At Tokyo Game Show 2016, members of the press were able to enjoy a demo of The Last Guardian, the successor to PlayStation 2’s Ico and Shadow of the Colossus that’s been delayed as much as it’s been ballyhooed. What was the press reaction?
While most outlets seemed determined to like The Last Guardian for its atmosphere, aesthetic, and the nostalgia for the two well-received games preceding it, others could not disguise their concerns about simple things like the camera, platform mechanics or puzzle logic. Check out the five press outlet reactions below:
“For as much as The Last Guardian nails the broad feeling it's going for in this demo, it whiffs on the details. Specifically: It feels awkward as hell when it comes to actually controlling the main character. The protagonist doesn't walk so much as he lurches in whichever direction you've pushed the analog stick. Much of the demo focuses on platforming, but his jumps have a stickiness to them, a sense of inaccuracy that could be played up as realistic weightiness in the right game but just feels frustrating here.
“The game seems to have a hard time determining what you actually want it to do from button presses alone. On several occasions, I tapped the jump button to reach a swinging rope, only to have the main character instead shift direction and climb on top of a nearby railing.”
“In 2011 Ueda had explained that Trico had a mind of its own, and that was very evident in this year’s demo... I needed to be patient.
“At times I extended this lesson to the game itself—a few parts of the demo felt rough, and I ran into trouble with simple actions like pushing something up an incline. I was supposed to grab and push a large cylinder up a ramp, but I kept getting stuck in place or suddenly let go of it. The ordeal seemed to take longer than it should for such a simple action, and I wondered if this was an in-game bug that Sony was currently fixing. Other times, I’d have to wait for Trico to do what was necessary to complete the puzzle, because it would follow his own logic instead of instantly listening to my demands. I wasn’t playing The Last Guardian at my own pace, but at Trico’s.
“I don’t know if this makes for a good game, but it did make for an interesting experience.”
“When the interplay of puzzle-solving and emotional bond comes off, The Last Guardian is exhilarating like nothing else… This leads to heartstopping moments where you place your life in Trico’s hands and vice versa, as the creature’s idiosyncratic personality makes you never quite sure what’s going to happen.
“This feeling of uncertainty is amplified by the puzzle design and control system, both of which are a lot looser than you’d usually find in a game like this. It usually works in The Last Guardian ’s favor, but it’s not always for the better. While I was playing a preproduction build, the controls are pretty fundamentally awkward and the camera seems to have as much of an independent streak as Trico; together with some performance issues, the game is often reminiscent of Shadow of the Colossus’ worse traits as well as its best.
“And at one point in my demo, even the developers themselves couldn’t work out why Trico wasn’t behaving the way he was supposed to in order to solve a puzzle. The eventual solution was obscure and unconnected to the puzzle itself, which doesn’t quite bode well for the final release — not being able to solve a puzzle when you know what to do suggests that The Last Guardian ’s unpredictability may occasionally work against it.”
IGN:
“ The camera misbehaves about as often as Trico does. It gets caught on objects in the environment, it swivels unexpectedly or focuses where you don’t necessarily want it to, and it loses track of Trico at inopportune moments. It’s distracting, and makes some challenges more difficult than they should be. This is coupled with a tenuous control scheme that’s very reminiscent of Shadow of the Colossus , one that’s less forgivable in 2016 than it was in 2005. Hopefully this will be fine-tuned now that the developers have a few extra weeks before release.
“That being said, there are genuine moments of brilliance at work here. Moments that will make you chuckle, moments that will make you hold your breath and shut your eyes tight, moments that will hopefully eclipse its annoyances and remind you that the experience might have been well worth the wait.”
“You’ll need Trico to do things for you to proceed, but he won’t do them exactly when you need him to. This works as a way to build up the relationship between you and Trico, because it feels like neither of you know what to do to solve the puzzle. On the other hand, when you think you have the right solution but Trico is just taking his sweet time doing his part of the equation, I could see where that might become frustrating.
“At one point I had to press a button to command Trico to jump over a gap, but it didn’t work (causing me to, for a while, mentally cross that off as a solution) until I was in what felt to me like an arbitrary position on the ground. There seemed to be no logical reason why I would need to be in that exact spot for Trico to jump over, except for the fact that me being in that position made for the most dramatic camera angle when he made the leap.
“...It seems like it’s being massaged and massaged, even now, in the hopes that players will love Trico instead of wanting to murder him.”
Are you looking forward to playing The Last Guardian at last? Feel free to talk about your impressions of the The Last Guardian gameplay previews after the jump.
