Sony’s glossy mascot is full of imagination and love.
People who like bits and pieces will love Astro Bot. It’s made of bits and pieces. Many of the bits and pieces are nostalgia-inducing: When selecting a save file, you’re given a choice between old memory cards, and after beating a boss, you’re rewarded with a session of Ape Escape, a monkey web game. Look closely at most surfaces and you’ll see a variation of the DualShock face buttons printed on them. Look up at the sky and you might notice a hint of Fantavision.
But what I really like about Astro Bot is that it is also full of Bit by bitThings that could be rolled around, piled up in little piles, kicked around. I’d punch a tree, only to have falling fruit shower down on me. I’d open a chest, and nuggets of gold would roll around at the bottom. In one dizzying level, I was given a magnet, and soon I was sucking up a dozen metal rods and hundreds of spray cans, all ready to form a bait ball that I could toss at a distant target. Another early level put me in a buttercream winter wonderland, and I spent five minutes pacing through soccer ball-sized piles of sprinkles, thousands of them strewn across the ground.
There are some jokes here about the tech demo duck, but there’s also a sense that, in a way, the entire game is one big tech demo. I mean that in the best possible way. It’s a constant tech demo that never stops showing you new wonders that are thrown at you and quickly discarded. Previous Astro Bot games were used to show off new gear. This is different. It feels like Sony is trying to put its entire ethos into this game. Astro Bot is a glimpse of what Sony wants you to know about what it believes in. It has the infinite cheer of a group of people coming together and trying to be the best version of themselves.
Perhaps more importantly, it’s just fun. Astro Bot is a really, really good 3D platformer. Like the blockbuster genre games of the past, it’s always a delight when someone comes out with another one like this, especially when they put so much effort into making it satisfying, intriguing, lavish, and delightfully bizarre. It’s also a genre that’s hard to do well, even though on the surface it’s just running and jumping. First, it’s hard because it feels like Nintendo has done everything. Second, it’s hard because making these games has to be a bit like making comedies. People always say making comedies is the worst. With a drama, you can tell if it’s dramatic or not. But how do you tell if a comedy is actually funny in the moment of creation? The same goes for kicking a tree and being buried by fruit, or stomping through piles of hundreds of fruit. There must be a voice quietly echoing in every designer’s head: “Yeah, sure, it’s fun in principle, but does it really hold up?”
Astro Bot’s solution to both problems is completely successful. Nintendo’s approach? Nintendo just accepts it. Astro Bot is already a trip back through PlayStation history – nods to Demo Duck, Ape Escape, Fantavision. But it’s inevitably also a trip back through fond Nintendo memories. Many platformers are essentially like that. The game seems to acknowledge this with a shrug: what are you going to do? Nintendo has done everything! So if the classic low-level Astro Boy enemies look like Goombas, why not? If a scene reminds you of a moment in a great 3D Mario game, let that be part of the richness of the whole affair.
As for fun, Astro Bot’s solution is much more successful. Instead of coming up with one idea per level, let’s come up with a hundred. Let’s come up with a new idea every few seconds. Let’s keep coming up with new ideas. Let’s get to work and keep ourselves busy.
So while there are rituals in this game, they stand out for their endless variety and imagination. For example, you arrive and leave each level on a PS5 controller, which pops out to store the seven little robots you can find in each level. Each area on the map ends with a big boss fight, followed by a palette-cleaner level that digs into the existing Sony video game series. At the center of it all there’s a hub, where the robots you rescue hang out and can help you unlock new areas and new trinkets. It’s all great, it’s all ritual. But what about in between it all?
Beyond that, Astro Bot can do just about anything. Cream wonderland! Japanese architecture! Entire levels are set in the dream of a 1930s skyscraper construction site! Many of these things are standard for platformers, but that’s kind of the point, because the game always throws in something to twist it and make it fresh. Creativity can be two things you kind of understand combined in a way you didn’t expect. For example, the construction site level has you leaping between gantries and girders and swinging a wrecking ball, but it also gives you a giant magnet that turns the physical world into glittering shrapnel for you to build and then fire. The casino level gives you a gadget that lets you burst out time like gel, so you can platform by jumping off the bodies of suddenly slowed darts that fly off to a distant dart board, or you can dodge a floating deck of cards with hearts and diamonds flying at you.
One level lets you explore a recognizable home world, but you can drastically change size, bursting through doors one minute and squeezing through gaps in baseboards the next. Another lets you transform into a super-heavy version of Samus Aran’s morph ball, and once you’re transformed you can do a lot of cool stuff. These levels feel very Nintendo-like because they’ve taken all the ideas and played them out. If you’re small but can grow big, can you blow things up from the inside? If you’re heavy and metal, can you roll on spikes? But what if the spikes are only part of the problem? Astro Bot is a platformer that actually thinks like the best platformers. It anticipates what you’re going to anticipate, and then goes a step further.
Inevitably, it’s a whirlwind. A string of robots to save, loving Playstation references, deep titles like Ape Escape and the recent Star, whose appearances I really don’t want to spoil. It’s got boss fights when you’re expecting them, and boss fights when you’re totally not expecting them. While Astro Bot may not have the perfectly delivered sense of weight of Mario, passing across the screen and into your hands through pure video game magic, they still have a lovely way of handling, dashing quickly, stopping quickly, having a spin attack and a hovering move that lets you land smartly while still dealing damage to whatever’s underneath you – think FLUDD in Mario Sunshine.
It’s an orgy of collectibles and hub-world jamming that also takes into account your time and how to make the most of it. Aside from the odd rogue boss battle, checkpoints are generous, and when you play through a level a second time you can buy a companion character with in-game currency who’ll point out any robots or other gadgets you missed on your first playthrough. Or you can choose to go it alone. Some levels are huge and oddly beautiful — there’s a water park made of warm, old stone that’s one of the loveliest places I’ve played in a while — and others are tight, happy to mix up the rules for a moment’s change.
What happens when it’s done? When it’s all done, I have a strange feeling of being cared for. I’ve seen many crazy sights. I’ve fiddled with cool gadgets, used the controller in unusual ways, tilted it, yes, but also blew on it, tried to read the hidden hieroglyphics in its rumble, I’ve checked boxes, collected things, unlocked things, nodded at references that made me feel old, sharp-eyed, or generally in the know. But when I closed my eyes, I saw tumbling fruit, hundreds of them, gems piled so high I could kick through them like I was wading through autumn leaves. What I thought about, more than anything, were all the bits and pieces of glory.
Review code for Astro Bot was provided by Sony.
