The Breaker Times

It is 9PM, and all I want to do is sleep. I barely have the energy to speak, let alone play a video game. But I have a job to do, and it’s reviewing Astro Bot by its release date, so I make a deal with myself to play just two levels, then go to bed…

Five hours later, my face burns from smiling. I’m convinced I could build, then run through, a brick wall. That’s the type of way Astro Bot will make you feel.

Astro Bot, out now on PlayStation 5, is a collect-a-thon platformer. You play as the robot Astro adventuring in space in his PS5-shaped mothership with 300 of his friends — some of them simple bots, others robot-ified versions of famous video game characters. Suddenly, he’s attacked by an unsubtle-as-hell Xbox-green alien monster who trashes his ship and scatters its parts and his 300 friends to far corners of the universe.

Astro Bot is filled with standard platformer tropes, but it pulls off a sense of wonder in their presentation. As you explore galaxies to find your fellow robots and unlock new parts of the game, you’ll find a lot of familiar elements, only to see them executed in quirky and delightful ways. Just about every platformer has an ability that lets you shoot across longer distances, but none of them let you do it by strapping a bulldog to your back. 

The different levels Astro explores have themes that you’d expect. There’s a jungle planet, a volcano planet, and worlds of pirates, ghosts, and gardeners. Some worlds require special powers to navigate, and those, too, are pretty standard in function if not in form. The monkey power-up lets you scale walls, while the mouse ability shrinks you down to access tiny spaces. There’s even a Super Mario Sunshine-esque F.L.U.D.D power that uses liquid to move Astro around.

The developers at Team Asobi didn’t reinvent the platforming wheel here, but like any good platformer, it’s the unique ways the powers are used that make them special. Instead of water, that F.L.U.D.D. power-up sucks up a green goo it then spits out to create platforms of grass. I giggled like a toddler using it to defeat a special enemy by literally sucking its green, goopy brains out. 

One power-up — which I won’t describe beyond saying it’s really cute since figuring it out is a big part of the fun here — truly captures the essence of Astro Bot. When I first found it, I could not understand it at all. It seemed useless; I felt silly for getting stumped by what had been, up until that point, an incredibly simple game. And unlike with most of my pickups, the game wouldn’t help me. Astro Bot typically displays a little tutorial box for how to use it, but this time, it deliberately left me hanging. Playing a game is like being in a conversation with its developers without the ability to speak directly, and it felt like communication had broken down.

But then I remembered that communication between player and developer is not only what to do but also what to feel. And suddenly, it felt like they were hovering just over my shoulder, holding back their laughter as a dear friend would while they waited for me to get a joke. They’d intentionally held back an explanation because they wanted me to experience the feeling of figuring it out for myself. They wanted me to laugh, like I suspect they did when designing it.

And when I finally got it, the jolt of understanding was so friggin’ powerful that I laughed myself into spontaneous sobbing saying aloud to no one, “Astro Bot, I would die for you.” 

There are so many moments exactly like that. I thought bots you rescued were simply currency used to advance to the next level, only to realize that in the game’s hub world, they’re your friends putting their very bodies on the line to help you access even more collectibles. Some distinctive PlayStation-themed bots — think one wearing Aloy’s red hair or Kratos’ beard — serve a more special purpose. When you rescue them, they can give you that character’s power and take you to a special level modeled on a game like Horizon Zero Dawn or Uncharted, so detailed that they’ll even include side quests from the original. And I defy you to feel something other than the warmest nostalgia during the final boss fight and credits sequence — I didn’t know just how much emotion a PlayStation Move controller could make me feel.

From my two-hour demo at Summer Game Fest earlier this year, I knew Astro Bot would be something special. It was a simple, joyous little platformer crafted as a celebration of PlayStation’s past. And if that’s all it was, it’d make for a great little pit stop on the 2024 game calendar as we travel toward the bigger, more anticipated releases like Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Echoes of Wisdom, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.

But Astro Bot is so much more than a mascot platformer plucked from the late ’90s and retooled for modern audiences and hardware. It is the kind of game that reminds us why video games exist in the first place: love. (Yeah, I know that sounds corny — but I’m serious.) Astro Bot exemplifies the great love that compels us to play, make, write about, and share video games with our friends and family. Even if it will keep you up way past your bedtime.