Everybody loves Astro Bot, so why does everybody hate Astro Bot?

In 2013, accompanying the launch of the PlayStation 4, was a game called The Playroom. It was a pack-in game developed by Sony’s Japan Studio that was meant to demonstrate the PlayStation Camera, which was not packed in with the console. As a result, despite the PlayStation 4’s global popularity, not a lot of people played it. It was an augmented reality game that featured some nondescript white robots in a few of its segments. I don’t think anybody would have guessed that these little automatons would be heralded as the saviors of 3D platforming.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. A few years later, accompanying the launch of the PlayStation VR in 2016, there was a sequel to The Playroom, succinctly titled The Playroom VR. Much like the first game, it was nothing to write home about, save for the well-received Robots Rescue feature, which saw those little white replicants return with a sleek new look in a 3D platformer. It wouldn’t be long before this concept would be expanded into a full sequel in Astro Bot Rescue Mission, also for PlayStation VR. While it wasn’t much of a hit, critics rated it highly, saying it was a standout game for the PlayStation VR, which as I write it sounds something like a backhanded compliment.

Step forward a few years into 2020. The eagerly-awaited PlayStation 5 has launched, and with it, a new pack-in game. This time, it’s Astro’s Playroom, the first game in the series detached from any unpopular peripherals. As before, it’s a 3D platformer, but unlike previous entries, the miniature mechanism isn’t exactly the star of the show. The game serves as something of a museum featuring the past and present of the PlayStation brand, with its four worlds representing four components of the console’s hardware and having monuments to PlayStation hardware and cameos from iconic PlayStation games strewn throughout. It was hard not to be charmed by it, both due to the history on display and the quality of the game itself. It was a delightful albeit brief game that combined functional platformer design with advanced technology to demonstrate the hardware, both in its pristine graphics and its engaging use of the new DualSense controller. Being included for free with the console certainly helped. Lots of people, myself included, felt that the gameplay here was enough to sustain an entire game, rather than just a hardware demo.

Come 2024, that wish became a reality, with Astro Bot releasing for PlayStation 5. It was anticipated as the potentially the best 3D platformer since Super Mario Odyssey, in addition to signaling that Sony would be opening up to more games outside of their blockbuster wheelhouse. And sure enough, it was very well received, earning rave reviews and numerous Game of the Year awards. It seemed that Astro Bot was a wonder of a game, a celebration of all that gaming can be, and a bright spot in a presently dark industry. Either that or it was a soulless corporate product that existed only to remind you of branded content.

If it wasn’t obvious, not everyone liked Astro Bot. If this discussion is to continue, then, it’s necessary to go a little more in-depth into what exactly Astro Bot is. To begin with, here’s a basic plot summary of the game: Astro is a robot who lives in a spaceship shaped like a PlayStation 5 along with a bunch of his friends who are virtually identical robots, some of which dress like PlayStation characters. The spaceship is attacked by an alien, who steals the various hardware components of the ship and scatters the bots throughout the galaxy. Astro goes on a journey to rescue the missing bots and get the components back to repair the PlayStation 5 ship.

So, it’s not exactly Blade Runner. Don’t expect any involving narratives about whether or not artificial intelligence can truly be human, or really any sort of narrative at all. But is Astro at least a cool protagonist? Well, let’s take a look at him (official materials refer to Astro with masculine pronouns, although it’s not clear if he or any of the other bots exhibit any gendered characteristics. Some of them dress as female characters. In the absence of any canonical explanation, I choose to believe that Left Hand of Darkness rules apply). He’s a robot. He likes video games. He likes to dance. That’s about it in terms of personality. His basic moveset is simple, but very much functional. There are powerups to expand on his moveset, most of which are animal themed, which spice up the game but are also a bit unsatisfying in how impersonal they are.

How about the setting? Much like in Super Mario Galaxy, the levels in Astro Bot exist in space and can therefore be just about anything. Sometimes they’re environments including forests and deserts. Sometimes they’re a bunch of shapes that don’t correspond to anything in particular. Sometimes they’re a casino. All of them are rendered in great detail, but they’re lacking in identity. They’re populated by robotic animals that vaguely resemble the bots, but these mechanical animals don’t serve much purpose besides being set dressing. There are enemies, but it’s never apparent what exactly they are. Do they work for the alien? Probably not, considering they also appeared in the previous games where the alien was nowhere to be seen. I guess they just really have it in for Astro.

In the absence of a compelling story, character, and setting, those PlayStation cameos seem to be the only thing left for the player to attach to. This is a big part of what people don’t like about Astro Bot. At best, it’s a somewhat hollow tribute to games past, and at worst, it’s barely more than an advergame that exists to remind you of other, often better games. One could also object to the nature of these cameos more specifically. Some of them refer to series long dormant, the implication being that these games are better as museum pieces than as games to be played in the present. While most series represented have at least one entry available on PlayStation 5, that isn’t always an adequate substitute for the original games that are part of the history on display. Another argument is that some of the games represented are from third-party developers, thus making their status as PlayStation games dubious. Astro Bot could be seen as a sort of historical revisionism, portraying these games as being part of a history they were only tangentially related to. This criticism is less valid in my eyes. Without getting too deep into gaming history, the PlayStation has always been defined by third-party games in contrast to its rivals.

Central to both of these criticisms is that there is something inherently wrong with the cameos in Astro Bot. This is not a critique I find particularly interesting. As I described above, the cameos and references are only as prominent as they are because of how empty everything else is. Moment to moment gameplay does not involve these allusions, save for a bonus level in each world. Astro’s Playroom was much the same way, albeit as a free pack-in game, where the museum framing made a bit more sense than in a retail release. One has to wonder why a commercial product should be so jam-packed with imagery of the console you’re playing it on. It would be easy to tune it out if only there was something else to focus on. Rather than criticizing what’s filling the void, I find it more useful to criticize the void itself. This is in large part because, mechanically and technically, Astro Bot is excellent. But it’s just hard to view Astro Bot as the platforming messiah it’s been framed as when there’s just so little going on. I eagerly await whatever Team Asobi does next, provided it’s not another Astro Bot.

…

Okay, so there’s another thing. Notice how I said Asobi, and not Japan Studio? That’s important to this story. In 2021, less than a year after the launch of the PlayStation 5, Sony’s long-running Japan Studio was closed. This studio was technically established in 2005, but as a continuation of Sony Computer Entertainment’s internal game development that had been around since 1993. Over the years, they were an important part of the PlayStation family, but following some restructuring (corporate speak for people losing their jobs), the studio was reorganized around the Astro’s Playroom developers which became known as Team Asobi. Perhaps the most well-known of Japan Studio’s creations was Ape Escape, a 3D platformer that Astro Bot was naturally compared to quite regularly. They worked on a lot of other well-known games, but there’s a bit of a problem in the narrative. Despite how often they were praised for making inventive and creative games, a lot of the time, they weren’t inventing or creating anything. Lots of the games they’re credited for by the public are games they only provided development support to. Games from relatively recent years like Bloodborne, Freedom Wars as well as older games like Parappa the Rapper and Everybody’s Golf were primarily developed by other studios. Japan Studio no doubt made important contributions, but to credit them as the creators of these games would be like saying Sony’s Santa Monica Studio created The Unfinished Swan and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. Furthermore, even for the games developed internally, the Japan Studio that existed up to their closure had very little continuity with the Japan Studio that created some of those classics. To illustrate, of the five game designers on the original Ape Escape, only one returned for Ape Escape 2. Most of the staff who worked on The Legend of Dragoon never contributed to another game at Japan Studio. The righteous indignation that many felt at Japan Studio being restructured into Team Asobi is ignorant of how consistent the decision was with much of the studio’s history. At the same time, the rationale for the studio’s closure was dubious. One reason was that the rise of mobile games infringed on the usual wheelhouse of Japan Studio (games like Locoroco, Patapon, etc), and therefore the studio hadn’t had a hit of their own in a while. But considering how many major AAA games had come out of Japan at this time, if Japan Studio couldn’t make a hit, whose fault was that? The developers working there, or the managers who seemed to think they didn’t have a future? I do not fault people for being upset with how the studio was handled, but Astro Bot itself has very little to do with it.

(For what it’s worth, many of the staff who left Japan Studio joined Bokeh Game Studio under Keiichiro Toyama, creator of games like Siren and Gravity Rush at Japan Studio. They have since released their debut game, Slitterhead, which launched to middling reviews and apparently underwhelming commercial performance. Make of that what you will.)