Astro Bot

December 20, 2024

I'm pretty surprised at all the love Astro Bot has received.

I enjoyed my time with it, but at no point was thinking: Game of the Year. Since I put it down I've had no urge to return to it. They've rolled out some updates that have been pretty easy for me to ignore. I'm not looking for reasons to engage with it further. My partner played it too and she also just thought it was fine?

I beat it back in October and remember almost nothing about it? the level where you get small was maybe the standout for me? I don't find the hyper glossy robotic/space design to be particularly interesting or memorable.

This is all very weird for me because I'm typically not some sort of platformer hater, anti-Sony, or anything like that. I just feel like I'm missing something that truly spoke to everyone else. Maybe it is because I was such a champion for Astro's Playroom, and this was just a less tight version of that? Playroom felt like it harkened back to an era where Playstation used to be a more innovative and risk-taking, the end game stuff making heavy reference to their PS1 t-rex demo really encapsulated that. this one just feels polished down to the point where it lost what was interesting about it, and it feels far more commercial when my appetite for something like that is at an all time low.

Even outside of just comparing it to the other Astro entries, I feel like astro's movement is somewhat joyless compared to other platformers. He moves really slow, there is no momentum or friction to him at all. Compare this to like the Mario cap movement from Odyssey, the long jump from 64, or even the heavy momentum based stuff from Penny's Big Breakaway this year. it really feels like a modern Yoshi game to me moreso than the often compared Mario Galaxy. I'd take the movement of all sorts of other games over this; Psychonauts, Spyro, Jak and Daxter, etc, etc. I also hear people talk about how it's filled with i've never seen that before moments, and I don't know that I felt that once? Maybe the fact its all packed into one game is an achievement of some sort.

I just wish it clicked with me more. I hear people describing it as being the epitome of gameplay, or like fun in a can, and it just wasn't that for me? It's sort of a bummer that I wasn't invited to the party.