The Last Guardian: Hands-on with a game we thought may never exist

I had to wait about 30 minutes to play the E3 demo of The Last Guardian on one of the few behind-closed-doors demo stations available at this year's show. In another sense, though, I've been waiting to play Fumito Ueda's next game for seven years now, ever since its 2009 E3 debut as a PlayStation 3 game. I've been waiting even longer since Ueda's Shadow of the Colossus dazzled the gaming world in 2005.

Playing a game that has been in development that long—and with such a distinguished pedigree—it's hard to separate out the experience itself from the almost crushing weight of expectations layered on top of it. I spent a good deal of the half hour or so with The Last Guardian just in a base state of wonder that the game I was playing was actually real.

The basic gameplay in The Last Guardian demo will feel familiar to anyone who fell in love with Ueda's Ico in 2001. At its core, the game is about finding paths through intricately detailed 3D environments with light puzzle solving and navigation. In an era of sprawling, 100-hour open worlds, it's a pleasantly dated design. The Last Guardian brings an old-school focus on architectural world-building rather than endless busywork quests.

Instead of guiding Ico's mysterious, wispy princess, in The Last Guardian you're paired up with Trico, a three-story tall beast that comes across as a mix of wolf, bird, and horse. As the game starts (the demo encompassed the first chapter of what already felt like a much bigger world), your character wakes up next to Trico at the bottom of a mysterious cavern. The beast is held down by massive chains around the neck, and he whimpers from a couple of wooden stakes impaled in his flesh.

Almost immediately, the game builds up sympathy with Trico through some wonderful animation. As you approach the beast cautiously, he lets out a pained, defensive roar that knocks you tumbling backward end over end. Compared to the canned, motion-captured animations or ragdoll physics of most other games, this simple interaction is brimming with life and emotion. I got the same feeling when Trico elegantly bent over to drink from a barrel of water, when he dove off a large cliff into a beautifully rippling pool of water, or when my character held on to the nape of Trico's neck for dear life as the beast shook his head back and forth.

Trico comes when you call, which is key to providing a climbing surface that lets you reach higher ground. But the beast also has a mind of its own. When you're about to jump to your next platform, Trico will sometimes simply turn around, cat-like, apparently distracted by some random molecule of air. Other times, the animal will show trepidation at following you down into an area unless you entice it with a barrel of water. It's hard to capture in words, but these little details of animation and artificial intelligence impart the game with a tremendous sense of life.

For all these immediately compelling parts of The Last Guardian demo, there are still some concerning technical issues. The game's frame rate chugged noticeably at many points during the demo, which severely distracted me from the painterly lighting and artistic design. You can almost hear the PS4 crying out in pain as it tried to realistically model the movement of every single feather on Trico's back, an effect that just pushes the beast further into the uncanny valley. There's still time to fix issues like these before the game's promised October release, but after nearly a decade in development, these kinds of tech problems aren't a great sign.

I wasn't enamored with The Last Guardian's controls, either. Everything felt just a bit too loose and imprecise; simple actions like positioning your character for a jump, aligning the camera, climbing up Trico's back, or clambering over a small obstacle were more difficult than they should have been. This looseness isn't a dealbreaker in a game that encourages exploration and experimentation over precision (and it's probably a fair trade if the controls allow for that brilliantly lifelike animation), but it was still annoying even in a short demo.

After all this time, the mere fact that The Last Guardian exists as a playable product is enough to wipe away many years of cynicism from my jaded critical eyes. In a few months, when the game is just another product on the crowded holiday shelves,, we'll see if its lifelike animation and charm can sustain a title that many had given up as vaporware.