This game is just a massive bundle of joy. You can feel the devs' passion for this medium in every inch of it. It's a bite-sized collectathon with smooth controls and occasional vehicle sections to spice things up. All of the DualSense's features are put to good use here. Sections that use the adaptive triggers, motion controls, or touchpad control like a dream and don't feel gimmicky or obtrusive at all. The haptic feedback in particular feels like magic the first time you get your hands on it. The game is bursting with charm (Astro waving to you in his idle animation will never not warm my heart) and callbacks to other games or PlayStation hardware. It's an ad, sure, but it's done with enough reverence to not come off that way while playing. The soundtrack is a treat as well, with plenty of catchy tunes and others that make me feel all fuzzy inside. Astro's Playroom is one of those games that reminds me just how much I love gaming. If you have a PS5, make a beeline for this one.

Only started playing this one once I heard that it was shutting down. It's what it says on the tin, playing Pac-Man on mazes constructed from Google Maps. It sounds like a bit of a mess, but it ended up being a lot of fun. There's some novelty in being able to play Pac-Man near famous monuments or even just by your home. The novelty of generating your own stages wore off after a bit (especially since the game couldn't always generate them depending on the area you chose), but it was also interesting to play levels that others had uploaded.

The real hook of the game, however, was the tour mode. The tour mode had stages handpicked(?) by the developers (from what I can tell they rotated like the tours in Mario Kart Tour), where you also have side objectives which you needed to complete to unlock more levels (eat X ghosts per stage, get X points, etc.). These objectives got a bit annoying on the more difficult levels, but nothing that ever felt unachievable, especially with power ups. Some of those "more difficult" stages also highlighted some of the game's control flaws. Some spots just aren't conducive for Pac-Man mazes, and I'd often be frantically swiping to go the right way to no avail. There were also some spots that definitely looked like you could make a turn, but either couldn't or would just get stuck on the maze geometry. Ghost spawn placements also tended to mean ghosts dominating a portion of the map by default, since there were never going to be any perfectly symmetrical maps. However these issues only truly frustrated me when I was shooting for some of the more difficult challenges later on, and most of the time I was having fun. There's definitely a novelty to playing a bunch of massive and wildly different, if unbalanced, types of mazes. I also really liked the unlockable pixel/voxel replicas of monuments and foods from around the world with fun facts attached. I love these kinds of collectibles and they gave me an extra incentive to keep coming back to the tour stages, and even select user submitted ones as well. There was also some sort of competition mode where you'd compete for the top score on a few stages, and earn badges and currency to buy hats that gave you extra perks. I only played one of these (seems that they updated on a monthly basis), so I can't really say much more other than it was neat.

As a final note, I'm surprised how lenient this game was in terms of monetization, or lack thereof. From what I can tell, this never had microtransactions at all. It only showed you ads after every level or two, and had the usual "watch this ad for an extra life after a game over/get an extra reward" mobile game trappings. There were two currencies, one you earned by watching ads or playing the game and was used for extra power ups. The other was the aforementioned currency that you could only earn through competition mode and could use for upgrades. Between the non-existent buzz for the game and the lack of any monetization besides ads, I can see how this died in little over a year. That being said, I hope this concept can be brought back some day, with a bit more polish on the controls, either as a new mobile game or a side mode in a full console/PC release. This is too good of a concept to let die unceremoniously in a mobile game that practically nobody played.


(No idea how this review turned into an essay, guess I wanted to go in depth with something that's at risk of being semi-lost media. Didn't even have an IGDB listing til I added one about a month ago.)

The car chase segment is really impressive, barely looked like a game at times (though ironically the frame drops broke that immersion a bit). It didn't wow me too much in terms of "this is what games could be like in the future" because of how much it didn't look like a game at all, on top of it just being a tech demo with very limited gameplay. As a visual showcase though, it's pretty neat. I think reading up on how everything in the demo works will give me a better picture of how all of the tech could be implemented into a full game some day.