After playing just 15 minutes of the adorable and smartly designed Astro Bot on PlayStation 5 as part of a Sony preview event earlier in July, I thought to myself, “Why aren’t there more PlayStation games like this?”
My initial reaction to Astro Bot is meant as a compliment to developer Team Asobi, the Tokyo-based team behind the similarly great Astro Bot: Rescue Mission and Astro’s Playroom, which Astro Bot builds upon.
Like Astro’s previous games, I played as the glossy white-and-blue robot who can jump, punch, and shoot beams from his feet, which act like jet propulsors. Across the various planets I visit, I acquire power-ups that grant Astro different abilities, letting him float through the air, throw extended punches, or burst through walls. Astro’s abilities aren’t complicated, but the smartly designed levels in Astro’s games are full of blind spots that hide secrets and pathways leading to collectible tchotchkes.
I wound up spending 45 minutes with the new Astro Bot game, scratching the itch that comes from knowing there were hidden goodies and cleverly tucked-away robots I needed to rescue. I walked away delighted by what Team Asobi had made: a blue sky game with bright yellow suns that felt like playing with a shiny new toy. Almost everything I interacted with — giant inflatable duckies, pink-leafed trees, a robot stingray — reacted to my touch in pleasing ways. I unzipped a big zipper on an octopus balloon, finding glowing treasure inside that let Astro turn into an inflated balloon himself. I jumped on that swimming stingray bot and my character did a little surfing pose. I thwacked a giant octopus boss with a pair of spring-loaded boxing gloves. Classic video game stuff that I’m looking forward to playing more of when the game arrives in September.
Astro Bot also immediately felt familiar. Controlling Astro in his new game seems nearly identical to the Astro’s Playroom that shipped with the PS5. Like that launch freebie, Astro Bot showcases what the DualSense controller can do, rumbling softly or strongly depending on the action happening on screen, and providing believable force feedback on the controller’s triggers when firing a weapon or throwing a punch. When Astro’s flying in a DualSense-shaped spaceship, tilting the controller left and right rolls the ship in those directions. Every action and piece of associated feedback feels finely crafted.
Nicolas Doucet, head Team Asobi, recently told Game File that his studio “really want[s] to treat the game as a toy as well as a game.” That philosophy comes through in so many moments of Astro Bot — the game encourages you to experiment, to touch, and to turn around to see if you’ve missed anything on your journey.
Those same feelings are evident in another Sony Interactive Entertainment-published game coming later this year: Lego Horizon Adventures from Guerrilla Games and Studio Gobo. Their kid-friendly, Lego-fied version of the Teen-rated Horizon Zero Dawn features the same stakes and characters of that post-post-apocalyptic game, but wraps it in The Lego Movie humor.
Like Astro Bot, Lego Horizon Adventures is gorgeous, but in different ways. It presents the futuristic wilderness of the Horizon games as made entirely of Lego bricks, and with incredible detail. When characters like the heroine Aloy and her ally Erend pop up on screen, reimagined as Lego minifigs, you can see light scuffs on their paintjobs and the seams that bisect their molded plastic bodies. Yet they’re full of expressive emotion, and the absurdity of seeing the people of Aloy’s warrior tribe as tiny Lego people amplifies the game’s humor. Lego Horizon Adventures is quite funny, as characters make jokes about their weird Lego hands and break the fourth wall to reflect on the strangeness of their predicament.
Because of that style of humor, Lego Horizon Adventures may ultimately be my preferred way to experience the story of Horizon Zero Dawn — a hilarious, keenly rendered version of a deeply serious tale (that’s, uh, also about robot dinosaurs).
I initially played my demo of Lego Horizon Adventures solo, learning its simple-but-tight controls, collecting items, and building Lego structures on journey through an early level. I fought Lego versions of mechanical wildlife with a variety of tactics: firing arrows through campfires to unleash flaming shots and tossing exploding barrels at my foes. Everything moves at a brisk pace, with simplified platforming and traversal.
For the second half of my demo, I played local, same-screen co-op with a rep from Sony. That experience highlighted that Lego Horizon Adventures may be best played with a partner, a child, or a parent, where two people can team up and explore a broader array of combat tactics — or one player can help shepherd the other through anything that’s slightly difficult.
Replaying the events of Horizon Zero Dawn might feel moot to veterans of the franchise, but revisiting the story with a new angle (and with a co-op partner) might be reason enough to do so. But for me, the humor of Lego Horizon Adventures was the best reason. With much of the original voice cast reprising their roles, now allowed to get extremely silly with it, Lego Horizon Adventures seems like it won’t be a retread, but instead a refreshing, lighthearted way to experience its story.
Astro Bot is coming to PS5 exclusively on Sept. 9. Lego Horizon Adventures will be available to a much broader audience, though, as it’s bound for Nintendo Switch, PS5, and Windows PC sometime later this year.