A little robot at the end of your hands, and a headset that has you tilting your head to peek behind a wall.

First signal, counterintuitive: on gut feel, with no criterion, Astro Bot: Rescue Mission only edges ahead of a third of the field. A third, for a title often held up as the showcase of its genre. Then you open the detail and everything shifts. Hands-on pleasure goes through the roof, ahead of 94% of games: that is where this game lives, in the precision, the movement, the comfort of every jump. Desert island follows high, ahead of more than 80% of titles, and attachment stays solid. Rediscovery sits around the middle, the soundtrack too, and the visual style stays more discreet than the rest. There is the tension: a game whose body is flawless, but which does not impose itself on the first reflex. Only a handful of votes per criterion, so treat it as provisional.

The explanation probably lies in its platform, exclusive to the PlayStation VR headset. You do not fire it up the way you fire up a couch platformer, and that weighs on any gut pick.

So who is it for? For you if you love finely crafted platformers, feel before rhetoric, and the idea of level design wrapping around you. Much less so if you lack the hardware or you want a visual and musical knockout.