This contains possible spoilers for The Last Guardian.
It was like coming home.
For a brief moment I looked around the room for my mother, or brother, or sister, or father. The people who had been around when I started the journey with these games. Shadow of the Colossus, a game I experienced in wonder with my sister and mother. ICO I started when I began my journey alone. It all circled back and I wondered where they all were at that moment.
But seven years is a lot of time and so much has changed since then. At that moment, I was completely alone.
So I looked at the screen again and for some reason, I could hear the song “Heal” from ICO. But only for a moment.
“Press any button.”
And it began.
—
There was a lot riding on this game. A lot more than I realized.
I should back up.
I need to begin with the fact that I have a bias. Team ICO/genDESIGN, the developers behind The Last Guardian, are also responsible for ICO and Shadow of the Colossus. Shadow has been my favorite game since I played it almost ten years ago. I’ve routinely bought it, or ICO, or both, for my friends when they say they haven’t played it. I can go on for hours about the style choices and decision making and story from the games. I even wrote an article earlier this year about Wander and Agro from Shadow and why they’re the best things ever (™) .
The Last Guardian was announced seven years ago at E3 in 2009 and I will be honest, I made plans of asking for it and a Playstation 3 for my graduation gift. From, er….high school. The announcement made it seem like a game about a boy and his giant pet bird-dog, in a beautiful environment and possibly with puzzles. I was sold.
It obviously didn’t release before I graduated high school. Or college, for that matter. In fact, due to the nature of the delays–from software issues to Team Ico leaving Sony–I heard more rumors that The Last Guardian was never coming out than anything else. I started to let myself forget about it, but every time I heard the music from ICO or replayed Shadow, I thought about the game that could have been.
At this point, I really need to make a shout out to my roommate. Because he was the one who had to deal with me running into his room with a box and giggling like mad. And bless him so, for shrugging it off and saying, “Seems your game came in.”
—
I tried not to get my hopes up; I really did. Games with long development cycles go through a lot of changes and there’s no guarantee that the game announced at the beginning will be anything like the game that comes out at the end. There was very little information about Guardian in advance. A few trailers, sure. But I was routinely told the game was going to suck because no one knew anything about it. The release seemed to take everyone by surprise.
A half hour into the game, I stopped worrying and let myself be happy.
Honestly, The Last Guardian is great. It is. It’s a meld of elements of ICO and Shadow. Puzzles and exploration mixed with interacting with the Trico (basically, your own personal Colossus). The world, though not as expansive as Shadow, is one puzzle for the boy to solve with the Trico. And the puzzles, 
echoing ICO but missing the constant state of dread brought on by the shadow creatures, combine with the platforming from scaling colossi. Though, for the most part, the Trico seems to have your best interest in mind.
For me personally, it seems to push together my favorite parts from both games, and plus I still get a really rad companion.
The game is fun. I have died a few times because of falling or not paying attention, and struggled with some of the puzzles, but I’ve not gotten frustrated or angry. The game’s aggressive checkpoint system makes failure relatively painless, and since the point is to explore and try different ways to progress through the levels, this game doesn’t stress me out as much as its predecessors. Or really, any other game I’ve played.
This game is beautiful. Even though sometimes it looks a bit washed out (which I’m starting to call a Team Ico/genDESIGN style choice), the scenery is amazing and makes me pause every time I enter a new area. Watching the boy and the Trico interact, the shift of clothing and feathers and sunlight on water and reflections from fire; I’ve already spent a lot of time in game just watching things be.
The Trico is wonderful. It may be my new favorite companion in any video games. Despite everything, Guardian is still, at its core, a game about the bond between the boy and the Trico. Watching it develop–and helping the relationship develop, as it were–has added another level to this game that I had not expected. The AI built in the Trico is amazing. It acts so much like an animal, like a pet, even, that I inadvertently found myself learning its body language. Because its body language, its vocalizations, it’s eyes and movements, everything; it’s so expressive. It’s so real.
My biggest, and only, complaint is the camera. In all three games by Team Ico, the camera has been their biggest drawback. It’s not quite sensitive enough for the amount of movement that is required of it, but then builds too much momentum and is hard to get it to stop in the right place. But once you learn how to compensate for it, it is hardly a problem anymore.
I love this game already, and I’m only about halfway through. I even got my roommate, who describes himself as more of a pen-and-paper gamer and whose only real console experience is Bloodborne, to play it. And he really likes it as well (despite the camera giving him headaches).
Somehow, despite all odds, the game that came out was the game promised. And the timing couldn’t have been better for me.
—
I haven’t played video games in almost six months, basically since my partner left to study abroad. I’ve tried, but typically after about ten or so minutes, I’ve found myself thinking, “What’s the point?” and stopping. On top of that, my war with depression hasn’t been in my favor lately, and games are always the first to go when that happens.
Folks who listened to last week’s podcast heard me admit to, ultimately, just wanting the motivation to play back as my holiday gift. And that I feared, despite the long wait, I wouldn’t be able to convince myself to play Guardian; the loneliness and sadness associated with it and games in general would 
prevent me. Games by Team Ico/genDESIGN are purposefully empty, because the focus is always on the central character and their companion. In ICO, it was Ico and the Girl; in Shadow it was Wander and Mono and Agro; now in Guardian, the focus is to be the boy and the Trico. I feared that seeing this bond in the emptiness would only remind me how lonely I was in reality, so I just thought: What was six more months to a seven year wait?
My hope was that The Last Guardian would help me start dealing with my depression better. It’s no surprise that gaming, reading, and writing were ways for me not to drown. They have always been in my coping mechanism. Losing gaming was a sign that things were getting worse, and I ignored it. In hindsight, I should have gotten help long before this game came out. But sometimes, when you lie to yourself and say “I’m fine” enough, you start to believe it.
Even when things are not fine.
But of course, the very thing I was trying to fight was stopping me from fighting it.
Sam and Charlotte encouraged me to at least try. My partner asked for my review. My roommate said he wouldn’t let me do anything else on Saturday until I at least started the thing.
So I did (I couldn’t let everyone down, after all!). I played about an hour and a half, and then I started crying for no reason and had to stop.
It certainly wasn’t actions from the game that made me cry like that. Nothing in the first two hours causes that much emotional pain (the ending of the game probably will. That’s their MO. But this early on? Nonsense).
Maybe it was relief. In spite of what I thought, I’d been able to pick up the game and fall into the world. And forget about my outside problems and worries for a bit. Maybe it was the relief of the game promised being the game delivered.
Maybe it was the ability to connect. To the game, to the narrative, to the boy and the Trico.
Maybe it was because I felt awake. The game forces you to think, to observe, to interact. It forced me out of the tired, foggy head-space I’ve since fallen into.
Maybe it was that, for the first time since my partner left, I was able to have fun. To find happiness on my own.
Or maybe….I just needed to cry.
—
Playing Guardian now was both perfect and horrible timing. Perfect, because I wasn’t aware of how emotionally deadened I was becoming. Horrible, because the way I found out was immediate emotional overload.
I’m going to try to move a bit slower in the future.
And I know this fleeting happiness may not last. Depression does not just ‘go away’. The best game in the world can’t fix something like this. But it can help on the road to recovery. After all, it’s hard to think, “But no one will miss me,” when a 100 foot bird-dog-cat thing starts crying when it can’t see you and almost runs you over in happiness when it finally finds you.
I know that going forward, and every play-through after, The Last Guardian will always be an emotional experience for me. The game centers around the formation of a bond, the willingness to connect to something outside of yourself, different from yourself. And ultimately, how that bond makes you stronger.
And I think we all need a little of that strength right now.
