Masahiro Sakurai praises Astro Bot for short and satisfying gameplay 

Super Smash Bros. and Kirby creator Masahiro Sakurai recently took to X to praise Sony and Team Asobi’s Astro Bot. It seems that Astro Bot’s design appeals to Sakurai’s own oft-repeated ethos about delivering a satisfying experience that doesn’t waste a second of players’ time.  

The sequel to Astro’s Playroom, Astro Bot is the latest colorful and cute platformer featuring Sony’s robot mascot- in which you explore worlds, fight bosses and save your fellow crew bots.   

Attached to Sakurai’s Astro Bot tweet is the latest episode of “Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games”. In the episode (English version here), Sakurai advises game creators to be mindful of players’ time. Although packing a ton of content and gameplay into games has become a selling point these days, Sakurai points out that having a game that takes hundreds of hours to beat can actually put players off buying.  

In Sakurai’s view, game developers should treat player time as a cost and give them control of the game as much as possible. This also ties in with Sakurai’s previous video in which he strongly suggests that games should always let the player skip cutscenes. 

It seems Sakurai’s ideas on making games accessible and valuing players’ time were also aspects that Astro Bot’s developers paid attention to. In an interview with Video Games Chronicle, Astro Bot’s creative director Nicolas Doucet explained that the game was designed to be “accessible, friendly and cute, and can be put in front of anybody and delight them.” This is one of the reasons they opted for a level-based system instead of an open world. Even though each Galaxy is progressively harder, the main levels are designed to be accessible and easily completable. The difficult stuff for hardcore players who want to spend more time on the game is reserved for the optional levels. 

Astro Bot is available now on PS5.