Pretty close to being my favorite game ever. Gameplay wise it's over any other open world crime game for me on the fun factor. The hand to hand combat is more satisfying than any gun combat. The actual shooting is simply serviceable, gets the job done. It works in doses. Even still there's tight little action movie-esque sequences like the time slow down when hopping a railing or bailing out of a car. Climbing out of your own car and jumping to another vehicle and chucking the owner down the street. Stuffing a civilian in your trunk. I mean, it just never ends. You always get a kick out of smashing a guys head off the trunk before throwing him in there.

Up there with my favorite video game stories as well. I enjoy the little diversity with the detective missions and the citizen favors that add some flavor and immersion to the open world, when you start getting recognized by other locals.

I did have some nitpicks in that there's some characters who could use more time, (get Old Salty Crab in there!) like Vincent who gets unceremoniously offed. That's not even a spoiler because you won't know who he is when it happens. You see him like twice and he never speaks. The girlfriend missions are...fine I guess? Kinda corny and pointless. The game turns into Leisure Suit Larry for five seconds where Wei will drop a cheesy pick up line and get some ass or whatever.

This deserved a sequel and it was failed. I even did the racing missions in this because I liked the game so much. RIP to my dogs. Shout out to the all the assholes in high school I couldn't convince to play this because it didn't have multiplayer.

In the span of 20 days, I’ve killed Dracula like 3 times now, I don’t know why so many games have an obsession with him but I’m starting to pity the poor bastard, like, he only shows up in one puzzle and his purpose is to perish, now that’s a true tragedy…

During its initial release, a portion of the discussion around Storyteller revolved around how it really wasn’t what it seemed at first; from promotional material and even its descriptions, you’d be led to believe this is a game about creating stories, using the characters and options available to form your own visual narrative, an idea that even the game’s own opening text seems to be pointing towards, when in reality this is pretty much a puzzle game. In each of the levels you get a set of characters and scenarios and from there you need to reach a specific result, and for many this prospect was less enticing than that supposed original ‘’go wild and crazy with your imagination’’ idea, but I believe that throwing Storyteller to the side simply because it isn’t something that ‘’sounds cool’’ is silly at best, especially when what it really is still sounds incredibly promising.

Building up a narrative and creating a story to reach a specific ending is a fantastic concept, an idea so fascinating that can lead to so many cool experiments, and gamifying the act of forming a world, giving life to a set of characters with a finale in mind is far from being an idea always bound to backfire, it’s a genius one with a super strong premise… one that Storyteller fails to realize.

Being simple is a good thing, and then there’s being simplistic; each of the puzzles feel… barebones is the word I want to say, but I’m not entirely sure it’s the right one; no challenge is designed badly or unclear, but they also aren’t great. I’ll admit I definitively wasn’t a having a bad with the experience, but I also wasn’t feeling particularly excited or even just really that entertained, it’s a very ‘’going through the motions’’ kind of game, where none of the puzzles are particularly challenging and few have those moments where the pieces fall into place and you feel like a genius. As such it could be seeing as a cozy or pick-up-and-play style of game, but considering just how short it is and how little it attempts in that time to actually make it a super relaxing or enjoyable experience, I find it hard to call it one. You just do puzzles until its over… and without ever fully tapping into true ‘’imagination’’ territory.

It's hard to feel as a storyteller when there’s so little space of possibilities; as I said the fact there’s always one ending for each of the puzzles doesn’t bother me, but that the characters have a set of behaviors that you cannot change and that there’s basically only a single way to achieve said ending does. At first it’s fun to learn how each of the characters behave, but after a while it quickly turns into an automatized experience, where you see your objective and think ‘’oh yeah, I know which character has to do each thing’’ which might sound good, but in practice feels like placing pieces of the same puzzle over and over, sometimes rearranged, sometimes with a different set of pieces. The secondary objectives that some of the levels have as well as the stamps and the Devil re-tales are an interesting spin for sure, and especially towards the end this concept shows its highest potential, but it just not involving nor realized enough to be memorable or that fun.
The game doesn’t tell stories, just broken scenarios, and you aren’t tasked with forging them, just to fix the… I don’t know if that even makes sense, but what I’m getting at is that Storyteller, even at its best, doesn’t seem to strive for much despite shooting pretty damn high, and I’m left with the sensation that many other puzzle game accomplish the idea of creating your own path or solution much more consistently than the game about creating tales.

The game isn’t a incredibly ended open experience with player experience at its focus, nor does it want to be and nor it should be judged as such, but what it is is a overly simple, limited and average puzzle game that’s only somewhat enjoyable. It may not be something that it isn’t, but it also is not even close at being a true accomplishment of what it aspires to be, and that’s much, much more tragic than the former option…

There seems to be a prevailing expectation that as games evolved, they also became exponentially more approachable. Higher budgets resulted in smoother graphics and fewer bugs. More complex controls (adding left/right triggers, then adding one/two joysticks, then dabbling with motion inputs, etc) gave players a firmer grasp over their characters. AI became more predictable as their algorithms became more intricate to capture a wider range of responses. In a sense, as the technology expanded, the resulting products seemingly became more streamlined to better suit the player’s needs while more thoroughly capturing a developer’s vision.

Team Ico has never been about following tradition, however. If anything, the evolution of their titles embodies the regression of player control, choosing to instead utilize technological advancements not just to refine its premise via "design by subtraction" as chump has pointed out, but to deliver an entirely new experience altogether. Ico was a classic tale of boy meets girl; the girl had to be freed from her cage and pulled around the castle, as the boy protected her against everything in her way to prevent her demise. Shadow of the Colossus, however, was a story concerned with the struggle over control. The lone wanderer, in his quest to revive Mono, hunts down various several-story colossi capable of swatting him about like a fly. In the resulting desperate dance of death, he at first struggles to climb their hulking figures, hanging on for dear life until he discovers their weak points and stabs the colossi while they helplessly flail about. In other words, it's a game about trying to regain any semblance of control until you realize after the fact that the only shadow left was the literal shadow cast by Wander over their fallen corpse.

The Last Guardian then, can be thought of as the natural evolution of Team Ico titles, in that it melds previous design sensibilities and thrives off of disempowering the player throughout its entirety. Trico, the player’s companion and a cross between cat and bird, is essentially the analog to Wander’s horse in Shadow of the Colossus, Agro. Fumito Ueda designed Agro as a companion rather than just a vehicle, and had his team develop specific movement algorithms that would allow Agro to steer herself without the player’s explicit control, forcing players to put their trust in their steed during certain fights emphasizing bow aiming. Ueda and his new team at GenDesign iterated upon this idea, explicitly creating environments where the player was forced to rely upon Trico’s actions to progress and thus establish dependency between the boy and his companion.

While the game can be thought of as an inversion of Ico in this sense, its design influence upon The Last Guardian should not go overlooked, particularly in how the game captures Ico’s physicality. Ico’s key strength was establishing a sense of presence through minimalist puzzles that lacked overly gamey elements, namely in how Ico interacted with his surroundings. Players are subtly guided into climbing chains, pulling levers, sitting on stone sofas to save, and most importantly, holding down R1 to hold Yorda by the hand around the castle and pull her out of danger whenever captured. The Last Guardian innovates upon this by combining several of the traversable elements and the companion into one. To better navigate the vast ruins, the boy must guide Trico and utilize their tall body of climbable feathers in order to scale heights, while occasionally dragging around their large tail and dangling it over ledges to safely climb down. Most importantly, you get to pet Trico whenever you feel like it to comfort your friend in both their happiest and most emotionally taxing moments. In both Ico and The Last Guardian, the player’s constant contact with both the environment and their companion keeps them firmly rooted within its constructed sense of reality by regularly reminding them of their companion’s physical presence.

This physicality would not be as significant without the lessons learned from Shadow of the Colossus however, not just regarding AI behavior but also specifically in how it adapts the game’s sense of scale. Trico is large, and the boy is small. As mentioned previously, Trico can utilize their size to lean against walls and give the boy a step up, but they can also utilize their weight to hold down large chains and swipe away at imposing bodies of armor. Meanwhile, the boy is much more agile and can fit into otherwise inaccessible small spaces by Trico, squeezing through narrow tunnels and gaps in metal gates to pull switches and let his partner through. This obvious difference in size creates consistent room for contrast, not just in how the two characters differ in terms of functionality but also in terms of their scale when measured against the traversed liminal spaces of the ruins, constantly transforming from immense empty rooms to constrained and suffocating tunnels and corridors.

What is particularly interesting is not just The Last Guardian’s disempowerment or sense of scale, but rather what it manages to achieve with said elements and the resulting contrast to establish interdependency between the two characters and solidify their relationship. The combat, an almost complete inverse of Ico’s combat, is the most obvious example. Rather than defending Yorda by whacking shadow enemies with a stick, the roles have been reversed, in that the player must rely upon Trico to guard against scores of possessed armor as to avoid getting kidnapped himself. Even so, the game plays around with this idea of vulnerability, shifting the onus of responsibility about as the boy often finds himself in positions where he must actively support or protect Trico, such as disposing of glass eyes that scare his friend or scrambling to pull a nearby switch to lower a bridge and give Trico room to climb up to safety. The game is even willing to occasionally break its own rules to demonstrate how this sense of caring evolves past its defined guidelines. In almost any other game, this mechanical inconsistency would be regarded as a flaw, but it is this sense of doubt that creates room for the relationship to build from in the first place, and is perhaps the game’s most understated strength.

This is not to say that The Last Guardian was bereft of limitations regarding the execution of its ambitious scope. The most pressing challenge that Ueda and his team faced was how to balance its constructed sense of reality with regards to player expectations; that is, it had to find meaningful ways to commit to its vision of establishing the relationship between the boy and Trico while also acknowledging and appeasing players that would otherwise get lost or frustrated. Perhaps the most obvious downgrade from Ico is the presence of constant button prompts appearing on-screen to alert the players on how to better control the boy and instruct Trico; while the frequency of the prompts lessens over time, it is a slight disappointment that the game doesn’t simply force the players to experiment with inputs and commands as a more subtle and trusting substitute. This downfall however, is an anomaly amongst The Last Guardian’s other shortcomings, as it manages to successfully disguise many of its other concessions and limitations. There’s a classic “escape from the collapsing structure” sequence where all you do is hold forward and jump, but the game gets away with it because the player is used to being framed as a helpless participant. There’s occasional voice-over dialogue hints whenever the player has been stuck for a while in the same area, but it feels far less intrusive than Dormin’s repeated and booming hints in Shadow of the Colossus because the game has already established itself as a retrospective re-telling from the now grown boy’s point of view. Trico doesn’t respond immediately to the boy’s commands when being told where to go, but it makes sense that they wouldn’t function like clockwork and would need time to spot and process the situation from their own point of view, so the lag in response feels justified. It doesn’t matter that certain isolated elements of the game would crumble under scrutiny. What matters is that the situational context to allow players to suspend their disbelief is almost always present; in other words, the illusion holds up.

I’m still learning more about the game to this day. There are so many little details that I wouldn’t have spotted upon a first playthrough, and it’s an absolute joy finally getting to gush upon spotting them in replays. Of course it makes sense that you can’t just issue specific commands to Trico at the very start as a sequence-break despite not being taught by the game; after all, Trico hasn’t had time to observe you and mimic your actions to carry out such commands. Of course the hostile creatures that look exactly like your friend behave similarly; how can you then use your preconceived knowledge of their physiology to aid your friend in a fight against their copycat? I also can’t help but appreciate how GenDesign condensed so much learning within its introduction; in the first ten minutes alone, you’re hinted on how to later deal with the bodies of armor (the magical runes that appear before waking up are the exact same as the runes that appear when grabbed, and are dispelled in the same manner of furiously mashing buttons), you get to figure out how Trico’s eyes change colors depending upon whether they’re mesmerized or hostile, and it quickly establishes the premise of building up trust with a very wary creature that’s more than likely to misunderstand or ignore you at first. Combine all of these nuances with the game’s ability to destabilize and diversify playthroughs via Trico’s innate curiosity and semi-unpredictable instincts, and you get a game that becomes easier to appreciate the more the player familiarizes themselves with its inner workings.

I think a lot of criticism for The Last Guardian ultimately comes down to less of what we perceive the game is and more of what we perceive the game isn’t. It’s not a fully player-controlled puzzle-platforming game like Ico, it’s not a puzzle-combat game with spectacle like Shadow of the Colossus, and it’s certainly not a classic companion escort-quest game where you can just order Trico around like a robot and expect automatic results every time. Instead of focusing on the progression of more complex controls and puzzles, The Last Guardian is focused on the progression of a seemingly more complex relationship. I’m not going to pretend that everyone will get something out of this game, as it definitely requires a good deal of patience and player investment to meet the game halfway. It’s certainly more difficult to appreciate given its lack of influence unlike Ico or its lack of exhilarating boss encounters unlike Shadow of the Colossus. That said, it’s this element of danger in its ability to commit to its vision while alienating impatient players that makes it such a compelling title once it finally clicks. Many before me have pointed out how powerful the bond between the player and Trico felt upon learning from others that improperly caring for Trico results in your companion stubbornly ignoring the player’s commands; after all, volume swells cannot exist without contrast to provide room for growth. Perhaps this is why at the end of the day, I find myself transfixed by every word that Fumito Ueda has to offer. In an era where developers feel overly concerned with the best and brightest, he doesn’t seem concerned about what video games mean so much as what video games are. I can only hope that someday, he and GenDesign will return to bring us a new title that captures our imagination as thoroughly as many of his works already have for me.

heaven, hell, heaven again

If Andrei Rublev becomes praying through film, teaching us how to bear the cruelty of its passages, The Last Guardian feels like a harsh meditation in which kindness is a piecemeal revelation as the only way to get through. Not as explicitly as an introspection you can hear from the person whose faith is challenged over and over, but even more confidently lies in the power of experience.

The game almost doesn't speak about any monument you're in contact with to the point that dialogues, most of them, feel very redundant because we are not supposed to get too much in the realm of representation. In one way or another, the game named and thought its narrative elements to steal imagination from our control, and that's why dream-like seems to be the proper way to describe it.

Honestly, I believe the unarticulated emotional vibrancy of this game is almost too much, and sometimes it needs the cliche appeal to distract us from the weight of nest's atmosphere. In the last segments (what we usually call a "Final Boss") the space almost drowns, but the peaks of motion, power and narrative intensity that follows are all as close to perfection as any visual media can get.

SOTC definitely handles better the darker themes, making it feel more grounded by giving a greater level of control to the player, but nothing conveys as much life and as much death attached to its gestures so well.