Wife got us a PS5. I was intending to hunt one down some time in the next couple months (prior to the release of God of War: Ragnarok) but I hadn’t gotten around to it yet. But . . uh . . she just went off and got one. So we have a PS5 now. Astro’s Playroom is the pack-in game (remember pack-in games?), so no better place to start than there.

This will also sorta serve as my intro-to-the-PS5 review, because Astro’s Playroom is effectively a tech demo to show all the new things you can do with the controller.

Astro’s Playroom is a Tech Demo / Platformer / Collect-a-thon / Playstation Nostalgia Orgy. It isn’t particularly outstanding at any of these things. It’s fine, it’s not bad, but it’s not something I would have paid for. It’s four worlds, four levels per world. Each world is focused on one aspect of a console (GPU, Memory, SSD, Cooling), and has you playing “through” a PS5. Each world is also loosely aligned to one iteration of the PlayStation, with all the collectables being hardware and software from that era.

The platforming controls are fine, you’ve got a run, jump, punch, FLUDD-style laser hovering, and that’s about it. Platforming level design is fine too, it’s cute, it’s nice and quick, it’s Fine.

The problems are the tech demos, which ok fine, tech demos get a little bit of a pass because they’re intentionally trying to do goofy stuff to show you what’s possible. They don’t all land in here. They mostly come in the form of thematic segments in between the normal platforming where you have to do something goofy, like roll into a ball that you slide around with the touchpad, or bounce around as a frog by holding triggers and tilting, or climb handholds as a monkey with waggle and your triggers. None of it is great. The least offensive was probably the frog thing. The ball was terrible, the monkey was atrocious.

I also wasn’t super impressed by what it was showing off. Great. Waggle. In 2022. Groundbreaking. And they’re still pushing “hey we have a speaker . . iN OUR CONTROLLER!?!1 WHOOAAAA” nobody cares. The rumble tech that people were super duper excited about? It seems to be literally just the same “HD Rumble” that Nintendo put in the Switch, where it plays “sounds” through the rumble motors, just with better beefier motors than what Nintendo put in the Switch . . and then they SUPER over-used it. Like, to the point that it’s exhausting.

I plowed through it in about two hours. I will not be returning to 100% it. I Get It.

Do I recommend it? Ehhh. It’s not a system seller, it’s the opposite. You get it free, might as well play it.

So quick aside about the PS5 first impressions.

  1. Goddamn is it enormous and awkward. Why couldn’t they have just made a box? We had to remove a whole-ass rack shelf in The AV Cube to get it to fit. And I’ve seen the inside of it, there’s so much dead space in it, it’s just dumb. They could have even made it curvy, just . . not curvy and sharp and indescribable via simple geometric shapes.

  2. The controller is still not great. They kept all the dumb gimmicks and added more, and I’m not sold on them yet. I’m sure I’ll have more of an opinion about the triggers after playing Returnal later this year, but for now it’s just . . ugh. The only non-standard features I’m interested in a controller is paddles and being bulletproof. This brings none of them.

  3. The PlayStation Store is STILL a complete mess. It’s been years and years and Sony still inexplicably hasn’t figured out how to make their store experience enjoyable or even functional. When the Xbox Series X/S were announced, people gave them crap for focusing on how much “Smart Delivery” matters, but no one understood why it mattered. It was so obvious, of course, if you own [GAME] and [GAME] works on the Xbox One, Xbox One X, Series S, and Series X, you should have a license to all of them, and you get the version suitable for the console you’re installing it to, and only that. Duh, that’s how it should work, why are you bothering touting this as a feature?

  4. Well the answer is because of COURSE people can and will do it wrong. Sony did it wrong. The transition from PS4 to PS5, especially when it comes to flagship first-party and/or exclusive games with multiple versions (God of War, Ghost of Tsushima, FF7R, Spider-Man, etc), it ranges from simple cash grab “lmao cough up $30 for better pretties” to incomprehensible trainwreck like FF7R. I still have no idea what I’m supposed to do to get the PS5-native version of FF7R, or just get Intergrade, both want me to subscribe to PS Plus, which is a whole other trainwreck of its own.

More research is required, but I think my experience is going to be basically like the PS4. It’s fine, but I don’t like it. Microsoft’s UX is just so much better.