The Last Guardian: EVERYTHING You Need To Know

Like Team Ico’s past work, talking about The Last Guardian too much inherently drifts into spoiler territory, but we have years to unpack this.

The game’s pacing also comes into play as a sense of progression.

The result is a game that’s hard to recommend without reservation. Depends on how you feel about technical issues and controls! The divide between the highs and lows of The Last Guardian is staggering. Initially, I was anxious that the game would become shallow and repetitive, but I never felt that throughout the game. Sometimes you just need to climb up on its back and let it take you where you need to go. Maybe I was anxious it wouldn’t live up to the hype, or maybe all the hype had died down over 9 years and two consoles of development, I’m not sure. There are times when you’ll shamble up platforms and tangle from impossible heights and it feels so good that it’s hardly like you’re controlling anything.

Very early in the game the focus is on you building an emotional bond with Trico, which paves the way for a working relationship which is the main means of navigating the puzzles you’ll be challenged with throughout. Its body language is effortlessly expressive – you can easily read its happiness, fear, anger, and confusion – and this is essential to shepherding the creature throughout the game. If you press R1 (alone it calls Trico) and one of the face buttons, you will suggest Trico to perform the same action, like jumping and interacting. But instead of just issuing commands to Trico, the gameplay takes into consideration that Trico is simply a large animal-and you must get it to do the things you want pretty much how you would get a dog to sit or roll over: by coercing it, offering it food, playing fetch, and giving it repeated commands.

This improves as the game progresses.

The Last Guardian isn’t officially out until 9 December, but you can pre-order it from Amazon on the PS4 for £44.00.

You’ll spend the bulk of your first few hours with Trico just sort of marveling at how the beast moves. Given that you’re generally right next to a giant creature, be prepared for the camera to be completely blocked by screens full of feathers, walls, and foliage on a regular basis. A little bit of this obstinance added to Trico’s charm, but it happened far too often, so most of the time it just bombarded me with frustration and made me lose any feeling that I existed in this world. This feels particularly loose, emphasizing the rag doll collision physics of your character, and also showing how imperfectly you’re able to control Trico’s semi-independent movement by tugging on its fur in various places. Epic ancient-world structures blend seamlessly with fantasy wilderness and dungeon to great effect. Sometimes the solution to a puzzle will involve leaping to a ledge that you could have sworn was out of its reach. It starts within what looks like a fortress, as both the boy and Trico try to escape. It feels like it has a mind of its own, twisting and rotating in ways that make little sense and occasionally made me nauseous. It’s a camera that dates the game back to 2007 when its development originally started. Without a heads up display or interface, you don’t get the same instant feedback you’d expect when playing a game, informing you that an action has been triggered. Despite this, Kollar opines that The Last Guardian doesn’t quite live up to the standards set by its forebears, likening it to a rough and unpolished PS2 game. Artistically astounding, yet technically flawed.

“When you think about a single expression, you can write a sentence or dialogue and that would be very simple to do”, he says, explaining the game’s lengthy production process. There are cerebral puzzles to triumph, odd items to use and the ominous feeling that you’re about to slip and fall off a cliff or be abducted by a haunted guard. It’s worth noting that the game ran fairly smooth on my PlayStation 4 Pro, but I did test portions of the game out on my original PlayStation, and there was slowdown in some areas.

Trico, from “The Last Guardian” is, by turns, adorable, frustrating and terrifying.

– As for the story: you haven’t seen anything. For some, it will no doubt be more than enough to appease appetites.

Ueda was also known for his video games, “Ico” which as released back in 2001 and “Shadow of the Colossus”, which was released back in 2005, both for the PlayStation 2 console.

If that name means nothing to you then it’s time to get an education.