The Last Guardian

The Last Guardian is a game about a boy and a giant creature named Trico, who looks like a cross between a dog, a bird, and a cat. Narratively, it is a memory of a childhood spent in the ruins of a sprawling complex of towers and bridges, from which the pair try to escape. The gameplay is built on cooperation: the player alone can only climb, pull levers, and carry barrels, everything else has to be handled by Trico. The boy calls him, pets him, points the way, and waits for the animal to decide to listen. This unreliability is deliberate, because Trico behaves like a real animal: sometimes it lags behind, sometimes it gets spooked by the colored eyes depicted on the shields of the hostile guardian statues.

Development dragged on for years and the game was originally being made for the PlayStation 3; the resulting PlayStation 4 version carries traces of both. The textures and frame rate occasionally betray their older foundations, while the animation of Trico's body, feathers, and muscles ranks among the most impressive things the entire console generation offered. The environments are quiet, bare, and monumental, the music only comes in at key moments and hits all the harder for it. The atmosphere of melancholic abandonment directly continues the earlier work of the same creative team, namely Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, and shares with them a minimalist storytelling style with no wasted words.

The reception was mixed on essentially one single point: the camera and controls could really test a player's patience, and part of the audience never got used to Trico's stubbornness. Those who stuck with it, however, described one of the most powerful emotional experiences on the console. The game's influence is visible anywhere designers attempt a believable animal companion instead of an obedient helper that executes commands at the press of a button. Today it is a title that needs to be approached with patience and without haste. The reward is an ending that is unforgettable, and the feeling that you truly had to earn your relationship with Trico. Few games dare to be this slow and this consistent about their one single idea.