Toast Interactive, the developer behind Richie’s Plank Experience (2017), announced its Astro Bot Rescue Mission (2018) inspired VR platformer Max Mustard is set to launch later this month.
When it was first announced, we called Max Mustard a “spiritual successor to Astro Bot Rescue Mission,” however the studio says in a Reddit post that’s not entirely accurate, as Nintendo’s Super Mario 3D Land is its “closest refence to gameplay and difficulty.”
“If you do love the challenge, the levels are scattered with what the designers call ‘greed bait’ it’s optional coins and creates that are really hard to get and if you get greedy, you’ll need to be up for the challenge. Thing is, you need coins to buy upgrades. So it becomes a nice meta juggling act for the player,” the studio says.
Still, Toast Interactive says that while it’s not supposed to be a spiritual successor to Astro Bot, it was an inspiration.
“Astrobot [sic] set a really high quality bar. It’s an inspiration. Thing with platformers is that if they don’t cross a certain high-quality threshold, they only get bought by platformer fans. They need to be REALLY good to also appeal to into mainstream market. Customers will soon decide if we’ve done that.”
Max Mustard is set to launch exclusively on Quest March 21st, priced at $30. You can now find it available for pre-order on the Quest Store. It’s set to arrive with 40 levels packed with first-person gadgets, classic third-person gameplay, four bosses and eight upgrades to unlock along the way.