Retro Replay Review

Gameplay

The first hours ask you to slow down and meet Trico on its own terms. You free it, feed it, tend its wounds, and gradually turn a frightening encounter into a partnership. That opening is more than setup: it teaches you that progress comes from reading the creature’s mood, gaze, and behavior instead of expecting instant obedience.

Most puzzles grow out of that relationship. The boy can climb, work levers, carry objects, and reach places on his own, but Trico is the essential answer to the castle’s bigger spaces. You ride its back to gain height, rely on its jumps to cross gaps, and use its attention to turn a route that looks impossible into a way forward. When you notice Trico watching a useful ledge or respond by throwing a barrel in the right direction, cooperation starts to click.

The tradeoff is that Trico can be genuinely frustrating. Commands do not always produce an immediate response, and its distractions can make a solved puzzle feel temporarily stalled. Sometimes that behavior makes the creature remarkably believable. Other times, you will wish the game would stop treating patience as a puzzle ingredient. The later need to protect Trico from spears, work around its fear, and redirect its lightning with a shield gives the partnership more pressure than simple traversal alone.

Graphics

The PlayStation 4 game paints the castle as a damp, crumbling place of mossy stone, dark rock passages, flooded chambers, and turquoise underground pools. Shafts of daylight in the ruins and small torchlit corridors give the journey a strong sense of moving between forgotten spaces rather than running through interchangeable platforming rooms.

Trico is the image that sticks. Its enormous dark body fills the frame when the boy rides across ruined courtyards, while its bright blue eyes and oversized ears remain visible in tight caves and on narrow ledges. The behind-the-boy camera often makes the creature’s scale feel imposing, especially when it waits above the water or squeezes into a rocky passage.

Story

This is a story about communication without a shared language. The boy speaks an unknown tongue, while Trico answers with body language, hesitation, hunger, fear, and bursts of protective action. That restraint makes small acts, such as feeding it or removing a spear, carry more weight than a typical companion-game exchange.

The castle escape gives the relationship a clear purpose, and the guards keep it from becoming a purely gentle travelogue. The boy is vulnerable when captured or dragged away, while Trico handles direct combat with its claws. Their strengths fit together cleanly: the boy must solve, climb, and care for Trico, and Trico must open the world and keep the boy safe.

The flashback framing, told by the boy as an old man, adds a wistful edge from the start. More importantly, the story earns its emotion through accumulated dependence. You do not need lengthy explanations to understand why the pair matters to each other after spending so much time learning how to move forward together.

Overall Experience

The Last Guardian is at its best when it lets you feel like you are traveling with an animal that has its own mind. Trico’s stubbornness can interrupt the pace, but it also prevents the relationship from feeling like a standard set of context-sensitive buttons. The game asks you to accommodate another creature, not merely operate it.

Give it a chance if you value atmosphere, environmental puzzles, and a companion relationship with real texture. You should be prepared for moments when the creature’s behavior tests your patience, particularly if you prefer platform games with crisp, immediate responses. The payoff is strongest for anyone willing to treat delays and detours as part of building trust.

Its rough edges are easy to notice, yet they do not erase the tenderness at the center of the adventure. Few games make the simple act of looking back to see whether your companion understands feel so important. The Last Guardian is uneven, strange, and often moving, with a bond strong enough to make its frustrations worth enduring.

Retro Replay Score

7.7/10