I cried at the end of Astro Bot. I recognize this isn’t indicative of much beyond my sentimentality, but I thought it was a crucial tidbit to underscore something else, something important about PlayStation’s excellent new platformer. It really is, more than anything else, a celebration of the consoles and games that shaped me, and likely many of you, too. It is so completely possessed with joy and teeming with the life of everything that PlayStation has meant to people over the years. It is also a brilliant platformer in its own right, stuffed full of ideas that make it seem like Asobi Team is just getting started in this utterly endearing franchise. For all its charms and wonders, however, there’s also a slightly melancholy feeling that Astro Bot, which secondarily serves as a kind of museum of PlayStation’s history, is putting that legacy and the spirit of innovation that defined it under glass to be gazed upon and appreciated as a relic of yesterday, rather than to infuse and electrify the games of today and tomorrow. — Moises Taveras
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