The 15 deepest cuts in Astro Bot, and where they came from

Astro Bot, launched on PlayStation 5 on Sept. 6, is an excellent platform sport. It additionally serves because the kickoff for Sony’s celebration of 30 years of PlayStation (the unique console debuted in Japan in December 1994). The sport is saturated with PlayStation Easter eggs and fan service.

Specifically, of the 300 collectible bots in the sport, no fewer than 173 come dressed up as characters from the final three a long time of PlayStation video games. However developer Staff Asobi cheekily doesn’t identify them straight, giving each a cluelike codename (“Aristocratic Archaeologist” for Lara Croft, “Raider Dude” for Nathan Drake) and an extra hint-filled description. So shopping the gathering is each a guessing sport and a take a look at of how deep your PlayStation fandom goes.

A number of the bots are immediately recognizable. However some are fairly obscure. Whereas the heroes from third-party publishers are all fairly well-known (Ryu, Ken, Strong Snake), Staff Asobi has achieved a deep dive on Sony’s historical past as a sport writer, unearthing some bizarre and fantastic delights. Through the PlayStation and PlayStation 2 eras in specific, Sony was a deep-pocketed and fearless writer, unafraid of throwing every kind of weird concepts on the wall to see what would stick, significantly in the Japanese market.

Astro Bot’s bot assortment is a stunning tribute to that point, and to Staff Asobi’s former house, Japan Studio — the legendary, progressive Sony studio that was dissolved in 2021. Listed below are among the assortment’s deepest cuts.

(Because of my Polygon colleagues — particularly Nicole Carpenter and Michael McWhertor — for serving to determine a few of these, and to Ryan Gilliam for sharing pictures of his full bot assortment!)

It’s unsurprising that lots of the deepest cuts in Astro Bot hail from the PS1 period, however right here’s a PlayStation 3 sport that’s sadly forgotten simply over a decade on: 2013’s Puppeteer. This little man is Kutaro, a boy turned into a puppet who, in a novel gameplay mechanic, can swap heads, in addition to chop up the surroundings along with his scissors. This Japan Studio sport was inventive, however failed to seek out a lot of an viewers — which, in the higher-stakes world of the PS3 period, was beginning to be an issue for Sony. Its failure was an indication of the start of the top for the studio.

This creepy, angular purple head is known as Polygon Man and, imagine it or not, it briefly served as a advertising and marketing mascot for the unique PlayStation in North America. Supposed to be an edgy spokesperson geared toward teenagers who could be delay by the toylike PlayStation identify, Polygon Man was thought of a mistake by nearly everybody, together with the PlayStation head Ken Kutaragi. It was deserted earlier than the PS1 even launched.

Dark Chronicle, the 2003 PS2 role-playing sport by Stage-5 that was launched as Darkish Cloud 2 in North America, isn’t as obscure as among the different references on this listing, however the best way this bot is called and introduced makes its identification significantly arduous to guess. It’s Darkish Chronicle’s protagonist Maximilian, or Max, and he’s brooding over some toy homes as a result of the sport has a city-building mechanic constructed into it, together with the randomized dungeons it inherits from non secular predecessor Darkish Cloud.

Boku no Natsuyasumi (often translated as My Summer season Trip) is a Japan-only sequence of open-ended, nostalgic life sims about being a child on summer season break in 1975. This bug-catching boy is the protagonist, Boku. Within the first sport, launched on PlayStation in 2000, and its three sequels, there are not any aims as such; apart from each day routines, it’s as much as you to determine how Boku spends his 31 days of free time in the countryside. Natsu-Mon: twentieth Century Summer season Child, a non secular sequel by authentic director Kaz Ayabe, was not too long ago launched on Nintendo Swap and Home windows PC.

One of the uncommon video games ever launched for PS1 — which is de facto saying one thing — is Vib-Ribbon. It’s an ultraminimalist, black-and-white tackle the then-popular rhythm sport style, in which a scratchily animated, line-drawn rabbit known as Vibri skips alongside a single line, navigating summary hazards in time with the chirpy electro music. The twist was that you could possibly insert your individual music CDs into the PlayStation and have the sport generate ranges to match the tunes.

Unhinged minigame compilations have been a factor on the unique PlayStation; anybody bear in mind Bishi Bashi Particular? One of the out-there ones was Incredible Crisis, which follows 4 members of a working-class Japanese household simply attempting to get house for grandma’s birthday in the face of every kind of terrifying and incongruous occasions — financial institution robberies, statues crashing into workplaces, teddy bear kaiju, the works — with out busting their stress meters. This man is the dad, Taneo.

This ax-wielding sheep is Lammy, the heroine of Um Jammer Lammy, a rocking spinoff of the better-known rap rhythm sport PaRappa the Rapper (additionally featured in Astro Bot). Though it doesn’t fairly have PaRappa’s lyrical allure, Um Jammer Lammy goes extremely arduous musically, conceptually, and in its frantic gameplay.

This elfin adventurer is Alundra, star of an eponymous 1998 sport for the PS1. Developed by Matrix Software program and printed in Japan by Sony itself, it was an try to offer the PlayStation a Legend of Zelda-style fantasy journey, with the fascinating gimmick that Alundra may enter the desires of the native townsfolk. However its old-school 2D gameplay was comprehensively overshadowed by Zelda’s transfer into 3D with Ocarina of Time that very same yr, and it’s now largely forgotten.

This blockhead is a reference to Intelligent Qube, a 1997 Sony-published PS1 puzzle sport in which a tiny man runs round on platforms attempting to not get crushed by monolithic metallic cubes. There’s one thing eerie and oppressive concerning the frail little man scampering about inside this hostile, monochromatic void, on the mercy of the essential polygonal slabs, that would solely have been invented through the wild early days of 3D gaming.

This dude is Arc, hero of the tactical RPG Arc the Lad, a Japan-only launch on PS1 in 1995. The sport was well-liked sufficient to spawn a number of sequels nicely into the PS2 period, in addition to manga and anime. However the first three video games weren’t printed in the West, which roughly doomed it to obscurity on these shores.

Earlier than Sony permitted him to outline racing video games for a era along with his ultrarealist motorsport magnum opus Gran Turismo, Kazunori Yamauchi was requested to earn his stripes by knocking out a Mario Kart clone at Japan Studio. That sport was 1994’s Motor Toon Grand Prix (a Japan-only launch, though a sequel did come out in the U.S.). Clearly, Yamauchi completely overengineered it, constructing advanced dealing with physics with absolutely simulated suspensions for the cartoon karts.

You’d be forgiven for being stumped by this unusual glowing canine character, regardless that it hails from a really current launch. It’s the participant character of Humanity, a puzzle-platformer/artwork piece from 2023 in which your celestial hound guides huge throngs of individuals by means of treacherous, summary ranges (that are considerably harking back to Clever Qube, really).

This cute lil’ Pomeranian is, in truth, the quilt star of a very savage PS3-era indie sport developed by Crispy’s! and incubated by Japan Studio: Tokyo Jungle. The 2012 sport is concerning the survival of the fittest in a ruined Tokyo with no human inhabitants — simply animals consuming one another, fucking, and evolving. The Pomeranian is one in every of two starter animal decisions (the opposite is a deer; surviving as an herbivore is even tougher).

Every now and then, you come throughout a sport that requires no extra rationalization than its title, and one instance is the 2002 PS2 launch Mister Mosquito, in which you… play as a mosquito. You reside in a home with a household of life-sized people and have to suck their blood to outlive. That’s it. That’s the sport.

That is Robbit, the robotic rabbit protagonist of the extraordinarily early PlayStation launch Jumping Flash!, a 1995 launch sport for the console in Europe and North America. Leaping Flash! was a daring, head-spinning try to do platforming in 3D utilizing a first-person perspective. Tremendous Mario 64 would consign this strategy to historical past a yr later, however the sport was nonetheless an actual trailblazer.