Weeks out from having finished Astro’s Playroom, I find it weighing on my mind. Kenneth Young’s soundtrack has metamorphized into a collective of brain worms that live rent free in my mind all day. My eyes dart longingly to the game’s spot on the PS5 home screen as I scroll past it to launch Game of the Year Contender, Final Fantasy XVI. I didn’t understand; I’d done everything I possibly could have. Collected all the baubles, completed all the puzzles, asserted my dominance as the alpha among my friend group by handily beating their time trial records. But it’s true, all of it: beneath its gimmicky façade, its simple concept and pathetically low difficulty, Astro’s Playroom is FUN. More fun than what is effectively a pack-in demo should be. In fact, it is because of the circumstances of its existence that I was not only pleasantly surprised by the game, but was also left wanting to see much, much more of it.
As a derivative of Japan Studios, it’s probably not surprising that Team Asobi’s first real outing (no, games that require peripherals for girlfriend simulators don’t count) meets certain expectations. The team comes from a lineage of developers who worked on most of the quirkier stuff that has defined Sony’s Japanese identity, though it’s easy to argue that much of this output has gone underappreciated in the west to an offensive degree. Astro and the world he inhabits certainly evokes a similar feeling to something like Ape Escape or Loco Roco, with its simple geometry, eye-popping colors, and all-around cuteness. The game’s raison d'être – the “4D” functionality (term coined by me) of the PS5 controller, is used to pleasant if not mind-blowing effect. I was particularly fond of the vibration employed for Astro’s footsteps hitting surfaces made of various materials, and especially the feeling of the rain hitting his head. I was certainly convinced of the DualSense’s ability to provide a texture to games I didn’t know was ever missing, so it’s disappointing to hear that the vast majority of games on the console don’t really care to take advantage of it.
What is largely surprising about Astro’s Playroom, when I consider how much I enjoyed it, is that it is otherwise a standard “collectathon” in the vein of popular 5th- and 6th-gen platformers. There are no groundbreaking gameplay innovations here, and relatively little time spent doing anything that isn’t running, jumping, and collecting trinkets, and I think perhaps the game’s strength is in the leeway afforded to it, by virtue of its length, that allows it to hone in on making these basic actions feel as good as possible. Now, I know the collectathon genre has seen some revitalized interest over the past decade or so with at least a couple high-profile releases, so perhaps I’m just late to the party on realizing that I actually loved these exercises in absolute tedium all along, but that doesn’t convince me. I really never held any love for the likes of Rare’s output back on the Nintendo 64, and in comparison Astro is much lighter in sheer volume of doodads to pick up. No; instead, I posit that it is the way Astro controls alone that makes it so appealing.
I’m a firm believer in the idea that (barring turn-based games and the like) a video game is only as good as it is fun to move your character around its world. Indeed, though Super Mario 64 owes much of its critical reception to its wonderful level design, it would have been a non-starter without the mastery with which the systems governing Mario’s control and movement were designed. This single focus propelled the game to such status that players and speedrunners to this day remain almost endlessly fascinated by it, both in a broad sense and in discrete contexts including but not limited to flinging Mario into alternate dimensions. On the other hand, a game with even one noticeably poor movement scheme will struggle to overcome it. My thoughts immediately jump to last year’s Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, wherein every module the player’s mount has is defective in one way or another compared to the superior facsimile provided in Pokemon Legends: Arceus the year prior. Not coincidentally, Arceus was the best Pokemon game we’d gotten in something like a decade, while Scarlet only managed to prove that the franchise is more than capable of subverting consumer expectations for just how bad the games can get.
Now, I said all that to say this: I cannot supplement this assertion with any sort of technical reasoning, but controlling Astro feels really good. The arc of his jump, the circumference of the path he takes as you make him run around in a circle, the precision with which he punches the other little robot fellas; it all works flawlessly on both a technical and conceptual level. Perhaps this all sounds like a very basic observation we can take for granted, but look no further than Sony’s own LittleBigPlanet to find an otherwise fun game scarred forever by the fact that Sackboy’s jump feels like complete ass. In fact, that is the primary reason I never really return to the games despite loving nearly everything else about them. Astro’s normal traversal through a level is also punctuated by the occasional gimmick – rock-climbing with the gyro, rolling a ball around with the touch pad, etc. – which mostly maintains momentum and provides a welcome, different sort of challenge in scoping out collectibles. The odd one out here, however, is the frog suit, which plods along a 2D plane via the gyro and shoulder triggers. While it scores full points for platforming precision, and I never felt necessarily frustrated with it, this section slows the game to such a crawl that I could see a less patient player dreading the return to its respective level to grab missing puzzle pieces or “Artefacts,” Astro’s name for the myriad Sony hardware peripherals painstakingly rendered and showcased as towering sculptures in the player’s trophy room as they’re picked up.
The Artefacts are but one part of the theme of Astro’s Playroom which, as everyone is probably well aware, is a celebration of Sony hardware and the software that that has culturally defined it over the past two decades. Now, I wouldn’t call myself a PlayStation fan by any stretch of the imagination. Although I’ve begrudgingly owned every Sony console, I never really vibed with the PlayStation “culture,” either western or Japanese. That said, even I know that Sony is uniquely terrible at celebrating its own history, so I was downright chuffed to find that a lot of love had been put into making Astro shine in that regard. In addition to the aforementioned hardware renders, one type of collectible goes toward completing two murals which form a timeline of PlayStation hardware, and each level is littered with robot friends appropriating and acting out characters and scenes from Sony and Sony-adjacent properties, all of which are fun surprises despite some odd inclusions (The Order: 1886?). While perhaps beyond the scope of a demo, it would have been nice to, as a player, participate in these cameos: maybe a segment where Astro uses Cloud’s sword, jumps into one of Wipeout’s speeders, or could briefly control gravity a la Gravity Rush. Maybe a 20-minute segment where he needs to paddle a fucking canoe down a river, or move half a dozen ladders! Something to chew on.
But really, it’s considering all these largely superficial aspects of the game that makes me realize that Astro’s Playroom, as a package, is simply more than the sum of its parts. There’s just something so satisfying about flinging Astro off a tightrope in just the right way to have him crash head-first into a PlayStation Mouse, then returning to the lab to punch it and rotate it to observe its dirty little trackball. While I would have enjoyed the game dressed up in any skin, the enthusiasm the developers had for making it a comprehensive, nostalgia-bomb showcase pervades every inch of its world and put a big, dumb smile on my face every time I picked it up. To put it simply, Astro’s Playroom has SOVL, and I hope it RETVRNs with a sequel that does not use some dumbass peripheral.
As a derivative of Japan Studios, it’s probably not surprising that Team Asobi’s first real outing (no, games that require peripherals for girlfriend simulators don’t count) meets certain expectations. The team comes from a lineage of developers who worked on most of the quirkier stuff that has defined Sony’s Japanese identity, though it’s easy to argue that much of this output has gone underappreciated in the west to an offensive degree. Astro and the world he inhabits certainly evokes a similar feeling to something like Ape Escape or Loco Roco, with its simple geometry, eye-popping colors, and all-around cuteness. The game’s raison d'être – the “4D” functionality (term coined by me) of the PS5 controller, is used to pleasant if not mind-blowing effect. I was particularly fond of the vibration employed for Astro’s footsteps hitting surfaces made of various materials, and especially the feeling of the rain hitting his head. I was certainly convinced of the DualSense’s ability to provide a texture to games I didn’t know was ever missing, so it’s disappointing to hear that the vast majority of games on the console don’t really care to take advantage of it.
What is largely surprising about Astro’s Playroom, when I consider how much I enjoyed it, is that it is otherwise a standard “collectathon” in the vein of popular 5th- and 6th-gen platformers. There are no groundbreaking gameplay innovations here, and relatively little time spent doing anything that isn’t running, jumping, and collecting trinkets, and I think perhaps the game’s strength is in the leeway afforded to it, by virtue of its length, that allows it to hone in on making these basic actions feel as good as possible. Now, I know the collectathon genre has seen some revitalized interest over the past decade or so with at least a couple high-profile releases, so perhaps I’m just late to the party on realizing that I actually loved these exercises in absolute tedium all along, but that doesn’t convince me. I really never held any love for the likes of Rare’s output back on the Nintendo 64, and in comparison Astro is much lighter in sheer volume of doodads to pick up. No; instead, I posit that it is the way Astro controls alone that makes it so appealing.
I’m a firm believer in the idea that (barring turn-based games and the like) a video game is only as good as it is fun to move your character around its world. Indeed, though Super Mario 64 owes much of its critical reception to its wonderful level design, it would have been a non-starter without the mastery with which the systems governing Mario’s control and movement were designed. This single focus propelled the game to such status that players and speedrunners to this day remain almost endlessly fascinated by it, both in a broad sense and in discrete contexts including but not limited to flinging Mario into alternate dimensions. On the other hand, a game with even one noticeably poor movement scheme will struggle to overcome it. My thoughts immediately jump to last year’s Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, wherein every module the player’s mount has is defective in one way or another compared to the superior facsimile provided in Pokemon Legends: Arceus the year prior. Not coincidentally, Arceus was the best Pokemon game we’d gotten in something like a decade, while Scarlet only managed to prove that the franchise is more than capable of subverting consumer expectations for just how bad the games can get.
Now, I said all that to say this: I cannot supplement this assertion with any sort of technical reasoning, but controlling Astro feels really good. The arc of his jump, the circumference of the path he takes as you make him run around in a circle, the precision with which he punches the other little robot fellas; it all works flawlessly on both a technical and conceptual level. Perhaps this all sounds like a very basic observation we can take for granted, but look no further than Sony’s own LittleBigPlanet to find an otherwise fun game scarred forever by the fact that Sackboy’s jump feels like complete ass. In fact, that is the primary reason I never really return to the games despite loving nearly everything else about them. Astro’s normal traversal through a level is also punctuated by the occasional gimmick – rock-climbing with the gyro, rolling a ball around with the touch pad, etc. – which mostly maintains momentum and provides a welcome, different sort of challenge in scoping out collectibles. The odd one out here, however, is the frog suit, which plods along a 2D plane via the gyro and shoulder triggers. While it scores full points for platforming precision, and I never felt necessarily frustrated with it, this section slows the game to such a crawl that I could see a less patient player dreading the return to its respective level to grab missing puzzle pieces or “Artefacts,” Astro’s name for the myriad Sony hardware peripherals painstakingly rendered and showcased as towering sculptures in the player’s trophy room as they’re picked up.
The Artefacts are but one part of the theme of Astro’s Playroom which, as everyone is probably well aware, is a celebration of Sony hardware and the software that that has culturally defined it over the past two decades. Now, I wouldn’t call myself a PlayStation fan by any stretch of the imagination. Although I’ve begrudgingly owned every Sony console, I never really vibed with the PlayStation “culture,” either western or Japanese. That said, even I know that Sony is uniquely terrible at celebrating its own history, so I was downright chuffed to find that a lot of love had been put into making Astro shine in that regard. In addition to the aforementioned hardware renders, one type of collectible goes toward completing two murals which form a timeline of PlayStation hardware, and each level is littered with robot friends appropriating and acting out characters and scenes from Sony and Sony-adjacent properties, all of which are fun surprises despite some odd inclusions (The Order: 1886?). While perhaps beyond the scope of a demo, it would have been nice to, as a player, participate in these cameos: maybe a segment where Astro uses Cloud’s sword, jumps into one of Wipeout’s speeders, or could briefly control gravity a la Gravity Rush. Maybe a 20-minute segment where he needs to paddle a fucking canoe down a river, or move half a dozen ladders! Something to chew on.
But really, it’s considering all these largely superficial aspects of the game that makes me realize that Astro’s Playroom, as a package, is simply more than the sum of its parts. There’s just something so satisfying about flinging Astro off a tightrope in just the right way to have him crash head-first into a PlayStation Mouse, then returning to the lab to punch it and rotate it to observe its dirty little trackball. While I would have enjoyed the game dressed up in any skin, the enthusiasm the developers had for making it a comprehensive, nostalgia-bomb showcase pervades every inch of its world and put a big, dumb smile on my face every time I picked it up. To put it simply, Astro’s Playroom has SOVL, and I hope it RETVRNs with a sequel that does not use some dumbass peripheral.