Key Takeaways
- I am a cynic and a grinch, who hates joy and loves to suffer. I was never going to play Astro Bot, because it didn’t seem like the kind of game that would make me suffer.
- And then I did play it, and it was good. I had a little giggle while playing it. I kicked some leaves around. I bullied some apes.
- I’m not going to say that it fixed me, but it proved that I can still enjoy nice, wholesome games about robots and their robot friends.
I had no plans to play Astro Bot. I never actually checked out Astro’s Playroom, despite it being a pack-in on my PS5, so I didn’t get Astro-pilled along with the rest of the world back in 2020. While every member of TheGamer team was celebrating the return of PlayStation’s mascot, I was unbothered, flourishing, and in my lane. I already have a hefty backlog of games released this year alone – why add another to it?
But I had a day off, Dragon Age: The Veilguard wasn’t releasing for another 12 hours, and I was looking for something to play while my pre-order downloaded. Animal Well had briefly captured my attention, but I needed something that required less precise platforming since I wasn’t in the mood to scream at my TV after falling from the same platform for the twentieth time. Enter Astro Bot.
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I don’t typically gravitate towards wholesome, kid-friendly games. That’s certainly not because I think I’m too good for them, or that they’re childish for being cheerier and chiller, or even because I don’t think they’re ‘serious games’. I’m just a masochist.
I love story-driven, narratively complex games that wrestle with contentious subject matter and are usually depressing and violent. It’s a character flaw, I know. I just really love when games are mildly to moderately upsetting. Astro Bot isn’t about to make me cry, so I ignored it.
While everybody I follow on social media has been swearing up and down that Astro Bot is a real GOTY contender, and its critical reception has been astonishing, I’ve been somewhat put off by how it seems like a playable marketing campaign for games you can no longer play and franchises that are essentially dead and buried.
What’s more, I never played platformers as a kid, so I have no nostalgia for the genre, and I didn’t have a PlayStation till I was in my late teens, so I don’t have a ton of familiarity with most of the franchises you see brought up. I don’t know jack about Jak & Daxter, and Ape Escape is just a bunch of weird monkeys to me.
But still, I have FOMO, and I had the time, so I booted it up. My partner, who was sitting next to me, said, “Honestly, Tess, you might be too dour a [redacted] to enjoy this wholesome, plotless, mascot platformer.” I would’ve been mad at him for saying so, if I hadn’t already been thinking the exact same thing.
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Thankfully, he was wrong. It turns out that I am, in fact, not too dour a [redacted] to enjoy the wholesome platformer.
Despite being, person with a sceptical spirit and a chronic inability to just enjoy things for what they are (I’m a grinch, if that tells you anything about me), Astro Bot got me. It got me good. It’s a very competent platformer. It has real challenge. The forward momentum through each level is propulsive, and there’s loads of replayability in how many secrets it has to uncover. There are also so many different mechanics and biomes available to you that going back to 100 percent a level never feels that tedious. The use of the controller is great, and most games on the platform never take full advantage of its capabilities the way Astro Bot does.
But that’s not why it got me. What happened was simply that it made me giggle with real glee. In a world where everything feels like it’s burning down all the time, it’s nice to play a game where you can just feel good. It’s wholesome in the realest sense of the world – it’s pure. It’s innocent. It’s good fun. Bad things are happening outside in the real world, but in Astro Bot, I’m just a little mascot kicking around piles of leaves, yanking pigs’ tails, catching monkeys, and reuniting my robot friends with each other. Sometimes, that’s enough.
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