The Last Guardian

Playtime: 7 Hours

I think I got around halfway into the game before quitting, stopping just after reaching the arena building (Trico's AI softlocked again and wouldn't launch me up through the grate). Played on PS5; I'm not sure if I missed some settings but the game was locked at 30FPS and had absolutely horrible input lag (near 1s) on everything. I'm not going to spend any more time trying to finish the rest of the game because it's horrible, definitely the worst of this year and among the worst I've ever played. It's certainly memorable, but for all the wrong ways - I've climbed up the first segment of the tower, I don't really feel any need to do it again.

Worst game played in 2023!

This is one of the biggest disappointments I've had on the PS5 so far. What little I knew of this game generally set it up as one Playstation's definitive experiences, even if it also widely acknowledged as Team Ico's weakest work. To be fair, given my previous experience with Shadow of the Colossus (which I also found terrible, though not quite as bad as this), my expectations were generally low but still optimistic. Unfortunately, in my opinion the game fails quite miserably at almost everything it sets out to do.

Notably, the core concept of the game - to make Trico feel alive - completely fails, because the entire world built around the adventure is not similarly convincing. Every piece of architecture - the form and structure of the buildings and towers, to the patterns in which they are decayed to expose holes, and the mechanisms encountered, are very clearly set up in very utilitarian fashion, with very little theming done beyond to give the lifeless rooms any sense of purpose. Fundamentally, I don't think it's necessarily a sin to have such a barebones level design (I tend to prefer it, actually), but for a game so intent on presenting a supposedly "lifelike" partner, such a bland world doesn't give any opportunities for interesting interaction that could imprint personality, growth, and emotion into a character like Trico. Staring blankly at walls, pouncing mindlessly from platform to platform on a completely linear road from start to finish - there is no life in Trico, and each boring, choreographed gameplay segment simply drives that further home. It's just another game mechanic - a tool that gives you access to platforms, or to convey you to the next area when it's time. It just also happens to waste a lot of your time when you need something to happen, and will frequently completely bug out because of it (not patience-related, as I'll go into later).

The central theme of the game is meant to be a tried-and-true tale of a budding friendship between very disparate creatures, forging a bond of trust despite initial difficulties in communication. This is rendered impactless by the unconvincing lifelessness of the boy's supposed partner, so I'm ultimately not sure what this game wants to be. It's a poor example of storytelling, since there is very little dialogue, with only the boy's narration and occasional line, and the actual goal of the adventure is very vague and never built upon. The worldbuilding certainly isn't a highlight, since there is never any reason given for the functionality of the architecture, with lots of empty hallways and normally-unreachable areas that happen to be accessible through structural decay. It can't be a character study, since the two characters effectively have no personality. Rather than suffering through this 10+ hour slog, shorter experiences like the HTTYD films or even Titanfall 2, with more proactive characters and deeper personality quirks, adding more nuance to their relationship. That's what this game and so many others get wrong - a superficial semblance of trust and cooperation does not imply a friendship, good-natured clowning around does.

Visually, this game is also a bit of a mess. From what I gather, this is a game that started planning as early as for the PS2, then was mostly developed for the PS3, but didn't complete and release until the PS4 generation due to consistent delays. This translates into a game that has some extremely outdated textures for its time; it generally doesn't look horrible, but the boy's skin has almost no detail so he pretty much looks like a monochromatic blob most of the time which is quite funny. On the other hand, Trico looks fantastic in my opinion; his eyes and features in particular are animated wonderfully, swaying with the wind or as he moves. Some of the crumbling and destruction effects also look quite good, though I wonder if the physics for these are mostly scripted to avoid complex calculations. Lighting is generally awful... apparently it's a design decision to make every outdoor area basically flashbang you, and there are lots of other areas that have pretty shitty blue/yellow filters on them to be more atmospheric (I guess). Overall, the quality of the visuals feels like it's all over the place, with little direction or polish.

The mechanical experience of the game is ultimately where everything falls apart for this game, however. Up until this point, pretty much everything I've described would fit quite naturally to many older classics - simple stories with simple characters, nonsensical environments and mediocre visual fidelity matters little if the gameplay surrounding it is excellent. However, the actual gameplay experience of TLG is probably the single worst part of it; on the PS5, not only does the game seem to still be locked to 30FPS (it's possible I missed an option somewhere, though), there is extreme input lag, far worse than any other game in memory. There is almost a full second of delay between any controller input and any response on the game. Coupled with this is the standard clumsy "slow-acceleration" feeling that is fairly common in more cinematic 3rd-person games, which would ordinarily be more forgivable if not for the lag, which compounds the issue. Also, when the boy is anywhere near multiple objects, he will frequently magnetize to the wrong one when trying to get him to do some kind of action, like picking something up. When there's a random helmet or pot near a lever, it's basically a coin flip whether he will do what you are trying to tell him to do since there is no proper targeting, nor any intelligent handling system that can guess what you're probably trying to use. Speaking on the concept of levers and interactivity, the entire game so far has had very little to actually interact with, aside from pushing/pulling and lots of activating levers, no matter what the obstacle is. There aren't any actually interesting puzzles from a mechanical perspective - almost every single room in the game is solved by looking for the lever you need to pull or some object you need to push, or maybe a barrel you need to slowly carry with you. One of the more interesting mechanics in the game (the shield) is only used for about half an hour before you lose it for almost the entire rest of the game. I can only assume this is because the developers also realized how poor the controls are for any more active or precise puzzles. Even so, there are several segments I had to retry multiple times even after understanding what I needed to do because of the horrible controls, which is terrible design to say the slightest.

I'm dedicating a separate section here to talk about how awful Trico's AI is, because this is what cinched the experience as one of the worst of all time for me. My typical stance on NPC behaviors is that bad pathing and AI simply represents bad design and programming, and nothing more. Why try to overanalyze the stupid shit he does as some kind of genius intention design decision when it's just an example of horrible game design? The developers claim the unresponsiveness is intentional, as Trico is a 'living being' - but what does he actually do while the game refuses to process commands? Nothing, in my experience. He spends his time "being alive and independent" literally just standing still, or at other times take 2 minutes looping the same barrel-eating animation because the barrel happens to be just barely in the wrong place for him to properly interact with it. In some other instances, he will constantly move or jump to the wrong spot like a retard despite there being very obvious ledges and pathways forward, or glitch around an area because his pathing is programmed so poorly that it can't figure out how to just walk down a hallway. In what kind of reality is it "realistic" for a creature like Trico, supposedly capable of emotion and connection, to behave like such a braindead entity, and with such consistency? None of these are an issue with patience, by the way - I've seen the common complaints (which also just seem like bad design - the 'command queue' of Trico shouldn't be confusing in the way that it is, if implemented properly). I've waited minutes for him to understand how to jump to another platform, the only realistic way forward, with no results. This has even gotten me softlocked by his shit AI 3 times, where he would simply not respond correctly to the puzzle for some reason no matter what I tried to do, even if this 'puzzle' was to just jump to the next wide-open platform, forcing me to go kill the boy real quick so I can restart from an earlier point again.

Really, if they had actually wanted to craft a feeling of life and personality to Trico, a more open-ended design would have worked wonders; more open puzzle areas, with multiple solutions, each requiring Trico to assist in radically different ways. Creative implementation of such a level design mantra could vastly expand the expression of the game - imagine if Trico's personality could manifest in many different ways, and in multiple playthroughs would prefer different kinds of solutions. Maybe one incarnation likes playing in the water, or in another he's afraid of heights and absolutely will not do any risky climbing. If he's a more active beast, maybe he'll follow you around very closely and use his head to indicate potential solutions, but if he happens to be a lazy one he'll just watch from a corner while you do all the heavy lifting. These kinds of traits, expressed consistently over the course of a reasonable, say 6-hour game and randomized per playthrough, per person could create an incredible experience, as every player realizes they're exploring with slightly different friends and partners when comparing to others. That would be a rendition of the same concept attempted here that I could praise, even with some of the other setbacks I've listed. It was one of the hopes I had going in, that the 'visionary' reputation of the development team could see something so simple and find a grand way to manifest it in this game; alas, it was never meant to be.

Somehow, a sizeable number of people who have tried this game have deluded themselves into thinking the horrible mechanics and overall poor design quality are strokes of genius and creativity, which is quite laughable from my perspective (though to each their own). I feel like this has no benefit, as it discourages them from improving the quality of their product over the course of multiple games, which is quite clearly showcased here; SotC was similarly terrible, and Ico doesn't seem to be much better in the mechanics department. In my opinion, a game with poor controls and badly-programmed AI models of this kind should never be an intentional outcome, and is exclusively indicative of bad or rushed design and nothing else. To say anything more is the game design equivalent of writing a terrible shitpost on some forum in ignorance, then claiming people got trolled for thinking you were serious. Minimalist game design of this style only works when the elements left over are polished to a mirror shine - something that I feel Ueda has missed the mark on by miles at least twice for me now. And these self-important comments about the intentions of a game that isn't fun to play, characters without any personality, and a story that has no substance indicates to me that there will never be any attempt to improve.