Shadow of the Decades-old Game

The Last Guardian doesn't feel like a game that took ten damn years to make. At least, not in the typical sense.

Titles stuck in development hell tend to come out as a scrambled mess of unrelated ideas, as a result of being left "in the oven" for so long; and often, after being rushed into a releasable state, end up unpolished and obtuse. But that's not the case here: The Last Guardian has a fairly-direct presentation, appropriately-spartan mechanics, and a focused theme. It's a lot like Ico and Shadow of the Colossus in those ways.

That's the problem. The Last Guardian is too much like the games that Fumito Ueda has been making for the last 20 years or so. And without Colossus's thrilling puzzle-parkour boss fights.

It might be fascinating, to observe the development of this auteur and his craft, if The Last Guardian played like a generational improvement (or... two generational improvements?) over his previous work. But it doesn't. I could offer the compliment that its dog-bird beast has some surprisingly-lifelike animations, and that's about it.

Otherwise, it plays a lot like one of today's Unreal Engine 4 "art games," but older. The controls haven't got much better since Colossus. The gameplay is flat, carried almost entirely by familiar and shallow environmental puzzle-solving. The environments look overly similar to those muddy-looking ruins we've seen so many times before. And the storytelling is vacant, in a way that may once have been mysterious, but is now just boring.

That's my net takeaway of what I saw in The Last Guardian: nothing it's doing is interesting. I've seen practically all of it before, and it's no longer novel or engaging. Maybe there's something good buried later in the game? ... but I wasn't motivated enough to stick around and find out.

What The Last Guardian showed me wasn't an advancement of Ueda-san's ideas, but a re-iteration of his old ones. In that context, spending two decades making the same game over and over again, it seems a little bit more like a typical development-hell production; one that should have been abandoned quite some time ago.

Progress: Saw another dog-bird, lost interest.