When the little robot Astro made his PlayStation 5 debut in Astro’s Playroom, his sole mission was to introduce the PS5’s new technology. Now, developer Team Asobi is working to grow him beyond his role as hardware hype man… while still using his adventures as a vehicle to experiment with PS5 technology four years into the hardware’s lifespan.
Speaking to Team Asobi studio head Nicolas Doucet at Summer Game Fest, he told me that it’s important for Astro to “find his own destiny” in addition to being a hardware ambassador (as he has been for both the PS5 as the PSVR). One way the team is doing this is by making Astro’s adventures in Astro Bot focus much more heavily on its platforming than in Playroom. He describes Playroom as something more like a bunch of tech demos stitched together by platform sections; In comparison, Astro Bot will offer power-ups for Astro that primarily complement the platforming action. In my preview I had to use an inflator to give Astro more height, a booster that gave him more distance, and a punch upgrade that allowed him to fight with range. They were all upgrades of things Astro could already do, unlike when Playroom turned Astro into a climbing monkey to show off motion controls and adaptive triggers.
But that doesn’t mean Team Asobi is done playing with PS5 technology. On the contrary. Doucet points out that while the studio uses the touchpad less in Astro Bot (it doesn’t fit the idea of a platformer very well), they tried to include small moments of technical play. Astro, for example, enters each level by zooming in on top of a DualSense controller, which the player can control with motion controls. “We view the game fundamentally as a toy.”
Doucet also points out a moment in the Astro Bot reveal trailer where the little guy absorbs a bunch of water to become gigantic, stomps around for a while, and then gets wrung out like a giant sponge. He tells me that this “was actually a prototype that was made separately.”
“It was like a sponge and you could squeeze water out of it with an adaptive trigger because you can change the pressure of the trigger. So we want to see if you can make something feel heavy and then feel lighter over time.
“That felt really good as a demo, but it was just one big sponge on the screen. That was it. So we included that [Astro Bot] and said, ‘What can we do with it?’ And then we thought maybe we could do a power-up. The other way around would probably have been impossible. If someone came up with something on paper without the prototype having proven it, and said, “I have an idea. Let’s turn Astro into a sponge.’ We would probably find it a bit strange. Let’s not do it. Maybe we try, maybe we don’t. But because that demo was there, which is kind of a housekeeping demo. You are a sponge. It could have been a cleaning game, right? But in the end we liked the demo, so we included it.”
Doucet also tells me about a feature for Astro Bot that underwent a similar process, where you can “run your hand over the wall” and feel changes in the texture to see where a secret passage is. “It will be like Uncharted or Indiana Jones.”
“That was one of the things that came up when we were trying to take DualSense to a new level,” he continues. “It’s always like that. Throughout the life cycle of a system toward the end, you still see things that weren’t possible in the beginning.”
In addition to being a fun platformer and tech showcase, Doucet says he hopes Astro Bot can be a “first game” for kids new to video games. He makes it clear that Astro Bot isn’t just meant to be a ‘child’s game’, but it’s not just a ‘gamer’s game’ either. It’s both.
“It’s a responsibility to potentially be the first game that some kids are going to play,” he says. “And that was the case for Astro’s Playroom. We’ve heard many stories where people said this was their child’s first game, and they played together and explained the characters… I’m sure as a gamer you have memories. There are games that shape your life, right? And if we’re the first that some kids start playing, that makes a big difference. That means something very important for that family and for that little individual. So we should be proud of it and embrace it.”
You can check out the rest of our interview with Doucet from Summer Game Fest here, as well as our full hands-on preview of Astro Bot.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Do you have a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.