It’s the PlayStation 5’s next big game, and Sony is in its DNA – but nonetheless there’s something very Nintendo about Astro Bot. It’s in the way that the game is designed so perfectly around the controller that you play with, taking advantage of all the DualSense controller’s bells and whistles. The spacey aesthetic, where different planets represent different colourful worlds to jump into, recalls Super Mario Galaxy. And there’s also the sense of pure joy that you feel when you play it. On a console whose most famous hits are rather self-serious – think God of War and The Last of Us – Astro Bot prioritises playfulness.
“I think Sony has the mindset of coolness in its product design, but there is also playfulness,” says Nicolas Doucet, the studio director at Team Asobi, the Japanese studio behind Astro Bot. “They’re not mutually exclusive, or seen as antagonistic… The [PlayStation] hardware team really liked it, nobody was being precious. These are products that are highly crafted, so you could imagine their designers wouldn’t want them to be tampered with – and there we were sticking eyes on a PSVR and turning 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 bursting with novel ideas. Astro’s Playroom was a treat packaged with the PS5 when it was released in 2020, designed to show off what Sony’s new console and its controller could do. It did that splendidly, with levels themed around the PS5’s super-fast SSD hard drive, or soundtracked by a singing GPU, in which every little gimmick of the PS5 controller from the microphone to the haptic triggers was exploited to the full. But Astro’s Playroom was also, unexpectedly, an interactive museum of Sony gaming hardware: as you played, you collected consoles and peripherals and other knickknacks that slowly filled a laboratory with PlayStation history. It was delightful.
During the development of Astro’s Playroom, Team Asobi worked very closely with the people who were making the PS5 and the controller – to the point where they’d be running between buildings with prototypes in paper bags, Doucet says. “They’d lend us prototype controllers that are double the normal size, sometimes two controllers stuck together because it needs more power… you really realise the effort of miniaturising all of that into a controller that looks good and feels good in your hands… those guys, they come up with features like adaptive triggers and haptics, because they get a feeling about how it will to be used. Our job is to try to come up with as many ideas as we can and validate that gut feeling, or invalidate sometimes. It comes down to the fact that we don’t sell technology – we sell an experience, a magical experience, that comes from tech.”
Now, Team Asobi has been given the freedom to make a bigger, longer game (12 hours or so) that’s not wedded to a piece of PlayStation hardware as an extended tech demo – though it’s still a manifest tribute to all things Sony. It incorporates lots of ideas that didn’t make it into 2020’s game. Astro Bot now flies around between levels on a controller-shaped spaceship whose very exhaust fumes are made up of PlayStation button symbols. Running around a few levels as the adorable robot, I whizzed down a waterslide with a bunch of beach-balls, dived off a high board into a swimming pool, defeated a giant angry octopus by slingshotting myself into its face with a pair of extendable frog-faced boxing gloves, used magnets to gather up metal shards into a ball large enough to smash things with, and inflated Astro like a balloon before propelling him around with expelled gas.
It is extremely cute and funny, and packed with playful detail – I discovered that I could slice up wooden logs with the blast of flame from Astro’s jetpack, for no reason other than that it’s fun, and when I jumped on to a turtle to see if I could ride on its back, Astro adopted a confident surfing pose. When I found a secret room after tickling some sad-looking anemones, I was greeted with a chorus of “seee-cret!”. These details are inconsequential, but as Doucet points out, “they do matter, because all these little things are memories”.
The levels are like a solar system that expands slowly outwards, as the challenge builds: towards the middle are the safest places, where a five-year-old could have fun kicking a football about, jumping through water and punching the occasional baddie, and out towards the edges are the most testing levels. There more than 150 little tributes to PlayStation games from PaRappa the Rapper to Journey, in the form of cosplaying robots that you can rescue. Challenge levels put my not-inconsiderable 90s-kid 3D platforming skills to the test with platforms suspended in time and precise jumps over miniature ice rinks suspended in space. It’s the most uncomplicated fun I’ve had playing a game in ages.
Team Asobi is relatively small – about 65 people – and relatively international. Three-quarters of the team is Japanese, says Doucet, and the rest represent 16 different nationalities. Some worked on previous PlayStation projects such as Shadow of the Colossus or Gravity Rush, but others came in fresh. They are all invested in earning Astro Bot true PlayStation mascot status, says Doucet. “We want Astro to grow into a really powerful franchise – we want to elevate this little guy,” 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 mindset, you always want to be chasing something. When you get complacent is when games start losing their soul.”
Astro Bot certainly has plenty of soul. It’s clearly the product of a development team who are really enjoying themselves. “We have a lot of geeky enthusiasm – I’m a PlayStation collector myself,” says Doucet. “It sounds a bit cheesy, but it’s important for us to be happy, in order for players to feel happiness.”
• Astro Bot is out on 6 September on PlayStation 5
• This interview and play session took place at Summer Game Fest in Los Angeles. Keza MacDonald’s travel and accommodation costs were met by Amazon Games.
