Contagious happiness asterisked by an air of “hey, wait a minute” brought about through no fault of its own. Two experiences cause this feeling: realising that yeah, the best game on this thing really is the tech demo that comes with it, along with subsequent gladness that it only cost your brother £20 thanks to a raffle ticket inside a Doritos bag; and ogling the who’s who of Easter eggs after loading into your first level only to notice soon after that just one of the developers represented by them in that particular spot hasn’t been unceremoniously shuttered.

Despite how frequently it comes across as gaming’s cheeriest graveyard, the charm of Astro’s Playroom is such that it features real life peripherals as its main collectible and somehow manages to not feel cultlike. Astro himself’s a big factor in this, embodying so many of the best characteristics of this brand’s would-be mascots of the past; a simple enough silhouette that anyone could quickly scribble down a recognisable drawing of him, lack of dialogue forcing him to rely on universally understandable expressions instead, vibrant yet malleable visuals which let him be twisted into a representation of any IP you can shake a stick at, easily able to slide up the cute and/or cool scales as and when required. Regardless of his probability of joining them in the dumpster someday, he really pulls his weight in terms of likeability and as a distilment of the game’s meticulousness. Contextual idle animations like him waving at the camera or holding his hand out in the rain may just be presentational, but they still contribute a fair amount to making him feel alive and giving him a personality distinct from the otherwise pretty samey array of photorealistic humans he shares SIE’s narrow potential-marketing-icon umbrella with, plus this kind of attention to detail’s extended to interactable objects in more substantive ways anyhow (like fully functioning diving boards in the background of one stage or beach balls you can do keepy-uppies with).

It’s a little unfortunate that he’s more interesting to gawk at or think about than to control, even if his double jump doubling up as an attack sees some inspired use, though the levels are smartly small enough that his limited moveset never becomes unengaging and is made up for by the segments where the controller’s gimmicks get to shine. The motion-controlled ball areas test your manipulation of momentum in a way that standard gameplay’s unable to, the climbing parts transform it into a miniature GIRP sequel, and a combo of gyro aiming plus the use of adaptive triggers make the shooting sections more tactile than this console’s actual flagship shooters, but my favourite ones are the frog bits. The long and short of one of my hypothetical game daydreams is a 3D platformer in which you play as a frog who has to do everything by jumping rhythmically, and I probably should’ve guessed before now that the closest thing currently in existence to that’s in something made by a subdivision of my favourite developer. Why wouldn’t it be? That’s why they were my favourite. Some studios create games so specific to your tastes it’s like they were made just for you, while others are so specific it’s as if they telepathically scan your brain for anything you think is cool and decide to make a game out of it.

Less fully on my wavelength is how it functions as a celebration of these systems’ history. This aspect’s still more good than bad, right enough. Part of why I mentioned that Astro’s Playroom manages to avoid feeling cultish is specifically because I wouldn’t trust any current SIE executives to be able to tell me what PAIN or Super Rub ‘a’ Dub are, nevermind greenlight giving them arguably more headspace than much bigger IPs by partially basing two levels’ mechanics off of them. Cool deep cuts notwithstanding, though, I’m taken out of it a bit by the haphazard distribution of Easter eggs. Kat, I love you, but what’re you doing in the PS2 level? I recognise her, but given that she’s a lesser known in the grand scheme of things and has no connection to the era she’s been placed in, I wouldn’t blame somebody if they didn’t. I even had this experience with a game I myself am actually familiar with, in part because of this sort of thematic mismatch and because what I assume’s recency bias (whether their own or imposed on them) led the devs to scrape the bottom of the barrel in places – it took me a 10 second long, confused, squinty stare to realise that The Order 1886 was being referenced at one point.

Apart from potentially hampering its own ability to give some of these games much needed exposure, it made me question whether it’s right for all of these lads to be on a level playing field representationally. Obviously, a company’s not going to encourage an interactive showcase to give some of its own IPs preferential treatment over others, but isn’t it a little weird to put your man on equal footing with a contributor to dual analog sticks becoming an industry standard, a platformer which piqued Shigeru Miyamoto’s interest in addition to driving the brand’s popularity in what used to be its home market or something which dwarfed the rest of its genre in popularity to the point that “God of War clone” was a pretty widespread term for a good two console generations? Granted, their most successful period up to this point needed some representatives and one of Astro’s cousins taking the form of a third party cash shop likely wasn’t on the table. “Cultural impact” is really just a straw you grasp onto when you need to rationalise that a transparent success you don’t like has actually secretly failed, so I’ll concede that what I think of when I think of Kratos having more songs written about him and crossovers under his belt might not compare to his most recent entries’ combined ~34 million units (albeit buoyed by discounts, bundles and giveaways).

Ultimately, I’m inclined to consider Astro’s Playroom a small miracle regardless of any of this because it’s so wildly out of the wheelhouse of what I’ve come to associate these consoles with and a refreshing reminder of why I was ever interested in them in the first place. If you wanted to get obnoxiously airy fairy, you could probably make some kind of point about how the bright colours of the ∆◯X☐ symbols regularly flying around aren’t even on the controller anymore, but its friction against the overall direction of its parent company only strengthens its case and makes the prospect of a more fleshed out iteration of it more exciting. If not fully in terms of people, Asobi at least seems to carry on a bit of Japan Studio's spirit.