Astro Bot is one of the most entertaining and depressing games I've played in ages. It's a loud, unrestrained explosion of creative energy, it's an antiseptic corporate product drowning in brand fellatio. A shining example of what current-gen first-party games can be, a dreary reminder of everything they're not. PlayStation is dead; long live PlayStation.
Over the past few years I've gotten pretty good at being able to quickly intuit whether a piece of media is real or fake. Anyone can hone this skill and I enthusiastically recommend doing so. For example: I have not yet seen
Cloud, the new feature directed and written by Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Kurosawa is a more spatially proficient filmmaker than about 95 percent of his contemporaries, and even just watching
the trailer, it's abundantly clear: this is a real movie. I also have not seen
Piece by Piece, an upcoming documentary about Pharrell Williams where everything is made out of Legos. And yet, beyond a shadow of a doubt: fake movie.