it's been awhile since i've experienced a piece of art capable of conveying the sublime heartache of finding that specific reason to keep on living, and one made in ren'py no less. sometimes all you need in a work is bespoke illustrations, prose that portrays the messiness of existence without any pretense, and a distinctly queer and neurodivergent perspective that's achingly familiar, all in a concise thematic package that doesn't waste anytime moralizing or patronizing the reader by textually assuring them that everything will be okay. not everything is something

After completing Astro Bot’s final, most difficult challenge after a couple of honest attempts, a friend of mine had to remind me that, “[I] already practiced it 14 year’s [sic] ago.” Being a modern 3D platformer, there are worse things to be called than “Super Mario Galaxy 3”, and Astro Bot certainly lives up to the legacies that it’s so clearly enamored by, but it does leave me a little perplexed that its reception is this overwhelmingly positive. Don’t get me wrong, Team ASOBI shows off an enormous degree of game design talent over the game’s duration, Astro Bot’s quality is no fluke. But for how special I want to sit here and claim it is, I find it so lacking in its own aesthetic and creative identity that completing the game had me feeling a bit hollow. Which feels weird, considering how much joy I experienced while playing it and how much I want to go back and keep playing it after I’ve already 100%’d it!

On the face of it, there’s nothing fundamentally “wrong” with being a little identity-agnostic, with franchises like Super Mario having relied heavily on repurposed aesthetics, ideas, and iconography for decades now, but Astro Bot’s pseudo-Super Smash Bros. approach consistently made me question if I was enjoying a particular moment for what it was or simply due to it shotgun blasting me in the face with an obscure, forgotten IP as the the game’s own form of Super Mario 64 power stars and the occasional special level themed around a series within the “PlayStation brand”. Sometimes this question would end up being answered for me as I’d be hit with an entire-level themed around one of Sony’s more modern franchises; my interest slowly waning as I play out facile vignettes of the type of game that makes me mentally groan every time I see one of them being advertised in a PlayStation Showcases.

It’s difficult to say if that’s a step above or below the deification of Sony hardware and peripherals that encapsulated most of the visual language of Astro’s Playroom, but it at least gives the game freedom to be varied with the aesthetics of its individual, non-Sony-ified levels (and it helps that two of the special levels based on Sony properties are actually really fun references that add genuinely fun wrinkles to the gameplay). And even if I’ve been backhandedly referring to the individually themed Astro Bots as Sony Funko Pops for a while now – which is a bit of an exaggeration on my part – I’ll definitely say there’s some clear passion going into the references from Team ASOBI themselves. You can tell that at the end of the day, even if there’s clearly something very slightly sinister bubbling under the surface of Astro Bot’s occasionally cynical but mostly corny adoration of PlayStation as a family of intellectual properties, these are people who genuinely love video games. On the other hand, having an Astro Bot of Elliot Page’s character from Beyond: Two Souls is pretty fucking heinous! Tone deaf as fuck. I fucking hate that David Cage is still allowed to develop games in this industry and still getting acknowledgements from Sony themselves. Also I’m just really sick of seeing these tiny little freaks, especially when they’re dressed as characters that I actually like, doing little Fortnite dances when I beat a level!!! I don’t need to be seeing that.

The titular Astro Bot itself is a charming enough design, not quite as offensive as the Rabbid or the Minion, but it’s difficult for me to see it as anything but a forced mascot at times; that is to say, Astro Bot ends up feeling like less of its own thing and more of an extension of the PlayStation branding, even if its origins are a lot more complex than that. You could argue Nintendo does the same thing, and I’d agree! Something about seeing the PlayStation logo on the in-game collectables fills my heart with the same harrowing disappointment that I feel when I think about how stifled creatively stifled Nintendo’s games have become during the Wii U and Switch era. It feels a little awkward to gas the game up too much when it’s aesthetically mired by the same constipation of expression in the name of corporate branding that the games it’s inspired by are afflicted with themselves.

But who’s to let the fact that the intersection of art and commerce is a four-way intersection where the lights are always red in one of the intersecting streets completely deprive them of joy? Astro Bot is such a wonderful little toy to just waste time with. Its bouncy and addictive soundtrack, the candy-coated color schemes and captivating landscapes that rest along the skylines of the game’s levels full of genuinely charming details, the immaculate sound design that consistently made my cat think that our house was under fucking attack (like Playroom, hands down the best utilization of the DualSense’s built-in speakers), and the relentlessly eclectic gameplay defined by level design and pacing that genuinely might surpass most other games in the 3D platformer genre; this is the most fun I’ve had with a 3D platformer since playing the original Super Mario Galaxy as a teenager.

I’d consider myself a connoisseur of sorts when it comes to 3D platformers, particularly of the collectathon variety, and we really do have something special here. I’d put it up there with the likes of Banjo-Kazooie, Super Mario 64, Jumping Flash! and Spyro the Dragon (specifically games that I personally think are cool as fuck) if not for the fact that it’s difficult to find anything distinctly “Astro Botian” to sink my teeth into aesthetically, outside of the mechanical fauna. Maybe that’ll come to me with time, but I really wish there was something else it leaned into outside of the Super Smash Bros-core power stars and its fetishistic adulation of PlayStation as a brand. I think I’d be able to stomach it better if it had been reserved for specifically IPs that Japan Studio had worked on? I don’t know, it’s cute that they let you dress up the robot like Kat from Gravity Rush, though I kinda wish they left the Team ICO references to non-Astro Bot-ified things. I’d like some things to be sacred. Though maybe getting jumpscared by THIS (made it a link to preserve the surprise for the kindred souls who also don’t want to be spoiled on the funniest reference in the game) makes all the corporate ass-patting worth it somehow…

The gameplay itself is uh, I hesitate to say it’s plagiarism, not that I’d really care that somebody was stealing ideas from Nintendo in the first place, but it’s very heavily inspired by EAD/EPD Tokyo’s work on the Super Mario franchise to say the least! This shit’s got 3.5 out of the 4 nozzles from Super Mario Sunshine in it (though Playroom did already have one of them from what I remember), as well as multiple modifications of Super Mario Galaxy/Super Mario Galaxy 2 power ups. Enemy archetypes were also heavily influenced by said games, but in every single case of Team ASOBI copping a game mechanic from EAD/EPD, they really only improved upon it? It helps that Astro Bot isn’t weighed down by decades of mechanical tradition and unnecessary vestigial elements like the Super Mario series often is; each level and mechanic really gets its own space to breathe and leave an impact within the player’s mind when you play things a bit looser like this. Astro Bot is on some Lies of P shit, in the best way possible.

I can’t say any of the boss designs left much of an impression on me though, particularly the main antagonist, who feels like a scrapped villain from an early cut of the Jimmy Neutron movie or something. Not even a dig against the character designers, it just feels like a very bizarre choice for a main antagonist. The boss fights themselves are all pretty fun though! They do stick pretty religiously to the “three hits and they die” rule, but the individual steps to actually get to those three hits vary wildly, which allows for some really creative and hectic boss design. Really, some of the best in the genre, even I can admit that. Also love how many surprise midbosses there are throughout the game, and I love that said midbosses DON’T give you extra health points like the main bosses do.

I feel that particular aspect of Astro Bot is gonna turn some people off, but the fact it’s so easy to jump right back into the action when you do die makes the one hit point thing really work for me. A huge issue in a lot of these types of games is everything is already excessively low in stakes while also giving you a fluffy health bar, and it sucks a lot of the grit out of the moment-to-moment gameplay. Making Astro Bot “fragile” while maintaining a low stakes fail state just works somehow! I love getting offed by a random pig or whatever! It encourages you to engage with environmental hazards in an honest way while also not overly punishing less skilled players. It’s smart, I like it! Also helps that Astro Bot has so many different fucked up death animations, another thing ASOBI consistently oneups Nintendo EPD with (love when Astro Bot’s “flesh” gets melted off by acid and all that remains is its skeleton or when it gets disintegrated into nothing by a little bit of lava, very charming stuff going on here).

I just wish there were more for me personally to grab onto with this game outside of its pretty fucking excellent gameplay. Maybe I’ll come to love it more with time? Particularly if my hunch that Sony is gonna market the hell out of these little shits over the next few years ends up not being correct somehow. I hope Sony themselves takes a cue from Nintendo and stays subtle with Astro Bot’s branding in the future, but it’s difficult to say with them after their weird ass MCU-esque push of the broader PlayStation brand in the late 10s/early 20s. I’d also love to see Team ASOBI tackle a completely new IP, they’ve def got the chops to make something truly special if given the chance. I guess it’d also be okay if they made a new Ape Escape instead, they clearly got what it takes to make a new entry that’d be unique enough to justify its own existence. Please no fucking remakes though, publishers need to stop doing that “we need to remake the old ones before we can greenlight the new one” thing if they’re actually gonna bother reviving older games, and the Ape Escape series really doesn’t need remakes in the first place. Anyways, Astro Bot fun, capitalism is corroding all of our minds, and everyone who enjoys this game needs to apologize to Super Mario Sunshine RIGHT fucking now.