Enlarge / Now I’m freeeeeeeee… free fallin’

Way back in 2010, a full year after it was first announced as a PlayStation 3 game, The Last Guardian creator Fumito Ueda stressed to a Tokyo Game Show press conference audience that the key to the game he envisioned was developing an “emotional attachment” between the game’s unnamed boy character and Trico, his three-story tall mythical animal-hybrid companion that combines elements of a bird, a dog, and a horse. Six years later, after finally completing Ueda’s oft-delayed opus, I find that the main emotion I feel towards Trico, and the game he inhabits, is frustration.

A beautiful disaster

The Last Guardian plays out as one big joint escort quest, with Trico and the boy working together to escape the extremely intricate ruins of a crumbling tower complex built into the side of a cliff. Before I dig into what frustrated me so much about the game, I’d be remiss not to laud the architectural feat of that digital environment.

Every broken brick, every rusted-over bridge, and every pile of rubble overgrown with weeds makes you feel like you’re inhabiting the epilogue of a once-great civilization. It’s a world full of ornate symbology and bronze-age-meets-magical-realism technology that’s all the stronger for never being even partially explained. You’ll feel like you’re trespassing on the ghosts of master builders, who placed every last stone with a sense of purpose you’ll never fully understand but love examining anyway.

Much like Ueda’s Ico and Shadow of the Colossus before it, The Last Guardian also benefits from a painterly use of light, which pokes through holes in the walls to reflect through cavernous halls and oversaturated outdoor scenes with a soft, otherworldly glow. Played on an HDR television on the PlayStation Pro, every scene has a vibrancy and range of visual expressiveness that’s hard to equal in modern gaming (Things look pretty good on a standard 1080p television, too). Seeing what new visual splendor lies around the next corner quickly becomes the main impetus to struggle your way through the game’s puzzles.