[COLUMN] Astro Bot’s Free Winter Wonder DLC Is Perfect Blast of Holiday Cheer | by Marty Sliva

Note: Just a heads up, this piece contains references to some of the Bots you find in Astro’s DLC levels. If you think that their surprise reveal might bring you some joy, proceed with caution.

I had a few ideas for year-end columns to write during the holiday break. Report cards for each of the first-parties (spoilers, no one got an A this year). A speculative look forward to what I think could be some of the best games of 2025 that haven’t officially been revealed yet (the follow-up to Outer Wilds might be closer than we think). A travelog on my current Persona 4 Golden replay (almost in September, Rise is still my waifu, sorry Yahtzee).

While all three of those are topics that I’ll revisit in the near future, my plans got derailed when I sat down to play through Astro Bot’s Winter Wonder DLC yesterday on a stream. It caps off the recent wave of free additional levels that have been doled out since its launch in September, but while the first five of those are bite-sized speedrun courses all built around a single one of the game’s unique abilities, Winter Wonder feels like a leisurely victory lap brimming with holiday cheer for the most joy-inducing game of the year, and I loved every second of it. 

Unlike the straight-shot speed challenges, this Christmas-themed stage is open-ended in how you explore it, similar to the Ape Escape level from the core game. Your goal is to find 15 golden presents hidden throughout the playground, many of which need to be unlocked using any one of the core game’s power-ups that can be found scattered throughout the floating islands.

On its surface level as a platformer, I loved getting a chance to revisit this world and mess around with these toys one more time. The various powers Astro comes across are a blast to play with, especially the excellent and underused Mouse Shrinker. Instantly shrinking down into a tiny little guy and exploring a hidden gingerbread village is the kind of thing that plastered a big ol’ grin on my face that I couldn’t mask even if I’d tried.

Despite absolutely loving the game at release, I somehow forgot just how good it feels to play over the past few months. The amount of control you have over your Bot mid-air lends a sense of expression to the forgiving platforming, and the way every single piece of the environment interacts with you (and vice versa) makes it a joy to just exist in this world.

All of this is strengthened by the festive theming present throughout the entirety of the DLC stage. From the moment you load in, you approach the course flying parallel to Santa on his sleigh being pulled by reindeer. You immediately crash into a bell, which explodes into a hundred tiny ones. Each present you find adds an additional light to the massive Christmas tree that looms over the stage. The friendly critters scattered about are a mix of reindeer, bunnies, penguins, and even the enemies are wearing little antlers. It’s all just so damn nice.

I love it when a game gives you a reason to log in during the holidays. Whether it’s the Wet Bandits being added into a mission in the modern Hitman games, a festive event with all of your neighbors in Animal Crossing, or the folks behind Ten Bells decking out their purgatorial watering hole with haunted lights and Christmas trees. As a sucker who gladly spends every December surrounded by Christmas music and movies, I love seeing that same level of cheer added to my games.

Playing through this had my mind turning on the different seasonal levels they could drop into the core game on an occasional basis. A beach-themed jaunt in the summer, or a spooky playground in October. There are also anniversaries of specific franchises that were notably absent from the main game — Twisted Metal turns 30 next November, and Final Fantasy IX celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2025. My life for Vivi and Steiner Bots.

And talking about the little robos themselves brings me to possibly my favorite part of this holiday mission – the various characters you come across from PlayStation’s past, present and future. While the hidden characters from the first five DLC levels were nice, they didn’t spark joy inside me the way so many of the gaming icons and forgotten misfits from the core game did. For me, folks like Eve from Stellar Blade and the Helldivers troops don’t pull the same nostalgic dopamine levers in my brain as the likes of Jumping Flash, Pyramid Head, and Teddie from Persona 4 do.

But all of that melted away as soon as I realized that the pals hidden away in the Christmas stage were an eclectic mix of two of the biggest characters of Sony’s current roster, and a handful of ‘90s platforming mascots who never reached the heights of their bandicoot, hedgehog, and plumber brethren. While finding Peter Parker and Miles Morales was great (and fitting considering the holiday theming of the Miles expansion on PS5), it was those critters in the second group that made this DLC feel like the island of misfit mascots in the best possible way.

The joy on my face when I found Tomba hiding at the bottom of a lagoon, or coming across both Croc and Gex in the span of a few minutes warmed my heart, especially since all three are making a comeback via their original PS1 games getting the remaster treatments As someone who still revisits all sorts of of weirdo older games on a regular basis, I’m glad to see that I’m not the only one who still thinks about them.

The Winter Wonder DLC is the cherry on top of Astro Bot’s glorious sundae, cementing its place as one of the best games of 2024, and the current holder of the 3D platforming title belt…though that second one might have a bit of competition in a few weeks if the Switch 2 is revealed alongside the follow-up to Super Mario Odyssey and Bowser’s Fury.