New gameplay coming today as well
https://twitter.com/eurogamer/status/796624197896249344Spoiler for that last tweet - it totally can. Later today we'll have some new footage of The Last Guardian and a short Ueda interview.
The short answer, before I lead you on any further, is yes. Despite an impossible amount of hype heaped up over the course of a decade, of hopes sparked by those all-too-intermittent trailers and by the glorious yet dimming memory of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, The Last Guardian can live up to expectations. It can even surpass them and surprise you with its brilliance, as it did when I sat down to play it for just over an hour last week.
There are, though, a few caveats.
That much, at least, is by design. Your relationship with Trico evolves over time, and the three sections opened up for the purposes of the demo offers three different snapshots of that relationship. In The Last Guardian's opening minutes, Trico's suspect of you and your actions - he'll only eat the barrels that give him energy when you're out of sight. Later, as you tackle the bridge in the set-piece first shown to announce The Last Guardian's arrival on PS4 at E3 in 2015, he's a tentative partner whose bond grows through your shared moments of peril. In the final section, being shown for the first time, the player and Trico work in harmony as they climb their way up a series of towers, Trico acting like a mobile platform as he flies from pillar to pillar.
Even then it's not without problems. Trico often won't move upon your first command, and sometimes it can take three, four or five attempts to get him where you want him. Again, it's partly by design but his stubborn nature can come as a surprise. At a time when so many games remove as many barriers as possible and sometimes even seem to play themselves, here's one that is actively resistant to its players. Few other games would be so daring.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-11-10-can-the-last-guardian-live-up-to-expectationsThat's why The Last Guardian took me by surprise, I think. That's how it managed to meet my expectations - admittedly lowered having read some of the muted reactions to the playable demo at this year's E3 - and then go on to surpass them. Before sitting down to play The Last Guardian I was worried it'd struggle with the heavy burden of anticipation, and whether it'd be able to pick up a legacy deserted so long ago.
There have been countless games inspired by Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, and in examples like ThatGameCompany's outstanding Journey some have taken that legacy to new and exciting places. I feared The Last Guardian might be outshone by its predecessors' imitators, but it turns out there's a magic to designer Fumito Ueda's vision that can't be replicated. The Last Guardian might feel like it belongs to the same era as its predecessors, but that's no bad thing when it becomes apparent that, despite the many pretenders, there's been nothing quite like it ever since.
Part of that is down to Ueda's famous penchant for 'subtracting design', boiling the gameplay down to its core elements until they're all that's left, but there's something else too. For all the ethereal majesty of these games - the wind whistling through crumbling stonework and an almost spiritual sense of isolation - they're bluntly simplistic. For all the mystery that surrounds them, there's hardly any pretence. There's a basic idea - in The Last Guardian's case, an amalgamation of Ico's emotive hand-holding and Shadow of The Colossus' awe-inspiring scale - and everything else exists in service to it. The partnership you have with Trico in The Last Guardian can be powerfully, uniquely emotional.