Astro Bot, Hi-Fi Rush, and a new definition for cozy games, part one

If you live with someone else, what goes on The Screen™ is a conversation.

I’m not talking about our personal screens, like our phones, laptops, and tablets. Nor am I talking about the little Switch screen or the verging-on-too-big Steam Deck screen. No, I’m talking about The Screen™: the statistically speaking 55” television that dominates your living room.

Longtime Backlog readers will know, Jade, my wife, has some particular feelings about games, especially their auditory wetness. She’s also one of those, like, healthy people? Who limit their screen time? And read books? I know, what a weirdo. She’s also not a videogame person, in terms of playing them herself, but now and again, I’ll play a game that she likes to watch, and it becomes something we experience together, even if only one of us is holding the controller.

When one of these games comes around, we make some chamomile tea, clear space on the couch for the dog (she is essential to this operation), and play through a game a little bit every evening. The experience is—well, it’s cozy. It’s really cozy.

So, for the next two newsletters, I’d like to talk about Astro Bot and Hi-Fi Rush, two games we played this way, and I’d also like to fight against the greater tide of the internet and attempt to redefine what I think of as cozy games. Because you know who’s had it too good for too long? Cozy gamers.

Okay, that’s it for the manufactured vitriol, because, frankly, I totally understand why cozy, as a genre header, has taken over the indie space. There’s something to be said about a game that isn’t trying to be hard so much as it is rewarding, that asks you to climb a gentle slope only to reveal a sunset at the crest of the hill. I don’t actually think that “cozy games,” as a moniker, is that far off in terms of accurately describing these experiences. They are the warm blanket of videogames, fresh from the dryer, and I think they’re great.

It’s just that, damnit, I think Astro Bot and Hi-Fi Rush are cozy, too.

Let’s start with Astro Bot, because, if you’re like me (read: own a languishing PS5), you’ve probably played it recently. I’ll admit, I was a bit dubious of the hype. Sure, I’d played the tech demo version when the PS5 launched and had a nice time with it, but “nice” is as far as I’d go when it comes to how I felt about that “time.” It was cool! It showed off the controller in a way that no game since has managed to do. But it was… just kind of there. It didn’t really do much for me, because it wasn’t really meant to. It mostly just existed as a glorified way to communicate why, exactly, the PS5 controller was better than the PS4 controller. Still, it’s hard to be mad at a pack-in title. Though Wii Sports raised the bar so high you’d be hard-pressed to clear it, nobody, really, should complain about a pack-in game.

But Astro Bot costs $60. It is not a tech demo. It’s a game. So, just as a baseline, it had more to live up to. And, you know what? The hype wasn’t unwarranted.

Sure, a lot of it is a pastiche of ideas from other games. Chiefly, a lot of other Mario games. We got the not-F.L.U.D.D. version of F.L.U.D.D. We got the slow-mo mechanic from Super Mario Bros. Wonder. But, hey, Super Mario Odyssey came out in 2017, folks. That’s nearly two whole US presidents ago. We’re overdue for an excellent 3D platformer, and, by God, Team ASOBI understood the brief. By the time the credits rolled, I was convinced that what we had here, PlayStation nostalgia or no, was a genuinely great platformer. (And then I collected all the bots and did… that final thing. Oh, did my wife laugh, watching me fail over and over again, trying to complete that final thing. Yeesh.)

But we’re not here to talk about what makes Astro Bot great. We’re here to talk about what makes it cozy.

Besides the fact that the game is blisteringly cute (thing+robot turns out to be a powerful recipe for d’aww), what I think makes it qualify for my newly broadened definition of the cozy moniker is how playful it is. And by playful, I don’t mean, “Oh, look, how clever.” (Though it also is that at times.) What I mean is, in every level, Astro Bot embraces play as play, in the most childlike definition of the word. Play as messing around. Play as “watch me, watch me.”

Take the spinning attack. You hold Square for a few moments then release, causing your little bot to spin his arms around like a windmill, knocking away enemies and activating mechanisms that move you on to the next portion of the stage. But you can also just… spin around in a pile of leaves and watch the leaves fly up in the air, settle on the ground, and then whip them up again. You can do the same thing with a bunch of plastic balls that just happen to be lying around. Or some gems. Or some apples. Really any small thing.

And let me tell you, if what you are going for is a game that is fun for another person to sit and watch, this kind of ostensibly pointless visual whimsy goes a long way. So many games require of the player—and thus the viewer—a stringent understanding of the game’s vocabulary. When this monster flashes yellow, press Circle. When you see this symbol, that means you press Triangle, but only at the right time, otherwise, press X. Games love to teach, via a series of audiovisual cues, what precisely it is you’re meant to do. Games are learning machines, and very rarely do you have any extraneous element that does not contribute to that loop of increasing understanding.

But sometimes you just want to spin your arms around in a little pile of gems and watch them fly around, you know? And sometimes it’s fun just to mess around with water physics for the sake of messing around with water physics. This, I think, is why Astro Bot succeeds not just as a fun platformer, but also in being cozy. It’s charming, which, admittedly, is hard to both quantify and argue for. But you’ll just have to trust me: Astro Bot is charming as all hell, whether you’re playing the game’s hardest stages or just mucking about in the level where there’s a robot cow that you can take a nap with. It indulges the player and the viewer in joyful experimentation, asking you to get off the beaten path and mess with the physics, just for fun.

Hi-Fi Rush, by contrast, is all about staying on the beat-en path, if you’ll permit the horrendous and moderately forced pun. It’s a tightly authored experience that doesn’t indulge in the same play-for-play’s-sake approach that I’ve described above. But, I would argue that it’s no less of a cozy experience because of it. For more, you’ll just have to come back in two weeks.

For now, stay cozy, my friends. Whatever cozy is to you.