A week ago, no one knew how many typos plagued the Epstein files, the Steam Machine was little more than a social media leak, and 16 games were in the running for Polygon’s Game of the Generation (deemed by you in our week-long reader poll, as part of our Lost Generation special issue). Now, one game has emerged victorious. And it’s… Can we get a drum roll?
Astro Bot (PS5)!
If you’ve been following along with our poll each day this week, you know we started Monday morning with a bracket for each major gaming platform. Eight first-party games for Xbox (Avowed, Doom: The Dark Ages, Forza Horizon 5, Halo Infinite, Hi-Fi Rush, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Pentiment, and Starfield) teed up against eight first-party games for PlayStation 5 (Astro Bot, Death Stranding 2, Ghost of Yotei, God of War Ragnarök, Helldivers 2, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, and Returnal).
By the time the semifinals rolled around, Astro Bot found itself swinging against Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 in the PlayStation bracket, while the Xbox bracket saw Forza Horizon 5 in a tight race against Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. At the end of the day, Polygon readers determined that dusty archaeological dig sites were cooler than Lamborghinis and that robot armies of fan-service had more star power than mere friendly neighborhood heroes.
Here are the results of the final round:
Astro Bot: 70%
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle: 30%
Okay so, not as close as one would’ve thought back in those halcyon days of Monday morning. Sony’s charming little robot mascot pulled Mamdani numbers, frankly.
By our read, though, it was as fair a matchup as you could get. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is by all measures a terrific game. Developed by MachineGames, a studio known for bombastic first-person shooters, its gameplay subverted expectations by putting a focus on legitimately intricate puzzles. The environments, spanning from a frighteningly accurate recreation of the Vatican to the humid jungles of Sukhothai, are so lavishly and methodically designed as to feel like travel porn. And of course Harrison Ford turns i– wait! And of course Troy Baker turns in a career-defining performance as the titular hero.
But there’s a world of difference between a terrific game and a generation-defining game. And Astro Bot, which makes innovative use of the PS5’s DualSense features, arguably more than any other game has to date this console generation, simply is that game. It was definitive for the PS5, giving PlayStation a platformer to rival Nintendo’s oeuvre in both presentation and quality. Joy is present in every pixel, and it’s steeped in gaming history; the main story is functionally about making references to literally more than 300 beloved characters. There’s nothing like it, really. Astro Bot is both a celebration and an achievement. (There’s also the little matter that it won Game of the Year at the 2024 TGAs.)
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