How to Communicate with Your Giant Mythological Pet

In The Last Guardian, a young boy wakes up in a cave beside a wounded and shackled creature, of a type he knows as a "Trico." Together, the two of them try to escape what turns out to be the remains of some ancient city set in the middle of a crater or hollowed-out volcano.

It's a mixture of platforming and puzzle solving, the former often required to achieve the latter. The boy may have to scale a tower, then leap across a series of what are essentially mobiles until he can destroy the stained glass image of an eye that frightens Trico. Or Trico is tired and you need to find these faintly glistening barrels that he can eat to replenish his energy and get them back to him somehow. 

There's no life bars or health meters; you can die if you fall too far, or be hauled off into the light by the living armors you encounter, but you just return to your last checkpoint. Likewise, Trico can't die no matter how many spears those armors chuck into him, but when you reach a point where the game says he's tired and doesn't want to move, that's it until you get him some food.

At other times, the puzzle may be figuring out what you need Trico to do to advance. Although it's often not figuring out what to do that's the problem, so much as getting Trico to do it.

There's also the aforementioned armors to contend with. This mostly translates into the kid running, although sometimes he has to figure out how to get past them to throw a switch without being grabbed. It would have been nice if the game told me I could help Trico by pulling the helmets off after he knocked them down, but I was probably 70% of the way through before it thought to mention that.

I didn't feel as though I had as much difficulty controlling the kid as Kelvin describes in his review. Usually when it came time to start inching over a narrow path, so long as I approached it slowly, the game would understand what I intended to do. I didn't run off cliffs much, but trying to make a jump I wasn't supposed to because I didn't understand what I was supposed to do and falling to my death? That I did several times.

The camera, however, was exhausting to deal with. It might rotate while I was climbing a chain or up Trico's back, and suddenly the controls are reversed. I became leery whenever I had to jump towards something, because the camera seemed to settle at an awkward angle that somehow threw off my aim. Died more than once that way. Not to mention if Trico and I were in a tight space together, the camera might be obscured entirely by a wall, ceiling, or Trico's body.

But trying to convey to Trico what I needed done was the most frustrating part. Sometimes he seems to understand without me doing anything, immediately jumping from one narrow pillar to another to cross a gorge. Other times, I had to keep pointing at a ledge or bridge and urging him to jump. 4, 5, 6 times giving the command before he'd actually do it. A couple of times very late in the game, I was trying to tell him to jump up, and he started back down instead.

The game is meant to play like a collaboration. You and Trico, working together to get out of this place. You open the gates and remove the weird eye symbols that bar his path, Trico scales the heights you never could and smashes the armors that catch you with ease. I felt more like I was stuck in a terrible escort mission. One where the person you protect is so stupid, it's like they're actively resisting your efforts to keep them alive.

That said, the game makes Trico expressive enough, and he saves the kid's hide enough, that I did end up caring about him and wanting to try and spare him injury if I could. It's a lot like taking care of my dad's dogs. Moments of great fondness and amusement intermingled with, "Why are you like this?!"