On September 6, Team Asobi is set to launch its long-awaited mainline platforming gameAstro Bot, featuring the adorable titular character.
While previously receiving a ton of love from the Astro Bot Rescue Mission PSVR game and later with the packed-in PlayStation 5 title Astro’s Playroom, Astro Bot has quickly risen in the echelon of PlayStation characters. For good reason too.
Astro’s Playroomlaunched alongside the PlayStation 5 and was actually shipped with each console for free. The game served not only as an impressive tech demo, showcasing the console’s performance and DualSense capabilities. The game was also this big celebration of PlayStation and its characters. This continues and serves as the thesis forAstro Bot.
Team Asobi’s upcoming game is getting bigger and more ambitious. It’s a fully realized version of what Astro’s Playroomwas. InAstro Botplayers will explore six galaxies with over 80 levels. Throughout the adventure, players will reunite with familiar faces from across the PlayStation universe. Keeping in line with Astro’s Playroom,expect to see nods and easter eggs for marquee PlayStation IP as well as notable partners. Trailers have already shown off many including God of War’s Kratos and Aloy fromHorizon.
iPhone in Canadaspoke with Team Asobi’s Creative Director Nicolas Doucet. While remaining hesitant to call Astro a PlayStation mascot, Doucet explained how the celebration of PlayStation was something the team has learned to embrace. “It’s also a little bit of a geek dream,” Doucet says. “I collect a lot of games, and consoles and stuff like that. And there’s an element of bringing the whole family together is something kind of nostalgic, really sweet.”
While much of the game is used to highlight and showcase the legacy of PlayStation, Team Asobi didn’t want that to be the defining factor ofAstro Bot.Instead, the team used its love and respect for the IP and hardware in complementary ways.
“When we started this game the whole question came up, “Should we do it again?” Doucet recounts. There was a part of us thinking if we do it again, it’s almost like admitting that Astro cannot stand on his own feet. So the first thing we have to do is to forget about the PlayStation heritage. We need to design it as if it was Astro and Astro alone. So we designed the powerups and designed the worlds and the bosses and all the levels. Once we were happy that we were true to ourselves in terms of a new series—a new franchise—that had its legs at that point, we could afford to bring back this Playstation coating and put it on top.”
With the prospect of making Astro Bot stand on its own, Team Asobi has created original worlds, powerups, and a swath of new enemy types players will experience. InAstro Bot,players will come face to face with over 70 new enemies with a few familiar faces mixed in as well, calling all the way back to Rescue Mission.
“When it comes to the enemy [design], there’s two aspects to it. One of them goes back to the gameplay. We have the DualSeense. For example, you have the Spring Gloves. And those allow you to swing, but they also allow you to kind of get stuck and kind of pull things. That will inform the kind of enemies we have. So we’ll do an enemy [which has] sticky parts and if you punch and stick those parts, you can start pulling them out. So it’s very often our design methodology goes back to the DualSense. The DualSense informs what sort of gameplay we do. The gameplay that informs what sort of like associated interactions we need, including enemies, props, gimmicks or even some wildlife or side characters.”
Astro’s Playroom was a surprise because of its scope and the genuine fun that could be extracted from it. With so many nods and mechanics built in, there was bound to be something that ended up on the cutting room floor. Thankfully, Team Asobi was able to approachAstro Botand retool some of its ideas.
“There is a set of interactions—the PS5 Mothership has crashed, and you have to fix it. Part of the interactions about fixing it up were things that we had prototyped literally five years ago. And it felt pretty good with the DualSense. But we couldn’t find a way to fit those into Astro’s Playroom, because they were very thematically specific. So, they were always on the back burner. This time around, we actually decided that repairing the mothership came from the desire to want to use these interactions. It tells a story about how we design games. We go off and prototype stuff. Then once we look at the interactions we have, look at what’s fun, then we decide what game to make. The story for us always comes second. The gameplay from the DualSense, these kinds of interactions. That’s kind of [our] design philosophy.”
Players won’t have to wait very long to see where Astro Bot’s latest adventure takes them. The game launches exclusively on PlayStation 5 on September 6th.
[This interview was edited for clarity and length]
