The Last Guardian is the most disappointing game I have ever played. After releasing the great masterpiece Shadow of the Colossus in 2005, Team Ico planned to dedicate a longer development cycle to its new project as they took advantage of the complicated PlayStation 3 hardware. Unfortunately, hubris had plagued them and the team was disbanded by Sony after a long and troubled development before being hastily finished by Japan Studio on the PlayStation 4.

The game offers little new aesthetically, recycling the same dusty old green and grey ruins we’ve seen before. The gameplay is a coarse pastiche of their two previous games: the puzzle-platforming of Ico meeting the baroque climbing of Colossus, but neither meshes particularly well. The young lad protagonist slips and slides around with little precision, making his exploits around an environment composed of collapsed buildings and shaky foundations a source of constant frustration which is compounded and even dwarfed by the head-bashing agony of dealing with his oversized griffin-chimera companion. Teaching a dog to behave and do tricks is not a pleasurable activity, and doing it in a game is even worse. There is an unshakeable feeling when trying to communicate to the griffin what to do that the game’s programming is simply ignoring you.

It is a colossal sadness that such an ambitious and unique game rests on such a patchwork of broken and counterintuitive mechanics. It reminds me of the film Cool World by Ralph Bakshi, which had such a brilliant style and aesthetics that an otherwise unwatchable film could be replaced by a better one playing out in your imagination while watching it. The same can be said for this game and one wonders if it deserved perhaps another year in the oven.



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