. “Now what we need to do is incorporate this into the gameplay … and the animation has to match the feeling of the haptics, the immediacy of control.” Pair this with the controller’s speaker emitting sounds like a brapping balloon and you get what Team Asobi has dubbed “technomagic,” technology that empowers the audience to do and feel impossible things.
That technomagic, and the game’s ideas-per-minute design, contribute to a sense that the rest of the games industry, and PlayStation’s other studios, haven’t really been able to tap into the PS5’s true potential, particularly its controller. So many games these days based around guns and swords throttle the controller with the same abrasive feedback, and here comes Astro Bot with puffy balloons inviting the player to hop aboard and feel the bounce under our palms.
Astro is also magnificently relatable as a character. “VIP bots” that caricature iconic game characters mean there’s probably an Astro Bot hero for everyone. It’s a dream come true for Art Director Sebastian Brueckner, who grew up drawing superheroes.
“You have these characters do these fantastical stories in your head and you want to show your friends what they can do. Now we get to this age where computer graphics evolved so much and you could create what was on the front of the box,” Brueckner said. “That’s the important part. It’s about you going on the adventure to find your own story, that’s the beauty of making this kind of content.”
If there’s any flaw in this otherwise perfect game, it’s actually the reliance on PlayStation’s history. Astro Bot features countless cameos from other games, but also molds five levels around the gameplay features from other games. Three of the five homage levels are based around PlayStation’s modern titles, and the gameplay of all these levels suffers because the original works are all third-person action games featuring over-the-shoulder camera angles. The levels based on older, more diverse titles only underscore how the variety in PlayStation games has narrowed to cinematic blockbusters. These sections are still delightful distractions, especially when their Hollywood-production theme songs each receive a funky Astro remix.
Astro Bot’s elegant video game design uses only three buttons to let players express a variety of movements and actions, even those replicated from more complicated games. It is engineered so every action creates some delightful sound or movement. That level of pacing and design is deceptively hard to pull off despite the simplicity of the genre.
“It’s true of so many things in life. Like simple dishes, it can actually be hard to execute because you can’t cheat. You can feel every ingredient,” Doucet said. “We think kids can be fooled by playing anything, but that’s not the case. They also see through quality. It’s very important for us to know that for some people, this is going to be their first game ever. I remember my first games. They’ve never left me.”
The end of a level showered me in millions of colorful jewels - letting me live out my dashed hopes of diving into gold like Scrooge McDuck. I spent minutes letting the jewels douse my bot, and I felt the sprinkles crash against me through the controller. It was like the video game equivalent of a cold shower on a hot day, rejuvenating and breezy.
“When you open a door and a lot acorns fall on you, you can feel each one in the controller. So you start running around because it’s just fun,” Doucet said. “There is no goal to that. It doesn’t get you a trophy, it doesn’t get you back in the game. But that has probably more value than anything else. In fact, it’s the fundamentals of play.”
Centering the fundamentals of play is why Astro Bot is a game that reminds us why we play. It’s a passionate reminder why PlayStation is even called that in the first place.
Platform: PlayStation 5
