Astro Bot is a delight. The recently released platformer starring a cheerful robot has earned rave reviews from basically anyone who’s touched it. It’s bursting with color and fun, backed by a theme song so catchy I haven’t been able to stop hearing it in my head since the first time I heard it. And I can’t help but feel a little depressed whenever I boot it up.
To be clear, Astro Bot is incredible on every technical level. Its platforming feels great, it looks and sounds amazing, and it’s the first game that’s ever used the PS5’s Dualsense haptics and speaker in a way that feels genuinely impressive. Team Asobi absolutely nailed Astro Bot’s execution, and I’ll be shocked if it doesn’t sweep about half the categories at the next DICE Awards. But it’s impossible to overlook the fact that Astro Bot — billed as a celebration of PlayStation games through the ages — is just as much a celebration of Sony, and I just can’t find the joy in that.
Before you get to the much-discussed cameos in Astro Bot, which include characters from beloved games as distinct as Bloodborne and Spyro the Dragon, the PlayStation 5 itself takes the stage. Astro Bot is actually about the PS5 in a sense. It’s your adorable hero’s spaceship, and the entire point of the game is to collect parts of it stolen by an alien in the opening cutscene to put the sacred property of the Sony corporation back together. After its run-in with that nefarious alien, the corpse of the poor PS5 crashes in the desert, inviting us to grieve the poor defenseless console.
But don’t worry, Astro Bot is on the case! With the help of the DualSense controller, itself a smaller ship to explore the cosmos in, they set off to make things right. Spread across Astro Bot’s levels are hundreds of other bots to rescue, many of which are references to other PlayStation games. You might stumble upon GoW: Ragnarok’s Kratos one moment, followed in the next by Lammy of Um Jammer Lammy — a game that now can’t be played on any modern console, like so many referenced in Astro Bot. It’s a mix of modern and retro games that makes each discovery unexpected, especially since most of these cameos come in levels that have nothing to do with their respective games.
That’s not always the case, though. Early in Astro Bot you run into Spike, protagonist of the original Ape Escape. What follows is an entire Ape Escape level, which Astro Bot navigates while wielding a net and capturing the titular escaped apes. More than just a reference, it feels like a genuine homage to a great game, paying respect to a piece of gaming history. I played through that entire level with a grin on my face as I was outsmarted by one digital ape after another before finally capturing them. It’s easily the most fun I’ve had playing Astro Bot so far.
But that level is an outlier among plenty of smaller references that feel far less respectful. I was already feeling a bit queasy about the aggressive reverence for Sony-branded hardware — down to levels themed around the PlayStation controller’s buttons — when one particular character’s appearance took me from annoyed to outright angry.
Just a few levels into Astro Bot, you rescue a bot called Elfin Prisoner, with a white gown and gray hair. The Elfin Prison is Yorda, one of the two protagonists of Japan Studio’s 2001 masterpiece, Ico. In addition to being one of my favorite games ever, Ico is perhaps the most influential game of the 21st century, inspiring countless developers since its release and even convincing Dark Souls director Hidetaka Miyazaki to start his career in game design. It’s one of the best games to come out of Japan Studio, which was shut down by Sony in 2021, reportedly because its masterful, critically acclaimed games weren’t making enough money to keep the publisher happy.
It’s easy to understand why so Japan Studio games made their way into Astro Bot. Team Asobi originally formed under Japan Studio, and after the studio’s closure, many developers went on to join Team Asobi. Of course those developers want to include references to Japan Studio’s groundbreaking work, but seeing that happen in what’s in large part a playable commercial for Sony as an entity, it’s hard not to mourn Japan Studio’s fate and feel renewed anger at Sony for refusing to value one of the best teams it ever assembled.
Astro Bot is probably not meant as a comment on Sony at all. While the company itself is certainly aware of the value of having a hit game all about how cool its products are, Team Asobi seems to be just making the best platformer it can, and doing a hell of a good job with it. But regardless of Team Asobi’s intentions, playing through an interactive ad for a company that’s crushed more than one excellent studio because its games weren’t pushing the bottom line regardless of their quality is a more distressing experience than its adorable exterior might suggest.
