The Last Guardian is a meditation of trust and patience. The eight year wait after its 2009 unveiling is a conspicuous illustration of this thesis, but a clearer picture develops by persisting through its meticulous operation. A lingering touch of melancholy and deep suspicions of malevolence—both synonymous with ICO and Shadow of the Colossus—are now complimented by enduring senses of companionship and devotion. In these moments, and The Last Guardian has many, it's hard not to feel captured and taken by its ability.
The Last Guardian is a meditation of trust and patience.
The eight year wait after its 2009 unveiling is a conspicuous illustration of this thesis, but a clearer picture develops by persisting through its meticulous operation. A lingering touch of melancholy and deep suspicions of malevolence—both synonymous with ICO and Shadow of the Colossus—are now complimented by enduring senses of companionship and devotion. In these moments, and The Last Guardian has many, it’s hard not to feel captured and taken by its ability.
Fumito Ueda’s modest but potent body of work is one of the most “special” collections in all of gaming. ICO came out of nowhere and its wistful sentimentality and surreal ambiance dazzled early adopters of the PlayStation 2. Shadow of the Colossus followed in 2005 and showcased an unprecedented relationship between scale and agency, all the while concealing the surprising consequences for the player’s impetuous actions.
The themes behind Ueda’s games don’t lurk below the surface. They’re always present, but usually restrained until they reach an apex. If modern games are all about turning it up to eleven and breaking off the dial, Ueda’s work creates deliberate highs and lows, allowing the player’s subconscious to devour everything in between. A skilled piece of music can fill out a histogram without losing the attention of its listener. Likewise, an Ueda game is a complete and careful experience in ways that are exceptional to its medium.
In The Last Guardian, this sentiment doesn’t arrive all at once. In my first few hours with the game, I wasn’t sure if it was going to appear at all. In The Last Guardian’s cold open, you’re a non-descript boy deposited in the ruins of an ancient structure and presented with a feathered beast chained to a wall. What unfolds is a role-reversal overhaul of ICO where the player is helpless and the AI-controlled companion is capable of defense and destruction. The central challenge of pushing through collapsed ruins and shaky architecture holds true, with the player responsible for finding unconventional means of making progress and then working out ways to keep the giant beast along for the ride. The Last Guardian, if nothing else, is a steady progression of puzzles and platforming.
While the beast, Trico, acts independently, it is equally responsive to an escalating series of commands from the player’s character. Early on you’re presented with a means of decimating objects that block your path. Soon this ability is taken away and you’re left with crude vocal and hand signals that mimic your own actions. You can presumably make Trico jump, follow, push items, or press forward. Getting Trico to comply with your wishes is akin to training an animal in real life. Sometimes Trico listens to you and sometimes Trico prefers to take a bath in a nearby puddle of water or paw at some tasty barrels of food.
Separated from its context, The Last Guardian can behave like any number of modern puzzle-platformers. Out-of-the way paths are concealed around corners or below the surface, demanding the boy character crawl under tight spaces, scour cliff sides like Nathan Drake, and intuitively decode where The Last Guardian wishes you to go next. A measure of tangible opposition arrives in humanoid sets of armor that come to life and impede your progress, but most of the time the player just has to play keep-away while Trico wrecks shop.
While The Last Guardian delights in obscuring visual solutions to basic progression, there are also a significant number of puzzles that demand intuitive thinking and an untraditional use of trained mechanics. A sequence with a pool water and another with (what I thought) was an encounter that demanded personal offense required solutions that, before I tried them, I thought were not viable. I didn’t think The Last Guardian was equipped to reward my intentions and, as it turned out, that was actually the only path forward. Holy shit that worked is not an uncommon deposition in the mind of a person playing through The Last Guardian.
The Last Guardian puts a premium on building your relationship with its creature, and in doing so creates a significant amount of friction between the player and his or her intentions. For example, there will be a sturdy column slightly elevated to the left that I assume is my only way forward. I’m not completely sure, so I’ll climb on top of Trico and perform any number of ques to get him to move up there. Sometimes aiming the camera in a specific direction is enough to clue him on your path and plan. Sometimes I have to climb on his back and shout any manner of perceived expletives in The Last Guardian’s imagined language.
A persistent question throughout The Last Guardian: is the tension between Trico and the path forward by design, or is it the inevitable fallout from a game that spent a significant amount of time in development hell. There were times when I questioned if The Last Guardian was working properly, or if I was in the midst of some oversight by the development team. When you try to command Trico to go somewhere, and it doesn’t work, and you waste time trying any number of ideas that also don’t work – only to inevitably return to your first idea and find that it does actually work is, by almost any metric, frustrating.
I didn’t realize that The Last Guardian’s arduous performance was forming and then facilitating a bond with Trico. This is either The Last Guardian’s goal or my brain’s refusal to accept Ueda’s work as anything less than pure and creating a dubious rationalization as a coping mechanism. Getting Trico to go where I want would have been easier with a mechanic that allowed me to mark a position and have him travel to it. This would also destroy the point of The Last Guardian. It’s an interesting dichotomy, and one that will inspire debate with ample evidence for either side. Obviously I’m going to err toward “it’s like this on purpose” based on a greater amount of supplied evidence, which I’ll try to lay out the best that I can.
Trico’s presence is a unique force in The Last Guardian. Every time it leaps onto a crumbling ruin carries the worry and weight of the worst possible outcome. Every time. Watching the structure shake and crumble before Trico immediately jumps to the next surface is arresting, and watching it come up short and scramble to the top (sometimes with your assistance) can take your breath away. Trico is a magical beast, but it doesn’t have that sense of casual immortality that allows Nathan Drake to survive any number of falls that would obliterate the skeletal system of a normal person. The creature goes through hell and watching it endure against self-preservation to protect the boy is the path toward The Last Guardian’s ultimate destination.
The Last Guardian leaves room for several opt-in moments for the boy to nurture his relationship with Trico. The game has a dedicated pet button that can be employed to any part of Trico’s body. Mechanically this is employed to calm Trico down in a handful of frantic crises, but it can also be performed—and Trico will respond—at any opportunity. The beast also has a considerable vocabulary, with a wide range of vocalizations that run the gamut from Jurassic Park raptor to an aggravated Chewbacca. Throughout the course of The Last Guardian, based on sound alone, the player will be able to tell if Trico is upset, worried, defiant, or (I think) even bored.
The more I played The Last Guardian the more I thought of Trico as my pet. A sentient creature whose wellbeing I was ultimately responsible for upholding. My cat’s (who is sitting on my lap as I type this) name is Arthur and his face even looks like Trico. Whenever Trico was on screen my wife would refer to him as “Big Arthur.” I felt connected to this creature in a relationship designed entirely by our mutual need to press forward and my own agency to take care of him the best that I could. Part of this is because I was subconsciously pretending he was my cat, an imprint The Last Guardian fosters by outfitting Trico with an incredible and diverse set of realistic animations. Many games take the time to create human/pet relationships based on stats or objectives, but The Last Guardian accomplishes this by making Trico feel like a real companion. In the moments that I played it I was as invested in his wellbeing as I would have been if it were (somehow) my own cat.
The Last Guardian is the most clear and lucid game Ueda has produced. It delights in hitting the player with bizarre sequences while squirreling away a more direct explanation for later. While this is in contrast to Colossus and ICO’s insistence on teaching through pure supposition, it does provide a more concrete series of answers for the player to grab ahold of and steady their position. This also doesn’t discount The Last Guardian’s potential as an invitation of wonder—there’s enough symbolism and architectural minutia to fuel forum theories for years—but it’s non-linear path the completing its own story is a relief for some of its more absurd instances.
With that in mind, The Last Guardian isn’t without its rough edges. Trico’s size can occasionally make him feel too big for the camera, and when space gets tight and the boy is obscured from view, the entire screen goes black for a moment. This is disorienting. Control also bears some vestigial remains from Colossus, with its physics engine making Trico’s body an unwieldy surface to climb and scour. The Last Guardian’s frame-rate also takes the occasional hit, though I can’t recall an instance where it was a hindrance to its gameplay. Are these caveats or are they compromises? You have to wonder why The Last Guardian was in development for so long, and if these shortcomings were a sacrifice necessary to finally get it out the door.
Problems are present, but few of them affected my admiration for The Last Guardian. Throughout my twelve hours with the game I was searching for a moment and wondering when it would hit. I kept thinking of wistful ending of ICO or the junction where Colossus became more than a boss rush and wondering when The Last Guardian’s time would come.
It was in the details. It’s always in the details; in moments other games might pass as filler but which The Last Guardian’s indulges to communicate its ideas with the player. Details are a golden currency in Ueda’s games, and The Last Guardian greatest puzzle is their ultimate assembly. The impact in its final act is both somber and spirited, and it’s the pinnacle of the ideas it tries to put forward. I knew where The Last Guardian was going and I still couldn’t help but respond with deluge of raw emotion.
I’m still in that moment right now and I don’t know when it will leave. I hope it never does.
