Playing Astro Bot with my siblings made me love it again

There is a cemetery next to my house, and I walk my dog through it every day. I try to stay alive for the world around me and look for interesting names on the graves, strangely shaped tombstones or unusually long or short span between date of birth and death. But sometimes you are in your own head and stop paying attention. As I went through that cemetery with my niece last year, she noticed everything I did not. I felt younger because the world in her eyes was mysterious and strange again.

Regular, everyday activities – the types you do every day – look different when you make them with a child. I remembered it again this weekend, when I introduced my two oldest siblings to Astro Bot.

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Astro Bot is simple. Or is it?

When I play Astro Bot myself, it seems simple. It is a game where you mostly only work with four simple verbs. You can run, jump, beat and spin. There are other, rare measures such as pulling on cords, but even then you only use three buttons – left stick, x and square. When I played the game with my siblings, I realized how much more there is in the game that is usually invisible to me.

They are seven and eight, and although they have played some N64 with their parents, most of their experience of playing through iPad games is. This means that touch checks, so they have almost no experience of a thing that everyone who plays games with a modern controller learns to do: control of the camera. If you play video games, do this without thinking about it. It's like breathing or walking, something you have to do to achieve other, more complicated measures, but which does not take up any brain space.

If you record gameplay or play with someone else in the room, you can find that you are thinking about how to perform the camera to mark cool images or just to make it smooth. The difficulty you feel only highlights how other nature it is for the most part.

Technical difficulties

For children (or adults, like my dad, who do not play many console games), it is difficult to control the camera. This was not so much problem in previous 3D games because the camera checks paradoxically were much worse. The game handled much of the heavy lift for you and placed the point of view where it needed to be or give you a limited range of options to choose from. Super Mario 64 had a similar perspective as Astro Bot, but so did the camera in set steps instead of giving you total control.

If you are a regular player, it can be difficult to return to that type of control schedule in 2025 because you have to give up control. If you have no experience using R3 to frame your perspective, the old way is easier because it is a minor thing that your hands need to do.

When I played Astro Bot, my siblings only turned the camera when they absolutely needed. They would encounter a wall and lose the Astro view completely and get stuck. Only then, by necessity, would they try to turn the camera.

These sessions made me think of Astro Bot's camera pretty much. It's strange, because I 100 percent of the game last year and don't remember thinking about it once. If you play many games, cameras are only remarkable when they do something strange. Pikmin 4 and Baldur's Gate 3 sticked out because they, strangely, handled their camera in the same way-enabled a near third person and long range isometric.

More recently, Lost Records has made an impression as it changes between third person and first person depending on whether you are in the 1990s or 2020s. But when you see the world through a child's eyes, the invisible things end up being invisible. I understand the game better after playing it with two people who didn't understand it at all.