The Last Guardian is the second of two games to release this month to boast a near decade-long development cycle. Where Final Fantasy XV feels like it’s used the time wisely and brings a sense of modernity to the franchise, The Last Guardian feels very much like a relic, stretched between the last two hardware generations and the current one.
The Last Guardian made its first appearance back in 2007, and back then it was bound for the PlayStation 3. A highly anticipated follow up to Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, two of the most beloved games of the PlayStation 2 era, it held a significant pedigree from the moment it was announced. It has, since then, been in and out of a seemingly endless development cycle. At certain points it dropped off the radar completely, it was thought to have been cancelled once or twice and then it resurfaced with a vengeance at E3 2015 as a PS4 title. I provide this little history lesson because the spectre of this fragmented, protracted development cycle permeates the entire game.
This is not to suggest that every part of the game suffers from aging design. Developer GenDesign (the new studio headed up by Ico and Shadow of the Colossus auteur Fumito Ueda) build the entire experience around getting the player to form a strong, connective, emotional bond between the game’s nameless adolescent protagonist and Trico, a monstrous creature that is a hybrid of bird, cat and dog. In this sense, the game is a runaway success. Trico is an incredible feat of digital puppetry. Its big and soulful eyes peer into your soul the way your dog’s do when it realises you’re leaving the house. The way it moves — warily at first and then with the reckless speed of a puppy unable to grasp the concept of consequence, even the way it grumbles happily when petted allow it to steal your heart the moment you free it from its tiny cave prison. Trico isn’t just life-like, it truly feels alive, and though your investment in this big feathery weirdo is immediate and profound, it’s still not enough to outrun The Last Guardian‘s many other pitfalls.
Your character awakens in what appears to be a cave filled with crumbling ruins. The victim of a kidnapping, he must devise a way to escape the cave and get home safely. He’s not alone, however, and quickly stumbles upon Trico. Trico is badly wounded, covered in broken spears that jut from its body, and is chained to a mechanism in the floor. Trico is dying and your character intimates that he would like to ease the beast’s agony. The first thing you’re asked to do is round up some food for Trico, a task that will crop up again and again throughout the game’s campaign.
The vast majority of the puzzles you are asked to solve are a three-pronged affair — 1) Trico is too big to progress to the next area, so take a second and figure out how to navigate it around this problem. 2) Find the barrels of mystery Trico food nearby. 3) Use the barrels to coax it forward. I had no problem figuring out the how of these puzzles, I actually quite enjoyed plotting a course that would get Trico from one place to the next. It’s the barrels that were ruining my life.
The Last Guardian is absolutely obsessed with barrels. The idea is that you can take any number of items and use the game’s barely-there physics system to send them through a few simple Rube Goldberg machines that land at Trico’s feet (this fascination with basic physics puzzles being another key indicator of the game’s true age), but more than any other item it asked me to use, the barrels drove me crazy. They never go where you want them to, they are apparently coated in the same substance as those 20c bouncy balls you used to get at the super market and half the time it wouldn’t matter where I tossed them because they’d roll away from wherever I was aiming anyway.
The issue, clearly, is not the barrels themselves. The barrels are merely the objects upon which I project my frustration. The problem is the controls and the way The Last Guardian implements them. Your character is a bungling, hamfisted kid of about eight or nine and the game ties itself in knots trying to communicate that through the controls. He falls over constantly, he struggles to climb up onto Trico’s back and gets struck in its feathers, he’s got no upper body strength so he can barely push or pull anything and when he does its usually in the wrong direction. When faced with a jumping puzzle, he is far more likely to plummet to his death than actually make it because his jumps are minuscule and it makes them incredibly hard to land.
As difficult as dealing with the kid is, however, it’s nothing compared to the trial of getting Trico to co-operate. As beautifully animated and engaging as Trico is as a character, as an adventure partner it leaves an awful lot to be desired. Like an undisciplined puppy, it will obstinately park its backside and refuse to move until you feed it again. When it’s not doing this, it’s channeling its feline heritage and flat out ignoring you. Whenever I wasn’t trying to coax the feathery idiot into moving up a few metres, I was clinging to its coat for dear life as it bounded wildly from place to place on the way to higher ground.
It’s frustrating because Trico is is where so many of the game’s puzzles begin and end. This makes figuring out how best to communicate with it your priority. In a nutshell, you press R1 to yell at Trico and every now and again you’ll have to combine that with one of the face buttons to get more specific like “go here” or “jump over to that.”
This is my own translation of the game’s mechanics because, despite the fact that it never stops throwing tip screens at you regardless of whether you internalised its wisdom yet or not, the game doesn’t ever actually highlight what each command is or does. This makes Trico’s frequent ignoring of your orders that much more frustrating because it means you have no way of knowing if you’re doing any of this right.
So frustrating did this pattern of stop-start, trial-and-error gameplay become that at one point I simply tossed the controller onto the couch and stalked away for a while to clear my head. Upon answering a few emails and coming back to the TV about 20 minutes later I found Trico obligingly sitting in the spot I’d been trying to indicate when I threw my hands up and left. So, in that sense, Trico is like a real cat: Trico will do anything you like, but it has to feel like it came up with the idea on its own. As a true-to-life reconstruction of dealing with my housemate’s pet it is without peer, but a fun video game this does not make.
As I said earlier, not all of The Last Guardian is so aggravating. There is fun to be had here. At one point I collected a shield that let me point a ray of light at different enemies and objects in our path that Trico could destroy. There are also some truly eye-popping, staggeringly beautiful set piece moments that make it crystal clear why this simply game couldn’t have worked on the PS3.
These set piece moments highlight something that hadn’t occurred to me immediately — the way The Last Guardian‘s map is designed. The game’s world of ancient and decaying ruins didn’t make a lot of sense to me to begin with but by the time I clocked the campaign I realised just how complex it all was. Each part of the world knits together to create something that feels lived in, it loops back on itself and will surprise you with the odd trip through an area you’ve already visited, viewed from a different angle.
Further, as much as I’ve complained about Trico being a jerk to work with in this review, I want to come back to what I said earlier about how engaging Trico is as a character. By the time you reach the end of the campaign, you’ll be completely in love with the big dummy. I’m sure you know you’re in for some sentimental moments by virtue of the fact that the game gives you a pet to look after but (and without spoiling anything specific) every one of them strikes true.
The Last Guardian is a complicated game to review. It feels like a game from the PS2 era that also pulls moments out of its bag of tricks that could only be accomplished on current-gen machines. It is by turns a soaring achievement and incredibly unpolished, somehow spectacular and clumsy at the same time. This game was such a long time coming that I can’t quite believe I got to play it at all, that it’s something I own now, but I do wish that a development cycle this long had borne more fruit.
Score: 7.0 out of 10
Highlights: Trico is wonderful; Amazing world design; We can finally say we’ve played The Last Guardian
Lowlights: Dated mechanics; Unpolished, last-gen gameplay
Developer: GenDesign
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment Europe
Release date: Out now
Platforms: PlayStation 4
Reviewed on PlayStation 4 Pro using a press copy provided by the publisher.
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