Playing Astro Bot with my nieces let me love everything again

There is a cemetery next to my house and I go through my dog every day. I try to stay alive around me in the world and for interesting names on the graves, strangely shaped tombstones or unusually long or short spans between the date of birth and death. But sometimes you are in your own head and stop being attentive. When I walked through this cemetery with my niece last year, she noticed all the things I didn't do. I felt younger because the world was mysterious and strange again in her eyes.

Regular, secular activities – the types they make every day – look different if they do them with a child. I remembered this weekend again when I presented Astro offered my two oldest nieces.

Please do not let Astro Bot become a live service

Sony has to learn the right lessons from Astro Bots after the start.

Astro Bot is simple. Or is it?

If I play Astro myself, it just seems. It is a game in which you only work with four uncomplicated verbs most of the time. You can run, jump, beat and turn. There are other rare actions such as pulling cables, but even then they only use three buttons – the left stick, the X and the square. While I played the game with my nieces, I realized how much more is invisible to the game.

They are seven and eight and although they played some N64 with their parents, most experience with games through iPad games. That means Touch Controls, so you have almost no experience with something that everyone who plays games with a modern controller learns: to control the camera. If you play video games, do this without thinking about it. It's like breathing or going, something you have to do to fulfill other, more complicated actions, but do not take a brain room.

If you record gameplay or play with someone else in the room, you may think about how you can carry out the camera to highlight cool recordings, or to do it. The awkwardness you feel only shows how the second nature it is most of the time.

Technical difficulties

For children (or adults, like my father who don't play many console games), it is difficult to control the camera. This was not such a big problem in earlier 3D games, since the camera -kept, paradoxically, were much worse. The game has completed a large part of the difficult life bills for them and positioned the point of view that it had to be on, or provides them with a limited selection of options. Super Mario 64 had a similar perspective to Astro, but it turned the camera into Set -instead of giving them all control.

If you are a habit player, it can be difficult to return to this type of control scheme in 2025 because you have to give up control. If you have no experience with R3 to design your perspective, the old way is easier because it is one thing less who have to do your hands.

As I played Astro Bot, my nieces only turned the camera if they absolutely had to. They pushed into a wall and losing astro completely out of sight and got stuck. Only then would they try to turn the camera.

These sessions made me think a lot about Astro Bots camera. This is strange because I played the game 100 % last year and do not remember that I once thought about it. If you play a lot of games, cameras are only remarkable if you do something strange. Pikmin 4 and Baldur's Gate 3 stuck out because they strangely edited their camera in the same way and enabled isometrically third parties and long.

Lost Records has left an impression in recent times, as it shifts between the third and the first person, depending on whether they are in the nineties or in the 2020s. But when you see the world through the eyes of a child, the invisible stuff stops being invisible. I understand the game better after playing it with two people who didn't understand it at all.