While Astro Bot’s success may not have exactly been a surprise, the speed at which the charming old-school-style PlayStation game has attracted enough attention to be already being spoken about as a potential Game of the Year has been a little more eye-catching.

As Astro Bot zips between the 50 planets of the game, trying to locate his lost bot chums gamers have has a sense of what ‘this is what gaming used to be like, and maybe what gaming is supposed to be.’ Astro Bot has brought a little bit of joy back to the hobby.

Now Sony and Team Asobi are promising to release some free downloadable content before the year is out and speedruns and more VIP bots, doubtless long-lost and long-love characters from the PlayStation’s back catalog, will be coming to an Astro Bot installation near you soon.

Astro Bot game director Nicolas Doucet did a video interview with Quest Daily and confirmed free content was on the cards, “It’s going to come this year. It will be smaller. You know it’s not going to be like, you know, a huge, huge amount, but it will be focusing on one of the features that people enjoyed in Astro’s Playroom—that was the speedruns.

“(the) levels were quite short, but it was the fact that you could replay and keep shaving time off with some new VIP bots to rescue, so some characters we didn’t include yet will appear. But yeah, that’s going to come, and that’s going to focus really on kind-of challenging levels. But if we can, we’d like to also insert something a bit toy-feeling, something that could be really like for any player. But we’re not too sure about that one. But the challenging stuff is definitely coming.”

Astrobot currently has an aggregated review score of 94 on Metacritic and a user score of 9.5 making it the second best-reviewed game of the year so far, behind Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree.

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