VGC’s Game of the Year 2024 is Astro Bot
Team Asobi’s celebration of PlayStation’s 30th anniversary is the best birthday present we could have wished for
Even without its many (excellent) video game cameos and PlayStation references, Astro Bot would still be our favourite game of the year.
The quality of Team Asobi‘s endlessly charming platformer means that even were it not for the decades of love for Sony‘s console poured into every crack, the game would still be an endlessly creative marvel. Platforming is so enjoyable and well-executed that it can hold its own against some of the most unimpeachable plumber-lead games in gaming’s canon.
The confidence that exudes from Team Asobi is something that few other developers could possibly replicate. So many great mechanics in Astro Bot could have been the basis of entire games, but this PlayStation development team wasn’t interested in settling for that.
Some mechanics, like the ability to shrink down to the size of a mouse, were only used twice across the whole game. There isn’t a single mechanic that we were sick of by the time it was taken away from us, we simply weren’t given the time to get fatigued.
As exciting as seeing who the next cameo character was, the real joy of Astro Bot was dropping into a new level and seeing what new power awaited you. Sure, some of them return from previous games, but every single interaction feels evolutionary rather than copying and pasting from previous games.
This extends to the enemies and locations. Some designs and themes reappear from Astro Bot: Rescue Mission and Astro’s Playroom, but the context in which they are used makes them feel fresh. This speaks to Team Asobi’s priorities. Why waste time on things virtually nobody will notice when more time should be spent on mechanics? The fewer than 70 members of Team Asobi’s talents are better spent elsewhere.
Hand-in-hand with the engrossing, everchanging gameplay is the game’s stellar soundtrack. Kenny CM Young has worked on charming PlayStation platformers for more than a decade, but he came to the attention of many younger players with the release of Astro’s Playroom. The GPU song, which was essentially a love song dedicated to the PS5‘s graphics hardware, was an unshakeable earworm.
Astro Bot’s soundtrack is full of similarly joyous and irreverent tracks, as well as some classic tranquil platforming music. It’s impossible to come away from a session with Astro Bot without humming one of Young’s themes or repeating “I am As – Tro – Bot” in a robotic voice.
Further reading
‘We fill a gap for PlayStation Studios’ – Behind the scenes at Astro Bot’s Team Asobi
Team Asobi understands PlayStation and it understands PlayStation fans. It would have been so easy for Astro Bot to be a graveyard of licenses that Sony hasn’t touched in decades. And while there are plenty of characters featured that are long overdue for a run in the first team, the game never feels like they’re haphazardly thrown in; it feels like it comes from a place of celebration.
The hyper-obscure references to Cool Boarders, Um Jammer Lamy, Siren, and more feel like a team of developers sitting around a table and talking about the games that were important to them outside of the PlayStation staples and making sure they got their day in the sun.
Honourable Mentions
While it just fell short of our Game of the Year, Balatro is certainly the game we’ve played most in 2024. An ingenious poker-based roguelike, the joy of Balatro is in its infectious mechanics, which will turn a 10-hour flight into what feels like minutes.
Rarely do games come around that you know you’ll install on every platform you own for the rest of your life, but Balatro is one of them. If you’ve yet to pick it up, treat yourself over the festive period, but we warned: you might suddenly find yourself back at work in January with no memory of the last two weeks.
Indiana Jones and The Great Circle
If licensed games live or die on the strength of capturing the “feel” of the license, then Indiana Jones and The Great Circle is one of the very best ever. Beyond that, MachineGames has taken the point-and-click sensibilities of Indy’s classic PC adventures and constructed them with the highly-detailed levels of an immersive sim.
Pair that with a generationally good performance from Troy Baker, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle shines as one of the year’s best. As much as we’d love MachineGames to return to its other Nazi-killing opus, there are plenty of adventures of Indy left unaccounted for, and we’d be first in line to play them.
Beyond those cameos, Team Asobi flexes its muscles with five tribute levels that range from pleasingly faithful recreations of the original game to reminders of the left-field projects that defined Sony’s earlier days. It’s one thing making a faithful version of Ape Escape, but to create a version of God of War: Ragnarok, complete with a functional Leviathan Axe, is something else entirely. It is so blindingly obvious how much Team Asobi cared about the franchises it was referencing.
Astro Bot is so good as a platformer that we’d love Team Asobi to build on top of it for years, adding more and more levels. The recently added speedrun levels have been a great catalyst to turn your friendships into rivalries, but we’d also love more of the game’s tougher challenges. While the game references over 150 PlayStation heroes, there are plenty that could still be added, meaning the scope for further cameos feels virtually endless. That’s not even mentioning the conspicuous absence of Square Enix (outside of Gex).
Further reading
Review: Astro Bot is the best 3D platformer in a decade
As PlayStation turns 30, Astro Bot is a nostalgic, sometimes emotional look back at the games, the developers, and the characters that made it. While Nintendo will always have the 10-year headstart on its gaming history, PlayStation has put in a hell of a lot of work to build a legacy that can sit alongside it. The players who had to choose between the PlayStation or the N64 for their 10th birthday are now 40 and watching their kids make the same decision.
And while the PlayStation today isn’t the same one that took the world by storm in the 90s with its off-the-wall marketing and endless iconic mascots, Astro Bot serves as that bridge from PlayStation’s past into its future.
While it’s inarguable that Sony has faltered in preserving some of the franchises it has lost interest in along the way, Team Asobi has picked up the slack. The spirit of the PlayStation that had millions of young fans staring up at their TVs in the 90s is alive in Astro Bot. May he lead the charge for the next 30 years of play.
