Players can be hard to buy for. Even if you know the type of games they usually play, there’s no guarantee they’ll like a specific title. But I have no hesitation in recommending Astro Bot to anyone on your list who owns a PS5.
I don’t have a lot of time to play games, so I’m careful about which ones I choose (mostly I play Engadget reviews), so when Jess called Astro Bot “one of the best games ever made by Sony” I thought that was a safe bet. That was an underestimate on my part. It’s a delight: Inventive but completely intuitive, adorable but not cutesy. You play as Astro who is responsible for finding his robot friends on different fantastic planets. Some of these friends are dressed as characters from other video games. The novelty is not only rewarding for the players: at home, it also gave rise to discussions about the history of video games. For example, my husband and son looked up Ico after seeing robots dressed like the game’s two main characters.
The controller itself plays an important role, both on screen and in the new way you use it. The gameplay is challenging, but easy enough to understand that my seven-year-old got into it pretty deeply. Actually, that’s my only complaint. Between all the other people in my house wanting to play it, I rarely get the chance. But that just speaks to the universal appeal – a great quality of any gift. —Amy Skorheim, journalist
