Masahiro Sakurai - the man who created Kirby, led Kid Icarus: Uprising, and has directed every single Super Smash Bros game to date - has gushed about Astro Bot.
Astro Bot might be celebrating 30 years of a competitor's history - you're literally rebuilding a PS5 mothership throughout the game - but that didn't stop the legendary Nintendo developer from enjoying the platformer anyway.
"Cleared Astro Bot by rescuing 300 people," he tweeted recently, and for context, the game has 301 VIP bots to rescue, so he's pretty much on a completionist route to find every Astro Bot collectible. "This doesn't take that much time, but I found myself playing it for fun and interest. Great game," he continued, "I want your time with the game to be satisfying!"
Sure, Astro Bot is great, but Sakurai praised the game while retweeting his recent vlog about exorbitant game lengths - the same video in which he apologized to Super Smash Bros fans who've played his games for "hundreds or thousands of hours."
The famed director discussed how unnecessarily long games compete against, well, everything for players with limited free time. Phones, social media, music, life, and everything else compete with games, so Sakurai urged game designers to think of playtime as a "cost of sorts."
Clocking in at around 10-12 hours for a non-completionist playthrough, Astro Bot hits that sweet middle ground: it runs long enough to milk all of its good ideas but not long enough for that good milk to expire. That also puts Sakurai in line with Astro Bot's director, who recently said that "12 to 15 hours of condensed fun" beats 40 hours with parts "you feel like skipping."
PlayStation’s short platformer will be getting slightly longer, so check out everything we know about Astro Bot DLC.
