Players will have a “renewed experience” every 10 minutes

Astro Bot Rescue Mission, the PSVR exclusive outing, was a full-length adventure – but the upcoming Astro Bot on PS5 will kick things up a notch. Speaking exclusively with Entertainment Weekly, studio head Nicolas Doucet revealed that his team wanted to make a “big game” – in fact, its biggest game to date.

“This is really about going up one notch – really several notches – and having Astro’s big story,” he said. “We call it Astro Bot because we treat this as a new beginning. That’s a really, really big game. I think for us, that’s the biggest game we’ve ever made.”

Team ASOBI obviously hasn’t made many games, but with its 80 levels and six worlds, it’s clear this is going to be a much larger experience than Astro’s Playroom, the excellent DualSense tech demo pre-installed on every PS5 console. Despite that, Doucet insisted it won’t run out of ideas: “We really wanted to make sure that the player has a renewed experience every 10 minutes or so.”

The story revolves around the eponymous pint-sized android’s DualSense space ship breaking up into little pieces, which get scattered around the universe. Naturally, you’ll need to retrieve all of the components, and you’ll meet up with many famous faces from PlayStation and pop culture along the way, including the likes of PaRappa the Rapper and Nathan Drake.

Despite this, Doucet promised that Astro will be able to stand on his own two metallic feet. “The core effort has gone into making Astro’s own game so that he can stand as a new PlayStation character with a good reputation and confidence, but also on top of that, there is this whole coating of nostalgia.”