Sony's E3 conference had a lot of gaming fans crying tears of joy, as it announced that several games at the top of fans' wish lists were coming to its PlayStation 4 platform. For me, the most impactful of those announcements was the news that The Last Guardian, a game that's been in development hell for close to a decade, will finally cross the finish line on PS4 at some point next year.
Last Guardian is the long-awaited third game from Fumito Ueda, the designer of Sony's games Ico and Shadow of the Colossus. These weren't huge mainstream hits, but they're exactly the sort of prestige software that a console maker should be producing: Genre-bending, experimental, artistic, risky. Ico debuted in 2001 to tepid sales, but today it's cited by game developers far and wide as incredibly influential.
Originally developed for PlayStation 3, Last Guardian was wildly ambitious. The previous two games had focused on a pair of characters that explored the world together: a boy and a girl in Ico, a boy and a horse in Colossus. In Last Guardian, a boy would make the acquaintance of and travel with a giant bird-cat creature named Trico. Instead of climbing up the back of a giant Colossus to kill it, you could climb up on the back of your giant creature and hug it. Intoxicating. But also technically difficult to pull off, on the PlayStation 3. Eventually, Sony moved the project to PS4.
Following the trailer that was shown at Sony's press conference at E3 last week, WIRED got a look at the game running live, with Ueda on hand to explain some of what was going on.
The demo opened with the boy alone in a ruin, and he runs forward to find Trico injured, with spikes stuck in his back. Ueda clarified that this was not the beginning of the game, and that the boy and monster had already developed a tentative friendship at this point. You clamber up the monster's feathery back and pull the spikes out. This frees him up to walk around the room.
You can throw him barrels of food, or you can proceed with the game by having him climb up to a ledge, letting you climb his back to reach the next section of the game. The monster didn't really listen to the boy, much like an untrained puppy; he had to keep giving the command for "up" over and over to get Trico's attention. This is deliberate, and as their relationship grows closer, he'll be more likely to follow your commands instantly.
At this point, we got out to the area seen in the press conference trailer. The boy and Trico had to get across a giant gap that the boy couldn't jump on his own. By giving the command to "jump" over and over again, eventually Trico would run and leap across the chasm. At that point, the boy could leap out over the gap and Trico would catch him (which gives you some pretty clear Ico flashbacks, if you've played it).
Ueda then pointed out that this was not the only way to get across this gap. You could, for example, get onto Trico's back and jump over that way. Ueda made this point again when they played through the later scene in the demo, where the boy jumps, but Trico can't snag him with his mouth and he has to grab Trico's tail at the last second. If you time the jump wrong, they said, you will miss. Or you might just barely make it. It's not a cutscene.
Ueda's games have a unique way of, almost wordlessly and with very little in the way of scripted cinematic moments, building up a relationship between the onscreen characters and the player. With Trico, they're going for somewhere in the middle of cute and scary---he's an adorable pet in the way he stamps his feet looking for treats, or scratches behind his ear like a dog, but he's also a powerful, unpredictable creature.
After so many years, it's great to see Last Guardian running for real (as an E3 awards judge, I got to go hands-on for a minute just to verify that the demo was live and playable). Hopefully this is the last sprint across the finish line for what is likely to be a quite memorable PlayStation 4 experience.
