Review | Astro Bot - Bot On Melancholy Hill
I have a weird relationship with PlayStation. In fact, I have a weird relationship with video games. I was born in 2000 and didn’t get a PS2 until Christmas 2005. Yet despite this, I am obsessed with the games that came before my time.
The PlayStation Boomerang controller that was shown behind glass at E3 2005.
I spend my evenings Googling the lineage of Xanadu, Faxanadu and the Legends of Heroes games I will never play. I read old-form arguments about Victor Ireland’s questionable localisations of PS1 RPGs. I read pages and pages of wikis and fan sites that haven’t been updated in a decade about Nolan Bushnell, Factor 5, The Boomerang Controller, United Game Artists, Way of the Warrior and the 3DO, the CD-I, Tomobu Itagaki, GameFan’s questionable editorial standards, and Rising Zan - Samurai Gunman. In short; bullshit. Nonsense. The types of references, stories and games that only people who were reporting on these things in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s actually care about in 2024.
But jumping from hyperlink to hyperlink on MobyGames, Wikipedia and the Giant Bomb wikiis my happy place. Video games have such a vast and rich history that I feel like I learn something new every day. Games, right back to the pinball arcade days of the prohibition era have been divided into not just culture and counter-culture but politics, etymology, and life. And yet we so easily forget.
The New York Pinball Prohibition lasted from the early 1940s until 1976.
Source code was rarely archived in the 80s and 90s, and if it was, it is usually locked up in the basement of the IP holder. Developers were credited under fake names to stop other studios poaching them leaving us trying to piece together who actually wrote iconic music. Press conferences were recorded on tapes that rot in damp rooms. Websites with hundreds and thousands of reviews, previews and news stories are taken down before anyone can archive it. Game Informer’s vault of press releases, thousands of games, and more are sitting in an empty office somewhere in Minnesota, doomed to slowly disappear as GameStop closes branches, changes ownership, and eventually liquidates. And for the love of Christ, developers still aren’t backing up their source code!
The Game Informer Vault circa. 2016.
Maybe that is why I spend my nights reading, rushing, and cramming all this information into my brain before these discs decay and websites disappear. All in a vain effort to preserve this medium's history on the most fragile storage system of them all, my brain – the only storage system I can tell myself I have full control over.
Astro Bot is a triumph. It’s a brilliant platformer that feels as good as if not better than any 3D Mario game. The movement abilities might first appear limited in scope but feel extremely tight to control and can be layered upon each other and the many level-specific power-ups to create something that flows beautifully. Its music has been bopping around in my head the last week to the point every now and again while tidying away socks I have whispered “I. AM. ASTRO… BOT!” to myself. It looks and feels like more of a next-generation game than pretty much anything else I have played in the four years since these $500 boxes launched by making use of features that were once touted in PS5 adverts but hardly ever show up in most games. That is without even mentioning the delightful artstyle and meticulously detailed animation. And it is just so joyous.
The women of the Capcom Sound Team who for years went uncredited.
Astro Bot loves games, good games, bad games, Sony games, Capcom games, Konami games, indie games, Activision games, and games that I don’t even recognise. Its expertly designed levels - that run the gamut from walks in a sky garden park to a final challenge I have spent too long trying to beat - are littered with references to these games. But to call them references is a disservice. A prototype of Captain America’s shield showing up in Tony’s workshop in Iron Man 2 is a reference, an easter egg, empty calories of something you recognise are designed to trick you into thinking you have eaten a satisfying meal when in reality, it's just that a corporation has told you it remembers that one IP you like.
Astro Bot is full of odes to the games it brings up. Ideas from other games are folded into Astro’s world for one level and never used again, because the people at Team Asobi want you to know that they know what makes those games so special. Asobi gets to the meat of what makes these games good, bad and memorable. They poke fun at Triple-A games with budgets the size of a small nation's GDP that still force the player through thin corridors to hide loading times and delight at bringing back motion controls the industry has left behind because this weird fucking indie game wouldn’t be the same without it.
IGN’s 360p video of the PS3’s rubber duck demo.
Each one of the 100-odd bots referencing another game is animated with a personality and (usually slapstick) interaction that epitomises them or their game. Astro Bot is a game for people desperately trying to archive old E3 clips of digital rubber ducks in a bathtub at 1080p. I adore Astro Bot.
And yet after 15 or so hours doing damn near everything there is to do in it, I have been left feeling somewhat hollow. Melancholic for times I wasn’t even alive for. There are games mentioned in Astro Bot you cannot play on a modern system. They are stranded on consoles with slowly dying batteries and waiting to be delisted from storefronts you can only purchase things from by using arcane magic. Games that are doomed to never get sequels, not to mind remakes or remasters. All because Sony has decided yet another game cribbing from Overwatch, Tarkov, Genshin, or Fornite that costs 500 million dollars and eight years to make might be the next big thing.
A PS2 clock battery being replaced, pushing back against the never ending march of time and decay.
While Astro Bot celebrates the history we so desperately want to preserve, it does so under the cloud of corporations that could not care less if our history disappears. It is a tragic reminder of the mascots and characters and games and developers and human people that we have lost to time.
Astro Bot is beautiful. I just wish the industry treated our history with the same reverence that it does.
