Five days ago Sony finally showed us what the PlayStation 5 actually looks like, and I'm still not over it. I watched the whole "Future of Gaming" stream on Thursday afternoon with a bag of pretzels and my laptop propped on a stack of books, because my desk is currently a disaster zone of unopened Amazon boxes. Unrelated tangent: does anyone else feel like their apartment has slowly turned into a warehouse since March? Mine has.
The games lineup was genuinely great. Horizon Forbidden West closed the show and looked stunning, Ratchet and Clank got a next-gen showcase that made the PS4 version look like a browser game, and that Gran Turismo 7 footage had me sitting up straight for the first time in weeks. Demon's Souls is getting the full remake treatment too, which is going to make a very specific kind of person (me, several friends of mine, half of Twitter) extremely happy.
But nobody's actually talking about the games this week. Everybody's talking about the box.
That design. I need to talk about that design.
Sony went with this two-pronged white and black thing that curves out from the middle like a pair of wings, and the second it hit the screen my group chat exploded. Someone said it looks like a router. Someone else said air purifier. My honest read is that it looks like something bolted to the wall of a server closet, not something sitting under a TV next to a stack of board games. I don't hate it exactly, but I also don't think "does this look like my Wi-Fi extender" should be a live debate people are having about a gaming console that's going to cost several hundred dollars.
And to be clear, we still don't know what it costs. No price, no release date beyond "holiday 2020," nothing. Just the shape, and a promise. That's an odd thing to sit with for however many months we've got left this year, especially since the Xbox Series X reveal back in December already gave us a clean, boring, fridge-shaped rectangle to compare it against. Boring is sometimes the right call. A black box under your TV doesn't need to have opinions about interior design.
What actually got me, more than the shape itself, was watching people's reactions split hard along lines that had nothing to do with the hardware. Half my feed was doing genuine analysis: the vertical stand, whether it lays flat, whether the disc-drive edition and the digital-only edition Sony showed side by side would cost the same (still unknown, still being argued about in every comment section I made the mistake of reading). The other half just wanted router jokes. Honestly both crowds were right to do what they were doing. It's a weird looking machine. It's also apparently going to run some genuinely great games. Those two facts can coexist just fine.
One thing I'll say in Sony's favor: putting Astro's Playroom in as the pack-in title, built specifically to show off the new controller's haptics and adaptive triggers, was smart. Bundling a free tech demo disguised as a cute little platformer is exactly the kind of thing that gets normal people, not hardware nerds like me, to actually feel the difference between generations instead of reading a spec sheet and shrugging.
I also can't stop thinking about that closing teaser, the one that cut to black with no title card, just some fog and a logo flash. If it's what a lot of people online think it might be, we're going to be talking about it for months. Sony's very good at that kind of tease, and I say that as someone who's been burned by hype cycles more than once and keeps falling for it anyway.
We're still probably four or five months out from any of this being in an actual living room. Price unknown, exact date unknown, and apparently a whole console generation is about to get defined partly by whether it looks more like a router or an air purifier to you. I lean router. My actual router, sitting three feet from where I'm typing this, has never once made me want to buy a five hundred dollar sequel to it, so maybe that's the wrong comparison to reach for. But I didn't pick the design. Sony did. Now we all just get to live with it until November, whenever November's price tag decides to show up.