Early in development Super Mario 64 — the game that catapulted Mario into 3D and wrote the rules for character movement in 3D video game worlds — Shigeru Miyamoto and his team at Nintendo focused heavily on how the character felt to play. Before they began level design, they had Mario running around on an empty playing field, and they tirelessly reworked and refined the controls and movement until Mario was inherently fun to control even in nothingness. Only then did they begin to think about what he would actually do: what challenges he would face, what worlds he would inhabit, and what kind of adventures he would have.

In a way, Team Asobi — Sony’s preferred tech demo developer and developer of Astro’s Playroom and the upcoming Astro Bot — has been doing this kind of preparatory work for 12 years. From 2012 to 2020, the Tokyo-based company developed small, often free games whose purpose was to demonstrate the interactive potential of Sony’s hardware. The playroom the PlayStation camera was demonstrated; The Playroom VR And Astro Bot Rescue Mission the PlayStation VR headset; Astro’s Playroom the PS5’s DualSense controller. The team had a knack for creating fun and satisfying interactions with the devices, and they populated their games with cute little robots that developed more personality with each installment.

Now the Asobi team has the chance to develop all its gaming skills on Astro Bota full-fledged game that exists on its own merits and not a Sony marketing plan. And it’s just as good as you’d imagine.

This does not mean that Astro Bot — a lavishly produced classic platformer starring Asobi’s robot mascot — shirks its promotional duties or severing the connection between its irrepressible protagonist and the hardware he lives on. The game is saturated with PlayStation branding and fan service almost to the point of excess.

Astro and his army of bot friends travel the cosmos aboard their ship, which is shaped like a giant PlayStation 5. After an attack by a giant alien, the PS5 ship breaks apart, scattering bots and components across neighboring galaxies and crashing on a desert planet (in a scene that seems to quote the beginning of). Uncharted3). Astro must hop from planet to planet aboard his dual speeder spaceship in the form of a controller, rescuing bots and searching for the PS5’s key components: SSD, memory, CPU, etc.

Many of the bots – 173, to be exact – are dressed as characters from PlayStation games past and present. They’re digital collectibles, Funko Pop alternatives for 30 years of PlayStation gaming, celebrating just about every Sony brand you can think of. Of course, you’ll find Ratchet and Clank, Kratos and Nathan Drake here; third-party PlayStation-related heroes like Snake from Metal Gear Solid and Ryu and Ken from Street Fighter are also represented. Whether for licensing reasons or just to make a fun guessing game, the bots have coy names like Dad of Boy (Kratos), Spinning Marsupial (Crash Bandicoot) and Immune Survivor (The Last of Us‘ Ellie). There are some deep cuts that will leave all but the most seasoned PlayStation fans scratching their heads, gradually filling in the desert crash site and turning this central world into a bustling Sony museum.

This attack with nostalgia bait and brand synergies is initially somewhat less charming outside the context of a free supplement than Astro’s Playroom. Shouldn’t Astro and Team Asobi be allowed to create their own identity? But that’s exactly what they do, turning that marketing flavor into something heartfelt, handcrafted and celebratory.

This is in part due to the forcefulness of many of the picks. Team Asobi is the last remaining bastion of Japan Studio, the historically creative Sony studio responsible for: Ico, LocoRoco, Gravity Rush, PaRappa the Rapperand many, many more unusual classics. Japan Studio was unfortunately dissolved in 2021 and many of its employees were integrated into Team Asobi to Astro Bot. His wild characters and artistic, innovative games are especially popular in Astro Bot‘s directory of PlayStation history.

Nowhere is this homage more touching and joyful than in the case of Ape Escape. This series from the Japanese studio about a boy who catches evil monkeys in his net is one of many failed attempts by Sony to create a family game franchise to compete with Nintendo’s, and like most of them, it didn’t really stick. Astro Bot is very much its legacy, even down to the hardware connection – the first Ape Escape was intended as a showcase for the original DualShock analog controller. After defeating the final boss of the first galaxy in Astro BotA level is unlocked that completely and faithfully recreates the anarchic chase game of Ape Escape. Astro Bot‘s world. It’s a wonderful touch; on the one hand, a nearly forgotten series is given new life in a modern context, and Team Asobi is honoring the memory of the tirelessly inventive studio that was once its home.

But Astro Bot is not just an homage. There are more levels like that of Ape Escape, where Astro completely absorbs the personality and toolkit of another PlayStation hero and rampages through a level based on that character’s own games. I won’t give them away, but they all achieve a surprisingly deep synthesis of their inspiration (often a more mature style game) with Astro Bots tangible world, lovable characters, and exciting gameplay. It’s a sign of how confident the game is that its personality shines through so clearly through the costumes it wears.

This confidence is based in part on a certain, rare kind of purism. Astro Bot is an excellent, traditional linear platformer that never claims to be anything else, nor suffers any genre infamy. You run, jump, punch enemies, dodge hazards, pick up coins, hunt for collectibles. Each level is a carefully crafted obstacle course full of surprises, often ending with a novel, comical boss. Like most platformers, it offers the player little room for error and quickly becomes quite difficult, but lives are infinite and checkpoints aplenty. (Kids will love it so much they’ll persevere; mine certainly does.) It’s exquisite in its simplicity, even as this sturdy old structure is enlivened by some wonderfully inventive, transformative power-ups: rocket backpacks, spring-loaded boxing gloves, and gadgets that shrink Astro into a tiny mouse robot or inflate him into a giant, waddling sponge.

These wonderful devices are designed with a gift for tactility—for creating a toy-like world that you can touch, click, pop, squash, smash, crack, and press—that’s matched only by Nintendo. In part, this is down to Team Asobi’s enthusiastic use of the DualSense’s rumble, haptic triggers, and speakers. (Many of the game sounds come from the controller, which makes a huge difference to how immediate the action feels, while the TV speakers blare with the impeccably upbeat bops of the film’s brilliant score.) Some of the tactility is conveyed by the vibrant animation. Some is created by Team Asobi’s astonishing, virtuoso mastery of the PlayStation 5 itself; Astro Bot is a technical marvel, perhaps the best-looking PlayStation 5 game yet. The shine of the surfaces, the sloshing of the liquids, the size of the levels and the smooth frame rate are breathtaking. The physics, as Astro rolls hundreds of shiny apples or wades through a pool of gold nuggets, are just show-offs.

Thematically, Team Asobi enjoys the freedom of a traditional platform game: it doesn’t have to stick to a theme at all. Astro BotThe levels are a restless parade of “what if (space) but robots?”, with the gaps filled in by turtle temples, wacky trees, construction sites, or the inside of a giant worm. In the Spooky Time level, Astro stops time to navigate a haunted house. In Free Big Brother, Astro frees a Iron Giant-sized bot and climbs up its limbs. Everything is made of the same smooth, machined plastic and metal as a PlayStation device, even the rabbits, trees, and penguins; just like in the Mushroom Kingdom, everything has eyes, but in this world they’re blinking blue LEDs. The robot theme adds a sweet logic to the rampant anthropomorphization, bloodless violence, and surreal non sequiturs of platform games. It’s like an automaton universe, a jumbled simulacrum of random concepts (and PlayStation games) put together by a mad machine civilization.

Sony was striving for something like Astro Bot since PlayStation launched 30 years ago in the age of Mario and Sonic. Looking for a casual family game that could compete with Nintendo’s best while still fitting in with Sony’s cool, tech-centric brand, it tried out mascots like Crash, Jak and Sackboy. Sony ultimately settled on edgier, more cinematic action heroes, but deep in the console’s soul, it felt like something was missing. AstroBot — a dazzling, entertaining game – is a celebration of all the failed attempts and puzzling detours Sony has taken in that quest. And it might just be the game that finally fills that gap.

Astro Bot will be released on September 6th for PlayStation 5. The game was tested with a download code provided by Sony before release. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These have no influence on editorial content, but Vox Media may receive commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find Further information on Polygon’s ethics policy can be found here.