“A must-play for anyone who loves creative platformers. The worlds are beautifully crafted.” Here are the games released during 2025 that have won major industry awards or received nominations for those awards. We’ll update our awards tracker whenever new awards and nominations are announced. Astro Bot[a] is a series[1] of augmented reality and platform games developed by Team Asobi, originally a group within Japan Studio, and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment. The series is a spin-off of The Playroom series, and began with the 2013 launch title for the PlayStation 4, and its later entries have won numerous awards. Members of Team ASOBI discuss what it takes to make a platformer feel good.
For more gameplay details, read everything we know about Astro Bot’s gameplay and story. Sony intentionally disabled CD support on both the PS4 and PS5, so inserting a standard CD into the console simply doesn’t work out of the box. One of the only PS5 games that really feels like it was built around the DualSense. This focus also affected the platformer’s story, as the game has fewer than 13 minutes of cutscenes.
Later on, you’ll also unlock the Dual Speeder Garage, where you can personnalise Astro’s controller plane, and the Changing Room to switch up Astro’s look to outfits collected in the Gacha Lab. The levels in Astro Bot feature a staggering amount of interactive elements from jump pads, blocks, and platforms through to what appear to be decorative objects like plants, trees, and even animals. You’ll want to try and hit, nudge, press, and jump on absolutely everything.
Astro Bot Announcement Trailer
@2huwman Some people are just like that, they can still enjoy the game but some might be completionists who want to get everything in the quickest time they can due to having many other games to play as well. Winter Wonder is a DLC level that unlocks after clearing the main game. It’s a special, festive-themed level full of Special Bots and other goodies to find.
Since all PS5 consoles come with “Astro’s Playroom” for free, it’s more than likely that “Astro Bot” will become a big hit for Sony. This is because every console owner has played the previous installment and are likely to want more from the character. I expected it to be a pretty fun little cartoon romp where the main draw would be pointing at the screen and going “Look! It’s Nathan Drake!”. What I got was one of the greatest platformers I have ever played, in terms of creativity, consistency, and cleverness, that just so happens to have a bunch of PlayStation mascots inside it.
Crash – Crash Bandicoot
Four of the bots at the Crash Site will only appear once players have rescued them in Astro’s Playroom. The Great Master Challenge can only be accessed once players have found every Puzzle Piece in the game and rescued 300 Bots. Astro Bot’s win for Best Family Game is probably the least surprising of the bunch. Put simply, just about anyone can appreciate Astro Bot’s strengths, not just seasoned gamers or astute, wizened audiences. If you replay levels, you can buy a satellite at the start for coins that marks the collectible locations. However, you need 15,000 coins to buy 150 gatcha items for the Money Well Spent trophy, so it’s best to not spend coins on the satellites.
The developers at Team Asobi didn’t reinvent the platforming wheel here, but like any good platformer, it’s the unique ways the powers are used that make them special. Instead of water, that F.L.U.D.D. power-up sucks up a green goo it then spits out to create platforms of grass. I giggled like a toddler using it to defeat a special enemy by literally sucking its green, goopy brains out. Pulling together tips and tricks for a game that is so welcoming to all types of players feels a bit odd. But, because Astro is a silent protagonist and a lot is inferred rather than explained outright, some of the game’s elements left to the player to decipher may not be all that obvious to all.
The most alluring feature, though, is its PlayStation-themed collectibles. https://tg8899.net/ would be a charming Easter egg hunt, but Team Asobi isn’t just investing in empty references. But that’s not the only way Astro Bot celebrates history, as that idea is also directly tied to the game’s collectibles. In every level, there are a number of bots to rescue and puzzle pieces to find.
As you explore galaxies to find your fellow robots and unlock new parts of the game, you’ll find a lot of familiar elements, only to see them executed in quirky and delightful ways. Just about every platformer has an ability that lets you shoot across longer distances, but none of them let you do it by strapping a bulldog to your back. Many of the bots — 173 of them, to be precise — are dressed as characters from PlayStation games past and present. They’re digital collectible figures, Funko Pop alternatives for 30 years of PlayStation gaming, celebrating almost every Sony property you can think of. Naturally, you’ll find Ratchet and Clank, Kratos, and Nathan Drake here; third-party heroes with a PlayStation connection, like Metal Gear Solid’s Snake and Ryu and Ken from Street Fighter, are also represented.