While it’s beautiful to see people celebrating online, it is a shame when a moment of joy, such as a less well-renowned title like Astro Bot winning Game of the Year, is tarnished by a negative swell. Combine this with the fact that extreme views increase the number of likes a post gets, and therefore how much it’s seen, and what you’re left with is an environment that’s set up to prioritize strong opinions. An interesting study reported by Scientific American showed that one of the elements that drives online polarization are influencers. As the piece explains, in network science, an influencer is someone who is connected to lots of other people.

Get ready for some helium-filled hijinks as you take off, ride upward gusts of wind, and race to the goal to rescue your captured crewmates. Astro Bot[a] is a 2024 platform game developed by Team Asobi and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment for the PlayStation 5 in celebration of PlayStation’s 30th anniversary. A follow-up to Astro’s Playroom (2020), it is the fifth game in the Astro Bot series and Team Asobi’s first game since its separation from Japan Studio. Innovation in audio and physics make for an all-around good gaming experience.

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Astro Bot may be the best-timed video game release there’s ever been. It’s not intentional, but just days after Sony humiliated itself with the closure of Concord, along comes a PlayStation 5 exclusive dedicated to celebrating the 30 year history of PlayStation. Not only that but it’s a single-player action game with no microtransactions or season passes, or any of the other increasingly invasive hallmarks of modern console gaming. Astro Bot is filled to the brim with Easter Eggs, but there are also some secrets to find and special unlockables to earn for finding bots and puzzle pieces. Here’s what you can earn by collecting Astro Bot’s many collectibles, and the many, many easter eggs to look out for. There was already a lot to love about Astro Bot before, with it being one of the best PS5 games of the year, but Team Asobi didn’t stop there.

It’s not just movement though, as the creak of Aloy’s bow and arrow, while aiming in the Horizon level, is insanely satisfying and much better than in the actual game it’s based on. Bafflingly though, none of the characters are ever named – not the first party Sony ones or the third party ones. Instead, Ratchet, for example, is referred to merely as Tooled-Up Mechanic and Jill Valentine simply as Alpha Female. There’s also a character called Pro Skater, which we assume is Tony Hawk, but perhaps it’s one of Sony’s forgotten extreme sports games – it’s impossible to tell.

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As players take control of Astro, they’ll work to repair the ship and rescue their crewmates. Each galaxy you arrive in houses several secrets to uncover in the overworld, and even levels themselves have hidden bonus stages. This game’s secrets have secrets, with more hidden levels being revealed at a steady clip whenever you inch closer to polishing off each galaxy’s to-do list. There are 300 in total, though you only need 200 to face the final boss, and over half of them are dressed up as iconic characters from video game history. The new game, simply called Astro Bot and developed (like the others) by Team Asobi, kicks off when a group of robots’ PS5 mothership is attacked, scattering the robots throughout the galaxy.

For what it is, though, Astro Bot is incredible, and that is worth celebrating here and now. I just can’t help walking away from the experience with a bittersweet taste in my mouth and a hope that someday soon, we don’t have to look to gaming’s past for the best bits of it all. This review of Astro Bot was facilitated with a code provided by the game’s publisher. As of now, Sony does not have a PlayStation 6 on the horizon, nor does it seem to have any other major new hardware coming soon. Because of that, Astro does not have anything new that he can try to repair across multiple galaxies.

Astro Bot is a glimpse of what Sony wants you to understand that it believes that it is. It has the boundless cheer of a group of people coming together and trying to be their best selves. All in all, Astro Bot is definitely one of 2024’s best games, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it were considered to be the year’s best. If there were anything to criticize about the game, it may just be the game’s difficulty and its exclusivity. While the former may be alleviated with its already announced free DLC challenge levels and speedrun mode, the latter may be something that might not be addressed.

If I have one complaint about the game it is that the record keeping system that keeps track of the bots collected, does not break down who the special bots are and the game(s) they are from. Making your way through one star system after another, you might find your progress blocked unless you scour every level for the robots lost within them. There are 300 to find overall, with many of them depicting classic videogame characters. In that regard, Astro Bot can be seen as a celebration of not only Sony’s hardware and impressive catalogue of software over the years, but also video games in general. It’s fun putting them to work when revisiting the crash site, too, calling upon them to help lift heavy objects and create structures like human bridges to help you continue your adventure and rescue yet more robots. I can’t recall the last time I had so much fun jumping on platforms.

At its core, Astro Bot is built on the technical foundation of Astro’s Playroom. Using its own in-house technology, the design objective seems clear – to deliver a smooth platforming experience at 60 frames per second while dazzling the player with physics and pyrotechnic effects at every corner. From a technical perspective, the execution is virtually flawless.

The controller features a white and blue trim that perfectly matches the Dual Speeder in-game, as well as a smiling set of eyes on the touchpad. 789win seemed to have an answer to Nintendo’s Mario or Sega’s Sonic the Hedgehog. Crash Bandicoot was an iconic character that was exclusive to the PlayStation at the time, but he belonged to a third-party studio. And while Toro from the Doko Demo Issho series reached mascot-like status in Japan, the cute feline character was hardly known outside of PlayStation’s home country.