A very effective commercial for a product I already bought. I wish it was much more than that.
Comparing this to Nintendo is an inevitability. This is a pack-in exclusive launch title, a platformer with a focus on motion/controller gimmicks, and a heavy focus on brand nostalgia. I got a lot of the same feelings with this that I did the first time I played Super Mario 3D World; that was the first console game I ever played in HD in my own home, and Xbox's output has been weak enough that this may as well be the first new big budget 4K console game to grace my living room. Not to mention very few games ask you to blow on your controller.
That said, I would mostly compare this game to the "other" side of Nintendo. You can use a site like MobyGames to find out who did what on your favorite games, and with any luck, you can find out what they're doing now. Through various spurts of curiosity I've found over time that for many of the most charming Nintendo games of yesteryear, there are two main paths for the people who worked on them; either they get promoted to a leadership position and little of their own work makes it into subsequent products, or, well...
I don't know how to charitably say this. They polish turds. Their talents are wasted making boring products sellable. They do good work, and I'm sure they like it; if your job is to draw Mario, and you love drawing Mario, then it might not matter whether you're drawing Mario for the platformers or the RPG's or the sports games. People who did some of the best work during the Gamecube/GBA-era across every discipline from programming to sound design are working hard to give the next Mario Party a mirror sheen.
It's not like Japan Studio had been doing that much for the past decade anyway, mostly development support and remasters, but knowing that Team Asobi has more or less replaced it makes this celebration feel a bit more like a funeral than an anniversary. I suppose we'll find out how valid this is whenever we found out what Asobi is doing next.
For every time I point at the screen and clap my hands and say "I know what that is! I remember the PSone attachable LCD screen!" there's a reference to LocoRoco or Vib Ribbon or Jumping Flash, something that in my opinion stands in stark contrast to this perfectly egg-shaped, orifice-less non-mascot. Astro makes fucking Sackboy look like he has life in his eyes. The game takes opportunities to remind us of games that felt truly fresh and new, but aside from the sheer fidelity, Astro's Playroom just doesn't have much going on at its core.
The core, though, is only part of the experience. Each level is a more or less even split between the bare-bones traditional platforming and a unique controller gimmick mini-game. It's genuinely very strange. PlayStation controllers have had motion capability since the PS3 launched, but they didn't exactly have a good start so it doesn't seem to have ever caught on. After a few hours of this I replayed the early sections of Horizon Zero Dawn to get my save file caught back up to where I was on PS4, and found myself fruitlessly moving the controller; why don't more games support gyro-aiming when it's been an option for so long? The PS4 controller is nearly a decade old, the touchpad already seems so deprecated that I don't even think most of the PS5 UI even lets you use it for navigation or typing anymore, and yet I have never seen a better use of it than the rolling mini-game in Astro's Playroom. It's like when Nintendo Land's Zelda mini-game had more responsive swordplay than the previous year's actual Zelda game.
That's the thing, there is a quality here, I think this game can grab you. It's pretty, it has a genuinely excellent soundtrack, it's full of easter eggs and call-backs and weird little interactions. Despite its flimsy backbone it offers some mechanically interesting moments. It's a game that knows its history, it was made in part by some of the same people who made that history. To make one last Nintendo comparison, it reminds me a bit of Bowser's Fury in the sense that they both feel like something that simply could not exist anymore as a standalone product. They're both a complimentary piece to a more "known quantity" product, they both lift a substantial amount of their assets from a previous game (Astro Bot Rescue Mission in this case), and they both make me hope that something new is down that road, something that takes the good parts of this small experience and fleshes out the parts where it's lacking. They both make me worried that such something is not down the road at all.
Throughout the game you can find a number of robots who have hearts in their eyes, in a frenzied glee, pawing at and rubbing against the objects of their affection, PlayStation hardware. I don't know what exact purpose this serves, if that's meant to be a representation of how much the developers love the brand, if that's how they expect players to behave, or if this is meant to suggest and cultivate that kind of fervor. I guess I know this feeling is somewhat pathetic, but it's such an extreme expression of enthusiasm that it makes me feel sort of sad. Sad that so many people are buying this console, a system the aesthetics of which are so absurd and in-your-face that they're impossible to ignore, and they skip over this game the same way you might skip over the 3DS's AR cards or StreetPass games, sad that to a lot of people a game like this is just cluttering up the screen on the box that plays the next Call of Duty. Sad that so many people, even some of the people who like games, even some of the people who work with games, view games as a waste of time. Sad that if this is a genuine expression of love for games from the people who make them that it needs to be ran through the filter of this edgeless, faceless, lifeless drone. It makes me feel kind of stupid and out of touch for caring about games even half as much as this imaginary robot does.
Comparing this to Nintendo is an inevitability. This is a pack-in exclusive launch title, a platformer with a focus on motion/controller gimmicks, and a heavy focus on brand nostalgia. I got a lot of the same feelings with this that I did the first time I played Super Mario 3D World; that was the first console game I ever played in HD in my own home, and Xbox's output has been weak enough that this may as well be the first new big budget 4K console game to grace my living room. Not to mention very few games ask you to blow on your controller.
That said, I would mostly compare this game to the "other" side of Nintendo. You can use a site like MobyGames to find out who did what on your favorite games, and with any luck, you can find out what they're doing now. Through various spurts of curiosity I've found over time that for many of the most charming Nintendo games of yesteryear, there are two main paths for the people who worked on them; either they get promoted to a leadership position and little of their own work makes it into subsequent products, or, well...
I don't know how to charitably say this. They polish turds. Their talents are wasted making boring products sellable. They do good work, and I'm sure they like it; if your job is to draw Mario, and you love drawing Mario, then it might not matter whether you're drawing Mario for the platformers or the RPG's or the sports games. People who did some of the best work during the Gamecube/GBA-era across every discipline from programming to sound design are working hard to give the next Mario Party a mirror sheen.
It's not like Japan Studio had been doing that much for the past decade anyway, mostly development support and remasters, but knowing that Team Asobi has more or less replaced it makes this celebration feel a bit more like a funeral than an anniversary. I suppose we'll find out how valid this is whenever we found out what Asobi is doing next.
For every time I point at the screen and clap my hands and say "I know what that is! I remember the PSone attachable LCD screen!" there's a reference to LocoRoco or Vib Ribbon or Jumping Flash, something that in my opinion stands in stark contrast to this perfectly egg-shaped, orifice-less non-mascot. Astro makes fucking Sackboy look like he has life in his eyes. The game takes opportunities to remind us of games that felt truly fresh and new, but aside from the sheer fidelity, Astro's Playroom just doesn't have much going on at its core.
The core, though, is only part of the experience. Each level is a more or less even split between the bare-bones traditional platforming and a unique controller gimmick mini-game. It's genuinely very strange. PlayStation controllers have had motion capability since the PS3 launched, but they didn't exactly have a good start so it doesn't seem to have ever caught on. After a few hours of this I replayed the early sections of Horizon Zero Dawn to get my save file caught back up to where I was on PS4, and found myself fruitlessly moving the controller; why don't more games support gyro-aiming when it's been an option for so long? The PS4 controller is nearly a decade old, the touchpad already seems so deprecated that I don't even think most of the PS5 UI even lets you use it for navigation or typing anymore, and yet I have never seen a better use of it than the rolling mini-game in Astro's Playroom. It's like when Nintendo Land's Zelda mini-game had more responsive swordplay than the previous year's actual Zelda game.
That's the thing, there is a quality here, I think this game can grab you. It's pretty, it has a genuinely excellent soundtrack, it's full of easter eggs and call-backs and weird little interactions. Despite its flimsy backbone it offers some mechanically interesting moments. It's a game that knows its history, it was made in part by some of the same people who made that history. To make one last Nintendo comparison, it reminds me a bit of Bowser's Fury in the sense that they both feel like something that simply could not exist anymore as a standalone product. They're both a complimentary piece to a more "known quantity" product, they both lift a substantial amount of their assets from a previous game (Astro Bot Rescue Mission in this case), and they both make me hope that something new is down that road, something that takes the good parts of this small experience and fleshes out the parts where it's lacking. They both make me worried that such something is not down the road at all.
Throughout the game you can find a number of robots who have hearts in their eyes, in a frenzied glee, pawing at and rubbing against the objects of their affection, PlayStation hardware. I don't know what exact purpose this serves, if that's meant to be a representation of how much the developers love the brand, if that's how they expect players to behave, or if this is meant to suggest and cultivate that kind of fervor. I guess I know this feeling is somewhat pathetic, but it's such an extreme expression of enthusiasm that it makes me feel sort of sad. Sad that so many people are buying this console, a system the aesthetics of which are so absurd and in-your-face that they're impossible to ignore, and they skip over this game the same way you might skip over the 3DS's AR cards or StreetPass games, sad that to a lot of people a game like this is just cluttering up the screen on the box that plays the next Call of Duty. Sad that so many people, even some of the people who like games, even some of the people who work with games, view games as a waste of time. Sad that if this is a genuine expression of love for games from the people who make them that it needs to be ran through the filter of this edgeless, faceless, lifeless drone. It makes me feel kind of stupid and out of touch for caring about games even half as much as this imaginary robot does.
Reviewed on May 21, 2023