Astro Bot, a generally exceptional, imaginative game, features a heroic robot with pixelated eyes of blue who waddles tentatively through the universe like a toddler. But Astro is an ardent puzzle-solver, too, in a game that is a mammoth, interactive pop culture history.
Astro previously appeared in a tech demo for the PlayStation 5 that showed off the bells and whistles of the new Sony console and its controller. That tidbit was fun, but Astro Bot contains a fuller, 12-hour experience. It uses the PS5 controller to an impressive extent, emitting thousands of sounds and good vibrations. It’s not an exaggeration to say I felt like I was holding an extension of Astro Bot in my hands.
The simple sci-fi rescue story by Team Asobi works despite the fact that the only decipherable language comes via eye expressions and verbal exclamations. Astro’s delightful, whooping laughter recalls Curly’s harried vocalisations in the vintage black-and-white short comedies of the Three Stooges.
Asobi means “play” in Japanese, and Astro Bot evokes so many versions of play from pop culture’s annals that it’s somewhat like Steven Spielberg’s version of Ready Player One. About 150 PlayStation characters make appearances, including the dragon Spyro and the cylinder-headed prince from Katamari Damacy.
Astro Bot can feel like some Nintendo or Sega games. Like Super Mario Galaxy, it includes scores of planets. As in Pikmin, the little beings work together; on your home base, they combine to make a bridge held by a pelican’s beak. Climb across and you’ll enter an area inspired by Sony’s Horizon series. Even an old board game, the Rube Goldberg-style Mouse Trap, is evoked on a level in which the white-and-blue Astro shrinks to a gnawer’s size.
Some might think of this as way too much borrowing. I prefer the Newton-esque “standing on the shoulders of giants” idea because Astro Bot, startlingly, becomes its own thing.
Astro’s ship, a towering, rocket-powered PlayStation 5, has been attacked; when it crashes, its crew is strewed across galaxies. Ingeniously, the controller becomes a smaller jet, the Dual Speeder, which is even playable on a usually static pregame screen. By piloting the jet and streaking through multicoloured portals in space, Astro finds as many as 300 minuscule members of his crew on 50 planets and asteroids. On the Trunk of Funk planet, which features a huge smiling tree, a Bot is hidden in a bird’s nest. Sometimes they’re trapped in cages. Sometimes it’s hard to find all of them in a level.
More than just acting as the Dual Speeder, the controller uses haptic feedback and adaptive triggers to immerse players in these worlds. Handy-D, a banana-eating monkey in your backpack, climbs walls with long, Mr. Fantastic-like hands and arms as you tilt the device. When you press a trigger, Astro lofts rocks at a giant, peg-legged pirate boss with a dinosaur’s head as a foot. (The controller works less effectively when used as a hammer.) Later, when I jumped on two mushrooms near a tree, the fungi felt spongy and emitted a sound like wet sod after a rain.
Some tech is more familiar. Of the soundtrack’s 87 songs, none is more memorable than Kenneth C M Young’s short and poppy I Am Astro Bot, which is almost as catchy as David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s hook in Here Lies Love.
Astro Bot does have a marketing gimmick that can be annoying if you’re not a self-promotion-minded streamer or influencer. A trope among platformers is the collection of gold coins; here, they’re exchanged to unlock Astro’s wardrobe variations or animated Bots that populate the home base. The coins are branded with the PlayStation logo, an advertisement that appears thousands of times. Some might say this exhibits pride in one’s employer. To me, it’s overkill.
Beyond that hiccup, Astro Bot is an enjoyable endeavor that often showcases the brilliance of game makers who know their history. They iterate so inventively that you feel as if you’re part of something mildly revolutionary.
With the game’s expected success, Astro, who must be considered the PS5’s mascot in the way Crash Bandicoot was the original PlayStation’s mascot, will be imitated widely and promoted even more aggressively as the holidays approach. Already, you can buy a cute Astro-branded controller. He has become a star among the planets. – The New York Times
