The Last Guardian
A boy’s best friend.
We’ve been waiting a long time for this. Not the neardecade that has passed since work on The Last Guardian began, but rather the 15 years that have elapsed since we first sat through Ico’s credits, processing what we’d just experienced. In all its brave and sometimes rickety construction, The Last Guardian feels every bit the Ico sequel we’ve pined for during that time.
For the most part, that reassurance is provided by Trico, the creature that serves as your companion. Trico’s unusual form is made up from a hotchpotch of recognisable creature — bird, dog, cat — making Trico feel real.
On your first encounter, he is injured and restrained — punctured with spears, hungry and shackled by a metal chain. Removing the broken spearheads elicits howls of pain, a violent reaction, but ultimately cautious gratitude. It’s a service you provide often throughout the course of your journey, extracting projectiles after battles with the animated suits of armour that guard the towers and chambers you explore. You must also soothe the beast — a process for which you’re given no instruction, requiring trial and error to get right.
Every aspect of the game is focused on developing your bond with Trico in this way — even learning basic controls or mastering new abilities never feels like a game mechanic, but rather a growing understanding between the pair of you as you gradually learn how to communicate more effectively.
This symbiosis is required to make your way through the world. In some instances, it will be a simple leg up to higher platforms. Occasionally, you’ll even use Trico’s dangling tail to descend into otherwise-unreachable spots.
Trico will often ignore your requests at first, or simply fail to understand what you’re getting at, and while the beast is capable of moving at terrifying speed when he needs to, he mostly pads along at a mellow pace. For anyone expecting a compliant AI companion in the typical videogame mould, it will be maddening.
The game succeeds in presenting a number of puzzles the likes of which we haven’t seen before. Though the solutions aren’t overly complex, the mechanics feel fresh, combining imaginative physics conundrums with the need for Trico to behave in certain ways.
You are in continual danger here. The creepy animated-armour enemies move slowly, but fling runes that gradually cloud your vision and slow your movement. You can shake these off, but if an enemy grabs you, you’re slung over their shoulder. Mashing buttons allows you to wriggle free, but you need to knock them off the edges of platforms to remove them permanently. More effectively, you can rely on Trico to dispatch them.
It’s difficult at first to ignore issues with framerate and occasionally sticky controls, not to mention a camera that can struggle in less-spacious rooms and passageways. But it’s not hard to stomach them in the context of something so generous with ideas and environments, a game so full of heart and with a character that is unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.