The game looks beautiful, its environments are stunning, and its puzzles are clever and satisfying, often with multiple layers to figure out. There's a core gameplay loop around solving a puzzle to get to a new room, then figuring out how to get your bird-dog friend to follow. That loop is strong, and it helps reinforce the relationship between the protagonist and the pet.

Fittingly enough, I discovered a game experience that also requires patience, but not in a frustrating way. Instead it’s more serene as you slowly discover how to get around in this strange world with your only ally, a mammoth beast. The Last Guardian isn’t a game that you just tear through without a second thought, and that’s what makes it special.

The controls take some time to get used to; they’re much more responsive and fluid than in Team Ico’s past games, but it’s hard to train your brain to use triangle to jump, and pointing Trico to an area of interest using the camera and holding two buttons at once can be tricky.

When the interplay of puzzle-solving and emotional bond comes off, The Last Guardian is exhilarating like nothing else. Trico is an astonishingly realized creature, with subtle animations and sound design helping you figure out what it’s feeling.

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 pre-production 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.

In the demo we played, the boy now holds on automatically until you press a button to drop. On the surface, this may be kinder to the player, but I always felt that having to keep a button depressed to simulate hanging on for dear life was a way of heightening the connection between the player and the on-screen action. Now it’s easier to play, but doesn’t feel as much like Colossus anymore. A good tradeoff? I’m not sure.

In 2011 Ueda had explained that Trico had a mind of its own, and that was very evident in this year’s demo. There were times when I would gesture, holler, and clap my hands to get Trico’s attention. Most of the time he’d respond, but not always. I grew frustrated, then reminded myself that Trico was just a bird-dog thing, so I needed to be patient.

I don’t know if this makes for a good game, but it did make for an interesting experience. The AI seems rather sophisticated, and Trico could very well be the most realistic creature to appear in a video game. While that realism might wear on some players’ patience, it made the game more immediate. You are dealing with an animal and all that entails.

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.

In the demo we played, the boy now holds on automatically until you press a button to drop. On the surface, this may be kinder to the player, but I always felt that having to keep a button depressed to simulate hanging on for dear life was a way of heightening the connection between the player and the on-screen action. Now it’s easier to play, but doesn’t feel as much like Colossus anymore. A good tradeoff? I’m not sure.