To rework the classic football quote, Astro Bot isn’t a matter of life and death, it’s far more important than that. As the excitable android, you’ve got bigger fish to fry than, say, saving the universe.

PlayStation 5 itself, in the guise of Astro and friends’ spaceship, is broken to pieces by a nasty alien, the 300 passenger bots scattered across dozens of planets. Sony thus puts its own great white machine front and centre, to which some might say it’s about time. With cross-gen firstparty exclusives and few games that make full use of its features, there’s a sense that PS5 still isn’t quite essential. For an electronics and entertainment corporation, what could be more important than that?

If it’s a little odd to see the console you’re playing on being dismantled on screen, however, it’s less in service of introspection than celebration. And while the preloaded Astro’s Playroom fixated on SIE’s history of hardware and peripherals, this time the games take the limelight, with many of the bots you rescue cosplaying as characters from PlayStation’s 30-year back catalogue, and whole levels built to pastiche titles of the past. Never does this unearthing of sometimes long-ignored IP seem cold and corporate, though. Astro whoops and chirps with an enthusiasm that couples with giddy level craft and technical splendour to produce relentless joy. Hover over one of the planets on the galaxy map and the prompt to enter reads ‘Dive in’, like an invitation to scoff a sticky toffee pudding.

Talking of galaxies, as much as Astro Bot is submerged in PlayStation lore, the most perceptible influences here are the blueprints of Nintendo’s 3D platformers. Visuals aside, it wouldn’t take much adjustment to convince us that this was a new Mario game, such is the tight control, the structure of the objectives, and the effervescent design. Perhaps Galaxy is the clearest comparison – that star map looks and even sounds like it belongs there – while short cycles of side paths and quick rewards reflect the rhythm of Odyssey, and several ideas retrieve memories of Mario 64 (swinging a pig like an Olympic hammer thrower is a wildly kinetic rerun of Mario’s treatment of Bowser).