"Astro Bot" by Team Asobi
All video games are made to be played, but few are made to be playful.
This summer my wife took N, our five-year-old, to Martha’s Vineyard on a day trip. There was no particular agenda until they found an arcade, at which point the agenda was to waste as much money as possible while trying to win something from six different claw machines. As should be evident by now, I was not in attendance.
Ninety minutes and a still-undisclosed amount of money later, they won a singular prize: a very squishy, very strange-looking creature made of foam. Part giraffe, part Pikachu, the creature has no purpose. It is not cuddly like a stuffed animal. It does not articulate its limbs like an action figure. It is simply a large -- and have I mentioned very expensive? -- piece of nothing. Yet despite being worthless, it instantly became one of N’s (many) heirlooms.
N has always been a sucker for claw machines; the flashing lights, the illusion of skill, the possibility for unique reward -- how could she not be drawn to them? It’s partly that these demon machines are just casinos for kids. But it’s also that they pair play with discovery. When I asked N what’s so great about a claw machine, she said, “Because they give you a toy and they give you a challenge.”
You could say the same about “Astro Bot,” the newish video game from Team Asobi. It is, at first glance, a Mario knockoff. You run around, you bonk some enemies, you laugh at the physical comedy of a character plummeting to its doom. Tried and true stuff.
But N has glommed to “Astro Bot” in a different way than she has with other cute games I’ve showed her. We’ve spent the last month playing a bit each night before bed. She can recite the levels we still have to play by heart, and runs over to her mom to tell stories about our adventures. (You’ve never seen a blanker stare than when a five-year-old tells a disinterested mother, “And then Astro Bot had to drag its hand across magical blocks and when we felt the vibration we pushed a block in and behind the wall was a bot stuck in a spider web and there were three bad guys around it and we punched the bad guys and rescued the bot and it was from a video game Dada played when he was a kid!”)
I’d spent weeks wondering why this game had resonated so deeply with N, and what the thesis of the inevitable Writ Small dedicated to it should be. But then I asked N about claw machines and it all clicked. “Astro Bot” has a bunch of challenges, and then it gives you a bunch of toys. Simple, really.
Don’t worry, this is not going to be a review of a video game, in part because plenty of other people have done that for “Astro Bot” already. The game is good; if you like games you (and the kids in your life) would enjoy playing the game. Instead, I want to focus on N’s favorite part of the game, the little hub world at the center of the game’s map, and why it fills her with such joy and delight.
When you first arrive at the hub world, it’s a desolate circle filled with sand, a spaceship that needs repair, and a few islands you can’t reach yet. In order to unlock its secrets you need to play the rest of the game, rescuing little bot characters and puzzle pieces from other levels. To do so requires you to overcome various challenges, and after you finish you get your toys. N and I have made that cycle our nightly routine. I do the hard parts -- the platforming, the punching, and the navigating -- and she runs around the home planet reaping the rewards.
First, the planet transforms into a dollhouse where all of your collected bots go about their lives. N loves to see which bots are grouped together, how they react when you go up to them, and where the new bots live. I‘ve left her alone with the controller a bunch of times only to quickly be called back. “Dada, look at this guy, he breaks into a million pieces/is chased by a dinosaur/made a band with all his other monkey friends!”
Of course, there are toys for your toys. Dollhouses are no fun without accessories. And what better way to get useless nicknacks than via a claw machine? Or, in this case, a gacha machine. Put in 100 coins and get your prize -- basically a claw machine you can’t lose.
N demands we visit this thing every night before we turn the game off. I hand over the controller and she yanks the handle of the gacha machine to see what ball -- each filled with a special prize -- rolls out. We’ve gotten a golf club for the golfer bot, a magical paint brush for the graffiti artist bot, and more swords than I can count. Each time, N goes to visit the new accessories’ owners to see what tricks they can do now.
As you keep playing, the planet becomes a playground filled with facsimiles of all the things kids like to play with in the real world:
It becomes a jungle gym: You can amass your collected bots into bridges, ropes, and ladders to reach new areas.
It becomes a dress-up drawer: The gacha machine spits out outfits to wear, too, and over the past month N has spent at least an hour deciding whether to dress as a pirate a shiny metal man, or a random video game character from the 90’s she has never heard of. (Astro Bot looks surprisingly good as PaRappa the Rapper.)
It becomes a garage: The gacha machine also has paint buckets for the little spaceship you ride, and N has spent another hour deciding whether an ombre of purple and blue is superior to tangerine orange. (It is.)
It becomes a zoo: Players can unlock a little room full of all the cute robot animals they come across in the game, along with a photo mode. By now, you can surmise how much time N has spent with all these critters.
Each of these unlocks has been irresistible to N, who engages with them as zealously as she would a new toy someone gave to her.
Patrick Klepek, a journalist who writes the Crossplay Substack about kids and video games, writes a lot about how to make games actually accessible for kids. It’s tempting to think that all it takes is some cute characters, some simple controls, and a lack of difficulty. But the developers Klepek talks to say that doesn’t go far enough. To truly build a game for kids you have to understand and empathize with the way they play in real life. When N plays a video game, she mostly wants to explore, jump around, and play dress-up. When N has a playdate with a friend, she mostly wants to explore, jump around, and play dress-up. The sooner the grown-ups -- whether they be developers or parents -- get out of the way, the better.
You can sink tons of money into trying to find a game that actually stirs kids’ imagination, but it’s a challenge. Sometimes, though, you’re lucky and you get “Astro Bot.” What a toy.
I asked Nora for her review of “Astro Bot” and this is what I got: “I like how the bad guys are sort of funny. Heeeeeee! Like we get in their vacuum. Hehe. There are lots of things you could solve, like puzzles or something. I like to sometimes play with the ball machine. You just get lots of prizes and you sort of get to play.”
This essay started as a meditation on the diverse array of ball pits in “Astro Bot” -- acorns, jewels, apples, freeze-dried ice cream, and more -- but I couldn’t find a way to stand it up. But here’s a fun fact: Ball pits are a decidedly modern invention -- they date back to the early ‘70s, according to my basic research. Deploy that knowledge as you see fit.
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