But there’s something I want to leave an impact or impression of, to perhaps move anyone who comes in contact with my games. “It’s not that I’m always conscious, like always thinking that this has to be the theme of the game. “What I would like people to feel is that there’s beauty in sadness,” explains Ueda. The puzzles in The Last Guardian are, but they’re also ways of referencing the broader themes Ueda’s interested in. It’s also, as in Ueda’s earlier works, about conveying more than mere gameplay ideas. “So it’s not like in other games where you have an animal or pet character, and they only do orders or commands, where they’re basically one of your tools, like a weapon.” Trico was designed to act and behave and move on his own, says Ueda, calling that interplay between your actuation and Trico’s reactions “a very fine balance between being able to give the player control, in a sense, of Trico, and things that you can’t control.” “Trico is an independent animal,” says Ueda. The temptation may be to see Trico as a pet, which in most games involves a one-dimensional sidekick that’s merely an extension of your power in the world. “These are things you’ll learn along the way, and then be able to have that closer communication and bond with the beast.” “That signals the player, the boy, ‘Okay, now I’ve learned that by bringing him these barrels, he went for it, and now that he’s happy, maybe there’s a different expression that I get to see,'” explains Ueda.
And you’ll quickly notice that Trico’s eye color changes when barrels are near, one of the many nonlinguistic cues. “It’s basically his snack, it’s something Trico wants, like giving dog snacks to your dog,” says Ueda. In the demo, which chronicles the boy’s initial encounter with Trico (that’s the beast’s name), you can pick up barrels filled with who-knows-what to get its attention. Establishing and growing relationship at first involves conveying to the creature that you’re worthy of trust.
THE LAST GUARDIAN GAMEPLAY REACTION HOW TO
Not with words, but through actions or sometimes simple gestures as you work to figure out how to entice the creature to cooperate and help you both bypass obstacles. “It’s such a wide and open space, but there are barriers where you’ll need to work with the beast to break down or somehow get over these hurdles.”īut to do that, you have to first figure out how to communicate with the creature. “There are places that may be too small to bring the beast, or walk alongside it,” says Ueda of the gameplay. Yes, the game is on one level about puzzling your way past obstacles or barriers, progressing from one area to the next, as in Ico. All of that connecting allusively to the logic of the world’s spatial conundrums.
The array of behavioral possibilities as you learn to communicate with your mythic companion. The unostentatious, at times gloomy color palette simply telegraphs that you’re in the spiritual realm of director Fumito Ueda’s last two games, 2001’s Ico and 2005’s Shadow of the Colossus.Īnd as you play The Last Guardian, that becomes clearer-that it’s less about visual razzle-dazzle than the interplay between incongruous or seemingly disconnected things: The boy and a gigantic griffin-like beast. The spare, almost cartoon-like features of the boy’s face become a wellspring of Scott McCloud-ian austerity into which players can pour themselves (or as McCloud puts it, amplify by simplifying). If you scrutinize the demo or the game’s new trailer ungenerously, you might see it as a merely souped-up last-gen game.ĭon’t let that get in the way of what’s important and perhaps even intentional here. The game was originally to be a 2011 PlayStation 3 release, but missed its marks, and was for a while thought to be in danger of vanishing entirely. It’s simpler visual framework may seem to betray its lengthy, harried developmental journey.