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Astro Bot Devs Reveal Tons of Cut Content

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On April 15, 2025

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Summary

Team Asobi lead Nicolas Doucet recently revealed that Astro Bot’s cut content included quirky power-ups like a coffee grinder and roulette wheel.
A level designed around bird flight was also shelved due to excessive overlap with another Astro Bot power-up.
Astro Bot’s original ending was too disturbing for some players, and was accordingly tweaked.

Astro Bot director Nicolas Doucet has detailed a lot of interesting content that didn’t make it into the game’s final version. This includes quirky power-ups, abilities, levels, and even a more graphic version of Astro Bot‘s ending.

MILD STORY SPOILERS for Astro Bot aheadReleased in September 2024 as a whimsical and light-hearted PS5 platformer, Astro Bot took everyone by surprise with its exceedingly positive reception from critics and players alike. It debuted with a Metacritic aggregate score of 94 percent, and currently sits at a 92 percent user score. Rather astonishingly, Astro Bot also won the coveted Game of the Year mantle at The Game Awards 2025, and at the time of writing, is the most awarded platformer of all time.

Astro Bot: What Would a Sly Cooper Hero Level Look Like?

As Astro Bot grows into a longer series, drawing upon other popular Sony IP is inevitable, and Sly Cooper would be a great choice.

While Astro Bot had 90 levels and over 150 VIP bots at launch, director Nicolas Doucet recently revealed that Team Asobi’s content plans for the platformer ran much deeper. A new report from IGN covers a GDC 2025 talk dubbed “The Making of Astro Bot” held by Doucet, where he peeled back the curtain on the game’s development. According to Doucet, Astro Bot‘s earliest pitch was drafted back in May 2021, just a few months after Team Asobi began prototyping the game, which went through 23 different iterations before landing on a charming comic strip pitch that won over PlayStation execs.

Astro Bot’s Cut Content Included a Coffee Grinder, Roulette Wheel, and a Bird-Themed Level

After that, small, multidisciplinary groups at Team Asobi generated hundreds of ideas for Astro Bot using sticky notes, but only about 10 percent of them made it to the prototype phase. These yielded abilities like the balloon and sponge, which did make it into Astro Bot, as well as more outlandish ideas like a roulette wheel and a coffee grinder, which were ultimately cut. A level based around bird flight was also cut because it overlapped too much with the monkey power-up from Astro’s Playroom and Astro Bot‘s Go-Go Archipelago level.

Astro Bot’s Original Ending Was Rather Graphic and Distressing for Some

Lastly, Doucet revealed that Astro Bot‘s initially-planned ending handed players a fully dismembered Astro – no arms, legs, or even a head – to repair. Expectedly, this made some people “really upset,” as per Doucet, so Team Asobi eschewed the idea in favor of a more intact Astro in the game’s final sequence.

It’s always intriguing to learn about the creative processes and inevitable cut content that are part of a game’s development, especially in the case of a widely-beloved title like Astro Bot. Team Asobi even released five new Astro Bot speedrun levels earlier this year, and it remains to be seen if the studio has even more free content planned for the rest of 2025.