Astro Bot

• 1. Introduction

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  By the 9th of April, 2025, Astro Bot had surpassed It Takes Two to become the most awarded platformer game of all time. Its total reached 195 Game of the Year nominations and wins. That count began on the 6th of September, 2024, when the game launched exclusively for PlayStation 5. Astro Bot is the fifth entry in its series and Team Asobi's first release since the studio's separation from Japan Studio. The game was built to celebrate PlayStation's 30th anniversary. The Game Awards 2024, the 21st British Academy Games Awards, and the 28th Annual D.I.C.E. Awards all gave it Game of the Year. What made a game about a small robot rescuing friends worthy of that kind of recognition? What choices shaped it, and who made them? Creative director Nicolas Doucet described his guiding philosophy in one phrase: "the one that gave us the most control over the game's variety." That principle, and what it produced, is where the story begins.

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• 2. Building Astro Bot

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  Roughly three years and around 60 people were all Team Asobi needed to make what is reportedly its largest game to date. Development began almost immediately after Astro's Playroom was finished. The studio considered an open world structure but ultimately rejected it. A level-based design, Doucet reasoned, gave the team greater control over the variety of each moment the player encountered. An early DualSense demonstration inside the studio involved a chainsaw that could cut wood with convincing haptic resistance. The demo was genuinely impressive, but Doucet felt it clashed with Astro's friendly tone. The team stripped away the real-world framing and rebuilt those interactions as science-fiction tools. He described the goal as adding "a sci-fi touch" to interactions that might otherwise feel "too real and a little bit too daunting." That process defined how Team Asobi approached every DualSense feature in the game. They tested ideas in isolation and then selected the strongest ones for integration. The studio formed a small dedicated group whose sole job was to push the controller's capabilities as far as possible. Doucet highlighted using the adaptive triggers to simulate squeezing water from a sponge by changing resistance levels. A second technique used haptic feedback to guide players toward hidden secrets through felt surface irregularities. Touchpad-based mechanics appeared less frequently; reaching for the touchpad moved fingers away from the jump button, a friction Doucet considered worth eliminating. The subtitle was dropped entirely, with the name standing alone as Astro Bot, a signal Doucet intended as a new beginning for the series. A rebuilt game engine introduced over 70 unique species of wildlife across the game's environments, from polar bears to small insects.

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• 3. How Astro Moves

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  Astro's ability to jump, hover, punch, and spin-attack carries over unchanged from Astro Bot Rescue Mission and Astro's Playroom. Swimming underwater, which had been absent in Playroom, also returns from Rescue Mission. Fifteen new abilities attach to Astro across the game, each altering how he moves or how he fights. Barkster the Bulldog Booster grants Astro the ability to air-dash through enemies and terrain. Keri Kero the Twin-Frog Gloves allow him to punch from a distance and swing off red-painted surfaces. Handy-D the Monkey lets Astro climb banana-shaped holds, throw rocks at enemies, and slam the ground. These abilities also drive the boss fights at the end of each galaxy. The base game holds 90 levels distributed across six galaxies and 60 planets. Each galaxy contains progression levels that must be cleared to reach the boss, alongside optional challenge levels designed to be harder. Clearing a boss unlocks a level centered on a V.I.P. Bot; clearing that opens the next galaxy. Navigation between galaxies is handled by the Dual Speeder, a ship modeled after the DualSense controller and steered by physically tilting it. Of the total 332 rescuable Bots, 301 appear in the base game and 27 arrive through downloadable levels. Four are carried over from Astro's Playroom. Players who collect every puzzle piece and 300 Bots unlock the Great Master Challenge. This hidden level is accessible only from the hub world called the Crash Site. The Crash Site also holds puzzle pieces that, when collected, open the Gatcha Lab, Astro's outfit collection, and the Safari Park. Five of the game's levels are built around specific PlayStation franchises. Ape Escape, God of War, Uncharted, LocoRoco, and Horizon each represent a different PlayStation console, from the original through to the PlayStation 4.

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• 4. The V.I.P. Bot Gallery

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  194 V.I.P. Bots appear in Astro Bot, each modeled on a character from PlayStation's history or a franchise with a notable PlayStation presence. Designing them required solving a consistent visual problem: the same small robot body had to convey dozens of recognizably different identities. Characters with hair often had it replaced with vinyl. Characters whose original designs relied on stylized eyes posed a harder challenge. Blue LEDs alone could not replicate them, so these Bots received full head masks shaped closer to their originals. The result was a visual language wide enough to hold Ratchet from Ratchet & Clank alongside Solid Snake from Metal Gear. Joker from Persona and Leon S. Kennedy from Resident Evil are among the others present. Third-party licensors include Activision, Arc System Works, Atlus, Bandai Namco Entertainment, Capcom, Konami, Sega, and Ubisoft. Doucet described the collection as a generational bridge. A child who does not recognize a certain Bot could ask a parent who had played those games before. He and Team Asobi had briefly considered releasing the game without any PlayStation branding at all, letting Astro stand on his own. They decided against it, reasoning that fans who valued the cameos in Astro's Playroom would be disappointed if the sequel abandoned them. The tonal challenge was equally significant. Team Asobi needed to be playful with these characters without disrespecting the legacies they were drawing on. Various PlayStation Studios, including Santa Monica Studio and Naughty Dog, responded positively to the representations. John Garvin, the creative director behind Days Gone, took a different view. He publicly criticized Deacon St. John's appearance, claiming it "reduced him to a cartoon schill promoting some small game." Punching the Ratchet bot caused him to drop all of his Bolts and scramble to pick them up. That individual behavioral logic was written into each of the 194 designs. The 400th issue of Edge magazine ran ten different front covers. Each highlighted a different V.I.P. Bot, including Ratchet and Clank from their eponymous series and Aloy from the Horizon series.

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• 5. Composing for Astro

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  Kenneth C. M. Young had scored Astro Bot Rescue Mission and Astro's Playroom before Team Asobi invited him back for the new game. His working method this time was distinctive: the studio gave him a dev kit. This allowed him to access an early build and draw inspiration directly from the levels. Young described this access as "really important, particularly for those levels where it's not clear exactly what it needs." A fire-themed level suggested heavy metal to him immediately. A level called Bubbling Under presented no obvious sonic trope and proved harder to approach. The level Papa Tree posed a different challenge entirely. He was asked to write a song with lyrics, following a model from the previous game. Young could not find a direction into it at first. Young's process was shaped by firsthand play rather than written briefs; each level demanded a different approach from inside the game. The franchise-dedicated levels created a distinct compositional challenge. Young had to reference established musical themes without losing Astro Bot's own identity. He explained that certain series could not be heavily rearranged. "If you cut those up," he said, "it just stops being Uncharted, it stops being Horizon." Those remixes drew on work by Greg Edmonson for Uncharted and Bear McCreary for the God of War games. The Horizon themes came from Joris de Man and Niels van der Leest. Nobuyuki Shimizu and Kemmei Adachi handled LocoRoco, though both went uncredited. The original composers received the remixes warmly. Julie Elvin, the singer associated with the Horizon series, was described as "thrilled." McCreary described meeting Team Asobi at The Game Awards in person. "I loved it. I loved the level," he said. He noted that hearing his music in a completely different context gave him a fresh relationship with it. Young had rendered the God of War themes in what McCreary called a "fun, robo-electro-pop style." The full soundtrack was released on streaming services on the 5th of October, 2024. It included pieces from The Playroom VR, Astro Bot Rescue Mission, and Astro's Playroom alongside new compositions. The track "Rising Blue Lightning" from Thunder Force V: Perfect System, originally composed by Hyakutaro Tsukumo, appears in the level "PlaySquadron Go!" Young's personal favorite track in the game was Casino, which he built around retro aesthetics he had long wanted to include.

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• 6. Critical Reception

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  Metacritic ranked Astro Bot the highest-rated game of 2024. On OpenCritic, 99% of critics recommended it. In Japan, four Famitsu critics combined for a score of 36 out of 40. Simon Cardy compared the game to a theme park and to Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory, calling it "a delightful concoction of experimentation and joy." Mark Delaney praised the level design for anticipating where players would wander off the main path and rewarding them accordingly. He described the experience as "a surprise gift in the mail whose sender can't wait to learn it's arrived." Delaney did note one exception: he found Astro's underwater controls unintuitive. Masahiro Sakurai, the creator and longtime director of games in the Kirby and Super Smash Bros. series, praised the game publicly on Twitter. Critics compared its mechanics to Nintendo franchises including Super Mario Sunshine, Super Mario Galaxy, Super Mario Odyssey, Arms, Pikmin, and Splatoon. One critical camp found the game polished but ultimately derivative. A second camp described its dense catalog of PlayStation references as quietly highlighting how long those franchises had gone without new entries. In the United States, the game debuted as the second best-selling software in its release week. Its United Kingdom opening sold 21% higher than Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart's debut. Japan saw 12,672 physical copies sold in the first week, growing to 47,392 by the 8th of December, 2024. By the 3rd of November, 2024, Sony confirmed global sales of 1.5 million units. The Golden Joystick Awards granted the game both Console Game of the Year and Ultimate Game of the Year. The Game Developers Choice Awards named it Game of the Year and gave it the Innovation Award. Famitsu's Dengeki Game Awards named Team Asobi the MVC, their award for best game developer or studio. Doucet mentioned in an interview that a PC port remained a possibility, should demand prove sufficient after the game's console run.

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