When the little robot Astro made his PlayStation 5 debut in Astro’s Playroom, his singular mission was to introduce the new technology of the PS5. Now, developer Team Asobi is working to grow him beyond his role as a hardware hype man…while still using his adventures as a vehicle to experiment with PS5 tech four years into the hardware’s life span.
Speaking to Team Asobi studio head Nicolas Doucet at Summer Game Fest, he told me that it’s important for Astro to “find its own fate” beyond being a hardware ambassador (as he’s been for both the PS5 and PSVR). One way the team is doing that is by letting Astro’s adventures in Astro Bot focus far more heavily on his platforming than in Playroom. He describes Playroom as something more like a lot of tech demos stitched together by platforming sections; by comparison, Astro Bot will offer power-ups for Astro that compliment the platforming first and foremost. In my preview, I got to use an inflator to give Astro more height, a booster that gave him more distance, and a punching upgrade that let him fight with range. It was all upgrades to things Astro could already do, as opposed to when Playroom turned Astro into a climbing monkey for the sake of showing off motion controls and adaptive triggers.
But that doesn’t mean Team Asobi is done playing around with PS5 tech. Quite the opposite, in fact. Doucet points out that while the studio uses the touchpad less in Astro Bot (it doesn’t fit as neatly with the idea of a platforming game), they tried to include small moments of tech play. For instance, Astro enters each level by zooming in atop a DualSense controller, which the player can steer using motion controls. “We treat the game as a toy fundamentally.”
Doucet also points to a moment in the reveal trailer for Astro Bot, where the little guy absorbs a bunch of water to become giant, stomps around for a bit, then gets wrung out like a giant sponge. He tells me this was “actually a prototype that was done 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 have something feeling heavy, and then over time, feels lighter.
“That felt really good as a demo, but it was just one big sponge on screen. That was it. So we brought that into [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've been probably impossible. If somebody came with a thing on paper without that prototype having proven it and said, ‘I've got an idea. Let's turn Astro into a sponge.’ Probably we would think it's a bit weird. Let's not do it. Maybe we'll try it, maybe we won't. But because that demo was there, which is kind of like a household demo. You're a sponge. It could have been a cleaning game, right? But in the end, we liked that demo, so we brought it in.”
Doucet also tells me about a feature for Astro Bot that underwent a similar process, where you can “run your hand on the wall” and feel changes in texture to see where a secret passage is. “It'll be like in Uncharted or Indiana Jones.”
“That was one of the things that came out from us trying to push DualSense to a new level,” he continues. “It's always like that. Through the life cycle of a system towards the end, you still see stuff that wasn't possible at the beginning.”
Beyond being a fun platformer and a tech showcase, Doucet tells me he hopes that Astro Bot can be a “first game” for kids new to video games. He clarifies that Astro Bot isn’t intended as just a “kids’ game,” but neither is it just a “gamer’s game.” It’s both.
“It's a responsibility to be potentially the first game that some kids are going to be playing,” he says. “And that was the case for Astro's Playroom. We got a lot of stories where people said it was their kid’s first game, and they played together and explained to them the characters...I'm sure as a gamer, you have memories. There are games that shape your life, right? And if we get to be the first one that some kids are going to be playing, that matters a lot. That means something really important for that family and for that little individual. So we have to be proud and embrace it.”
You can catch up on the rest of our interview with Doucet from Summer Game Fest right here, as well as our full hands-on preview of Astro Bot.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
