As we grabbed an Astro blue mocktail and ventured down into Sony's basement dwelling at Summer Game Fest Play Days, Astro Bot came into view, and we immediately knew we were in for a good time. Team Asobi's cutesy robot hero is finally getting the full-length, full-fat platforming game he deserves, and even just the artwork adorning the walls is enough to put a smile on the face of any jet-lagged journalist. Going into the game, we knew it'd be a delight, but even just a handful of levels is enough to know this is shaping up to be a standout game in PS5's library.
As soon as we picked up the DualSense controller and saw the demo's title screen, the playfulness of Astro games is there. We guide Astro's on-screen DualSpeeder with 1:1 motion, and the haptics are just as fantastic as in Astro's Playroom . However, creative director Nicolas Doucet tells us the team has taken things a step further in realising the potential of the DualSense's features.
"We spend a lot of time prototyping game mechanics in an isolated form, and then later we think about how we can stitch them together in a way that makes sense. We had three or four people break away from the team, and we nicknamed that team DualSense 2.0," he tells us.
"We did lots of demos [and] technical tests," he continues; one new feature born from this is the sponge power-up, as the team wanted to see if they could capture the sensation of squeezing out a sponge with the adaptive trigger. Perhaps even more intriguingly, Astro .
