Dacvak
No one shall be brought before our LORD David Bowie without the true and secret knowledge of the Photoshop. For in that time, so shall He appear.
It’s the combination of things that really does it for me. Movement and character gameplay is definitely a big part of that. If Astro Bot is similar to Playroom, I understand it won’t have the same kind of diversity and freedom something like Odyssey has, but it’s still very tight and exploitable.
I also love the level of polish and detail in Mario games, and there’s no question that Astro Bot hits it out of the park there.
I’m also a big fan of bespoke stage and character gimmicks, and frankly from what I’ve seen, I feel like Astro Bot is going to surpass most Mario games in that area.
And finally one of the biggest and most difficult things to get right is creative and challenging level design. This is really where a lot of 3D platformers fall down. Mario games have such a great way of subtly giving you most of the information you need to know how to tackle a challenge at an instant glance, while still feeling satisfying to conquer. And the best type of level design is the kind that allows you to tackle it a variety of different ways, giving the player the choice of how difficult they want things to be.
For some of its pacing flaws, Odyssey is absolutely remarkable at doing this. Just watch any part of an Odyssey speedrun to realize that the skill ceiling is insanely high. The skips and exploits are a product of the tightly intertwined controls and level design.
Anyway, I could go on all day talking about why I love Mario games so much, but it really just boils down to expertly crafted gameplay all around. In any case, based off of Playroom and everything I’ve seen so far with Astro Bot, Asobi understands so much of this design language. And yet it’s still a unique flavor of gameplay compared to Mario. That’s super exciting to me, since I generally only get like one good 3D platformer every 5-7 years.
LETS GO!
