YoIt’s the next big PlayStation 5 game, and Sony is in its DNA, but there’s still something very Nintendo about Astro Bot. It’s in the way the game is designed so perfectly around the controller you play with, taking advantage of all the features of the DualSense controller. The space aesthetic, where different planets represent different colorful worlds to jump to, is reminiscent of Super Mario Galaxy. And there’s also the feeling of pure joy you get when you play it. On a console whose most famous hits are quite serious (think God of War and The Last of Us), Astro Bot prioritizes fun.
“I think Sony has a fresh mentality in the design of its products, but there is also joy,” says Nicolas Doucet, studio director at Team Asobi, the Japanese studio behind Astro Bot. “They are not mutually exclusive or seen as antagonistic… The (PlayStation) hardware team really liked it, no one was being valuable. “These are products that are highly crafted, so you would imagine their designers wouldn’t want to be tampered with, and here we were setting our sights on a PSVR and turning it into a mothership.”
Astro Bot’s first game, Rescue Mission, was the best thing ever made for the PlayStation VR headset, a clever platformer packed with fresh ideas. Astro’s Playroom was a freebie included with the PS5 when it launched in 2020, designed to show off what Sony’s new console and its controller could do. It did it splendidly, with levels themed around the PS5’s super-fast SSD hard drive, or soundtracked by a singing GPU, in which every little trick of the PS5 controller, from the microphone to the triggers, was exploited to the fullest. haptics. But Astro’s Playroom was also, unexpectedly, an interactive museum of Sony gaming hardware: as you played, you collected consoles, peripherals, and other knick-knacks that slowly filled a lab with PlayStation history. It was a delight.
During the development of Astro’s Playroom, the Asobi team worked very closely with the people who were making the PS5 and the controller, to the point that they were running between buildings with prototypes in paper bags, Doucet says. “They would lend us prototype controllers that were double the normal size, sometimes two controllers stuck together because they needed more power… you really realize the effort of miniaturizing all 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 be used. Our job is to try to generate as many ideas as we can and validate that gut feeling or sometimes invalidate it. It all comes down to the fact that we don’t sell technology: we sell an experience, a magical experience, that arrives of technology.”
Now, the Asobi team has been given the freedom to create a bigger, longer game (about 12 hours) that isn’t tied to a piece of PlayStation hardware as an extended tech demo, though it remains an overt tribute to everything. related to Sony. It incorporates many ideas that didn’t make it into the 2020 game. Astro Bot now flies between levels in a controller-shaped spaceship whose exhaust is made up of PlayStation button symbols. Running through a few levels as the lovable robot, I launched myself down a slide with a bunch of beach balls, dove off a high board into a pool, defeated an angry giant octopus by slingshotting at its face with a pair of extendable frogs. . -He wore boxing gloves, used magnets to gather metal fragments into a ball big enough to crush things, and inflated Astro like a balloon before propelling him with the expelled gas.
It’s extremely cute and fun, and full of fun details: I discovered that I could cut through wooden logs with the flame blast from Astro’s jetpack, just because it’s fun, and when I jumped on a turtle to see if I could ride on its back, Astro struck 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 slowly expands outward as the challenge increases: towards the middle are the safest places, where a five-year-old could have fun kicking a soccer ball, jumping in the water and hitting the occasional villain, and Towards the edges are the most difficult levels. There are over 150 little tributes to PlayStation games, from PaRappa the Rapper to Journey, in the form of costumed robots that you can rescue. The challenge levels test my not inconsiderable 90s kid 3D platforming skills with platforms suspended in time and precise jumps over miniature ice rinks suspended in space. It’s the easiest fun I’ve had playing a game in a long time.
The Asobi team is relatively small (about 65 people) and relatively international. Three-quarters of the team are Japanese, Doucet says, and the rest represent 16 different nationalities. Some worked on previous PlayStation projects like Shadow of the Colossus or Gravity Rush, but others arrived new. Everyone is invested in earning Astro Bot true PlayStation mascot status, Doucet says. “We want Astro to become 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 never forget to be the underdog; That’s part of the successful mindset: you always want to be chasing something. “When you become complacent is when games start to lose their soul.”
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Astro Bot certainly has a lot of soul. It’s clearly the product of a development team that’s really having fun. “We have a lot of geek enthusiasm; I’m a PlayStation collector myself,” Doucet says. “It sounds a bit cheesy, but for us it is important to be happy, so that the players feel happy.”
Astro Bot will be released on September 6 for PlayStation 5