The Last Guardian Review

The Last Guardian is announced while the PlayStation 3 is young and arrives on the PlayStation 4, which tells you most of what you need to know about how hard it was to make. Fumito Ueda's team builds Trico, a creature the size of a house with the head of a bird and the manner of a large dog, and then refuses to make it obedient. You call, you point, and Trico looks at you, sniffs the air, decides it dislikes the drop, and eventually goes.

Critics split on that exact behavior. Half call it the most alive animal anyone has put in a game and half call it a control problem wearing a costume, and the gameplay grade is where that honesty goes. The camera is genuinely poor in tight spaces, the frame rate sags in the big rooms, and a puzzle you solved in your head can take five minutes to communicate to your partner.

What survives all of it is the bond. Feeding Trico barrels, pulling spears out of its hide, watching it panic at stained glass, you build a relationship the game never states in words, and the closing twenty minutes land harder than almost anything else on the platform. The art carries weight too, all pale stone and enormous vertical space, and the animation on the creature is the strongest argument for the years this took.