PlayStation and one of its first-party developers, Team Asobi, confirmed this week during PlayStation’s State of Play event that a new Astro Bot game is coming to the PlayStation 5. It’s simply called Astro Bot and is set to release on PS5 later this year on September 6, 2024. The reveal of this game follows some rumors and speculations that a new Astro Bot game would be announced during the State of Play event. So while it’s a welcome announcement for Team Asobi fans, it’s not a wholly unexpected one.
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For those who’ve been following Team Asobi’s contributions to PlayStation’s first-party games over the past two consoles, it also shouldn’t be surprising at all to see that the developer has stuck with Astro Bot again. The Astro Bot games are quite meta compared to most other first-party games in that they directly incorporate elements from PlayStation itself such as the use and on-screen appearance of things like the DualSense controller for the PS5, so Astro Bot and Team Asobi are about as first-party as it gets.
Most often, these games are meant to showcase hardware that PlayStation has come out with recently. In 2018, Astro Bot: Rescue Mission showed off what the PlayStation VR could do as players followed Astro and his companions on missions through virtual reality. Two years later, we got Astro’s Playroom in 2020 which was free for everyone who had a PlayStation 5 and made for the perfect way to showcase what the DualSense and its haptic feedback and adaptive triggers could do. To that end, this new Astro Bot game from Team Asobi is technically the first that isn’t tied to a specific event or reason for existing, so it’ll be interesting to see then what Team Asobi has done with it.
Prior to this game’s reveal, it was leaked as one of the 14 games that’d be showcased during the State of Play event. Some of those details shared beforehand included hints that the game would take place in a desert setting and that Astro would be accompanied by a robotic fox, though it was said at the time that the game would not offer PlayStation VR 2 support which some might’ve expected after the VR focus on Astro Bot: Rescue Mission.
