Astro Bot is a Nintendo-tier PlayStation platformer, at last

Early in the development of Super Mario 64 — the game that catapulted Mario into 3D, and thus wrote the rulebook for character movement in 3D video game worlds — Shigeru Miyamoto and his team at Nintendo focused hard on how the character felt to play. Before they started on level design, they had Mario running around an empty grid, and they iterated and refined the controls and the moveset tirelessly until Mario was inherently fun to control, even in a void. Only then did they start to consider what he would actually do: what challenges he would face, what worlds he would inhabit, and what kind of adventure he would go on.

In a way, Team Asobi — Sony’s go-to tech demo developer and developer of Astro’s Playroom and the upcoming Astro Bot — has been doing this kind of preparatory work for the last 12 years. From 2012 to 2020, the Tokyo outfit made small games, often distributed for free, whose purpose was to demonstrate the interactive potential of Sony’s hardware. The Playroom demonstrated the PlayStation Camera; The Playroom VR and Astro Bot Rescue Mission the PlayStation VR headset; Astro’s Playroom the PS5’s DualSense controller. The team had a talent for unearthing delightful and satisfying interactions from the devices, and they peopled their games with cute little robots who acquired more personality with each installment.

Now Team Asobi has been given the chance to unleash all that expertise in playfulness on Astro Bot, a full-scale game that exists for its own ends rather than to serve a Sony marketing plan. And it’s just as good as you’d imagine.

That’s not to say that Astro Bot — a lavishly produced, classic platform game starring Asobi’s robot mascot — shirks its promotional duties, or cuts the ties between its irrepressible lead character and the hardware he lives on. The game is soaked through with PlayStation branding and fan service, almost to a fault.

Astro and his army of bot friends are traveling the cosmos aboard their ship, which is shaped like a giant PlayStation 5. After an assault by a giant alien, the PS5 ship breaks apart, scattering bots and components across neighboring galaxies, and crash-lands on a desert planet (in a scene that seems to quote the opening of Uncharted 3). Astro must hop from planet to planet aboard his controller-shaped Dual Speeder craft, rescuing bots and hunting for the PS5’s key components: its SSD, memory, CPU, and so on.

Many of the bots — 173 of them, to be precise — are dressed as characters from PlayStation games past and present. They’re digital collectible figures, Funko Pop alternatives for 30 years of PlayStation gaming, celebrating almost every Sony property you can think of. Naturally, you’ll find Ratchet and Clank, Kratos, and Nathan Drake here; third-party heroes with a PlayStation connection, like Metal Gear Solid’s Snake and Ryu and Ken from Street Fighter, are also represented. Whether for licensing reasons or just to make a fun guessing game, the bots are given coy names like Dad of Boy (Kratos), Spinning Marsupial (Crash Bandicoot), and Immune Survivor (The Last of Us’ Ellie). There are some deep cuts that will have all but the most encyclopedic of PlayStation fans scratching their heads. They gradually fill up the desert crash site, turning this hub world into a bustling Sony museum.

This assault of nostalgia bait and brand synergy is initially a little less charming outside of the context of a free pack-in like Astro’s Playroom. Can’t Astro and Team Asobi be allowed to build an identity of their own? But they actually achieve just that, transmuting this marketing flavor into something heartfelt, handcrafted, and celebratory.

This is partly down to the poignancy of many of the picks. Team Asobi is the last remaining bastion of Japan Studio, the historically creative Sony studio responsible for the likes of Ico, LocoRoco, Gravity Rush, PaRappa the Rapper, and many, many more offbeat classics. Japan Studio was sadly dissolved in 2021, with many of its staff folded into Team Asobi to make Astro Bot. Its wild characters and artful, innovative games are particularly favored in Astro Bot’s directory of PlayStation history.

This tribute is never more touching and joyful than in the case of Ape Escape. This Japan Studio series, about a boy who catches naughty monkeys in his net, is one of many faltering attempts by Sony to create a family game franchise to rival Nintendo’s, and like most of them, it didn’t really stick. Astro Bot is very much its inheritor, even down to the hardware connection — the first Ape Escape was intended as a showpiece for the original DualShock analog controller. After defeating the first galaxy’s end boss in Astro Bot, a level is unlocked that fully and faithfully recreates Ape Escape’s anarchic chase gameplay within Astro Bot’s world. It’s a wonderful touch; for one level, a near-forgotten series is brought back to glorious life in a modern context, and Team Asobi honors the memory of the ceaselessly inventive studio it used to call home.

But Astro Bot isn’t just a tribute act. There are more levels like the Ape Escape one, in which Astro fully absorbs the personality and toolkit of another PlayStation hero and romps through a level based on that character’s own games. I won’t spoil them, but they all achieve a surprisingly deep synthesis of their inspiration (often a more mature-styled game) with Astro Bot’s tactile world, adorable characters, and toothsome gameplay. It’s a mark of how confident the game is that its personality shines so clearly through the costumes it dons.

That confidence is born partly of a certain, rare kind of purism. Astro Bot is an excellent, traditional, linear platform game, and it never aspires to be anything else, or suffers any genre shame. You run, jump, bop enemies, dodge hazards, pick up coins, hunt for collectibles. Each level is a meticulously crafted assault course filled with surprises, often capped with a novel, comical boss. Like most platform games, it offers the player little margin for error and quickly gets quite difficult, but lives are infinite and checkpoints plentiful. (Kids will love it so much they’ll persevere; mine does, anyway.) It’s exquisite in its simplicity, even as this sturdy old structure is enlivened by some wonderfully inventive, transformative power-ups: rocket packs, spring-loaded boxing gloves, and gadgets that shrink Astro into a tiny mouse-bot or inflate him into a giant, waddling sponge.

These lovely gizmos are realized with a gift for tactility — for creating a toylike world you feel like you can reach out and touch, click, pop, squash, smash, crack, and squeeze — that is second only to Nintendo’s. Some of this stems from Team Asobi’s enthusiastic use of the DualSense’s rumble, haptic triggers, and speaker. (A lot of the game’s sound comes from the controller, which makes a big difference to how immediate the action feels, while the TV speakers blast the faultlessly upbeat bops of the brilliant score.) Some of the tactility is communicated by the lively animation. Some is rendered by Team Asobi’s astonishing, virtuosic command of the PlayStation 5 itself; Astro Bot is a tech marvel, perhaps the best-looking PlayStation 5 game to date. The sheen of the surfaces, slosh of the liquids, scale of the levels, and smoothness of the frame rate are stunning. The physics, as Astro sets piles of hundreds of shiny apples tumbling, or wades through a pool of gold nuggets, are just showing off.

Thematically, Team Asobi revels in the freedom of the traditional platform game: not having to stick to a theme at all. Astro Bot’s levels are a restless parade of “what if [blank], but robots?” where the blanks are filled in by turtle temples, funky trees, construction sites, or the inside of a giant worm. In the Spooky Time level, Astro pauses time to navigate a haunted house. In Free Big Brother, Astro unshackles an Iron Giant-sized bot and clambers up his limbs. Everything is made out of the same smooth, machined plastic and metal as a PlayStation device, even the rabbits, trees, and penguins; just like in the Mushroom Kingdom, everything has eyes, but in this world, they’re blinking blue LEDs. The robot theme lends a sweet logic to the rampant anthropomorphization, bloodless violence, and surreal non sequiturs of platform games. It’s like an automaton universe, a scrambled simulacrum of random concepts (and PlayStation games) assembled by some loopy machine civilization.

Sony has been reaching for something like Astro Bot since PlayStation launched 30 years ago in the age of Mario and Sonic. It has cycled through mascots like Crash, Jak, and Sackboy in its quest for a breezy family game that could hold its own with Nintendo’s best as well as mesh with Sony’s cooler, tech-centric brand. Sony ended up settling for edgier cinematic action heroes instead, but deep in the consoles’ soul, it felt like something was missing. Astro Bot — a dazzling, joyful game — is a celebration of all the failed attempts and quizzical detours Sony made on that quest. And it might also be the game to fill that hole at last.

Astro Bot will be released Sept. 6 on PlayStation 5. The game was reviewed using a pre-release download code provided by Sony. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.