In the music industry, a band often uses a self-titled album years into its career to denote a reinvention. “This is who we are now” is the intended and unspoken message. PlayStation’s Astro Bot uses the same naming convention to signal a similarly fresh start. Following a 2018 VR exclusive with obviously limited reach and a 2020 game that Team Asobi’s studio head and creative director Nicolas Doucet considers a “tech demo,” 2024’s simply titled Astro Bot feels like it’s ready to launch the cutesy robot to the top of the crowded PlayStation pantheon.
“Astro’s Playroom is actually called [that] so it wouldn’t be mistaken for an Astro Bot-sized game,” Doucet told me following a demo in which I beat several levels, rescued many PlayStation characters reimagined as robots, and beat a boss in the form of a boxing cephalopod. “A lot of people actually don’t know the Astro universe outside of Astro’s Playroom, so starting [here] with the name Astro Bot made a lot of sense as a new beginning.”
Doucet said that the VR game’s success convinced the team to revisit the Astro Bot world with the PS5 pack-in that followed it, and they thought if a wider audience was still falling in love with the mascot and their world at that point, then they could go biggest of all with something else. Astro Bot is that something else.
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