This references SCE London Studio’s PlayStation Home, a Second Life-style experience launched in 2008 and closed in 2015. The game let you explore themed spaces and allow you to purchase items to display in your virtual home. In the final shaded section of the level with the long wooden bridge, look down on the left-hand wall to see a Bot on a bike escaping a swarm of Bots. The Bots chasing the bike refer to the huge swarms of zombies featured in the game.

The final Astro’s Playroom update for all four special bots is out now, and the DLC can be carried over to Astro Bot when it launches on Friday, September 6, for the PS5. The special bots are from Bloodborne, Returnal, Gran Turismo, and Ape Escape. At its most basic, Astro’s Playroom is a fairly straightforward platforming game. You play as a cute little robot named Astro, exploring four different worlds set in a universe that appears to exist inside of a computer. You’ll collect coins, stomp on enemies, and poke around in search of secrets. There are TD88 com and one-off sequences, like one where you have to pilot a small spaceship through dangerous caverns, or another where you use a bow to pick off faraway enemies.

The main boss for this level is the Demo 1 Dinosaur, more commonly known as the Demo 1 T. This fellow was in the Dinosaur Tech demo to show the power of the PlayStation at rendering a single character. The T. Rex makes many other appearances in Astro’s Playroom, including the Dreams reference in Renderforest and some of the screens in the PlayStation Labo area. Yet another unlockable display for the Labo area is a Bot throwing a blue boomerang around. The shape is a reference to the infamous “Boomerang” prototype controller, an unofficial name for the controller that was shown alongside the PlayStation 3 when it debuted. The controller would be dropped in favour of the more familiar DualShock design.

Was This Guide Helpful?

If you want curated lists of our favorite media, check out What to Play and What to Watch. I can’t say I had very high expectations for Astro’s Playroom, a game that comes free with every PlayStation 5 console. I figured it might be a cute series of minigames, akin to the robot-themed minigames in the PlayStation 4’s pack-in title, The Playroom. That PS4 game was the sort of thing you boot up once, mess around with for 30 minutes, and then forget it exists. A DLC game in which the player controls a ninja AR Bot, evading traps and firing shuriken.

Gameplay Trailer

There is no way to turn the touchpad controls off, nor is there an alternate control method. I handed the controller to my sister asking her to do the area for me, with the expectation this would be a one-off. Past games are also celebrated in fine style thanks to the little skits that are always going on in the background, often involving other bots playing the role of famous game characters. You also ping Astro into action with a flick of the touchpad and zip up his various special suits by running your finger upwards. Astro’s Playroom is not that game, as it’s quite short and still at least 50% tech demo, but since so few will ever get to play Rescue Mission it’s an important step towards that goal. It’s also free with every new PlayStation 5, so it’s the one game that you can almost guarantee everyone will play – and it gives a very good first impression.

Trophy Easter Eggs

Since Memory Cards were sold separately, many PlayStation 1 games (like Crash Bandicoot) offered a password system that allowed you to return to where you left off with all your progress. Sony would later release a USB adapter to connect PS1 and PS2 Memory Cards to a PlayStation 3, even PS3s that couldn’t play those games. The PlayStation Memory Card acted as an interim between on-board cartridge memory and storing saves on a console’s internal storage (which the PlayStation lacked, outside of the RAM). Holding a whopping 1 MB of storage divided into 15 blocks, these allowed saves to be copied, backed up and shared among friends independent of the games and consoles.

Meanwhile, the monkey suit in GPU Jungle is very frustrating to use outside of the cool swinging action due to the weird timing and its usage of the motion controls. With the way forward forged, return to the start of the level and, facing backwards to where you first started, look to the left side of the archway to spot some cables in the ground. Pull them to get a canister, which has a tiny net inside (like from Ape Escape!). With the GT Driver revealed, you’ll see on his container’s display an image that looks a bit like a racetrack.

I’ve seen uses like blowing into a mic to get an in-game fan to move since the days of the original Nintendo DS, so it doesn’t necessarily bring anything all that fresh here. This file contains additional information such as Exif metadata which may have been added by the digital camera, scanner, or software program used to create or digitize it. If the file has been modified from its original state, some details such as the timestamp may not fully reflect those of the original file. The timestamp is only as accurate as the clock in the camera, and it may be completely wrong. That being said, the fact that my biggest complaint is just that I really wish there was more, is almost more of a compliment. Astro’s Playroom is an extremely well-designed platformer and getting access to it for free feels like a steal.