I just finished this game not even an hour ago but I just loved it so much and wanted an excuse to talk about it a lot so... here goes!

Very quickly before I gush about this game, I do want to get some negatives out of the way. The game isn't "bulletproof" when it comes to bugs- The biggest instance I had for this was chopping a tree down, where you basically wave at your cat Daffodil to come over and help you saw it. It's really cute, but it DOES rely on Daffodil actually walking over to you, and when there's a bug in the game where Daffodil just fucking... disappears....... you're basically stuck at that tree (Save & Quit didn't fix it but closing the game and reopening it did!). Without getting spoilery, I had a slight immersion break earlier on when I found a character somewhere where I shouldn't have, and my boat got stuck in a rocking animation once while I got called over by Atul to start the lightning event, only for said lightning to strike exactly once before my boat continued sailing and the rocking stopped. Other than that, I think I had a pretty smooth experience.

With that out of the way... I consider this game an absolute masterpiece.

It's a slower kind of game, and that's okay! I thought the gameplay was at a right amount of simple, I think adding more complexity to it or making it "harder" would've made things get tedious after a while. (if the rest of the game was as hard as fishing up a goddamn tuna fish i would've been crying for a whole different reason). Outside of following specific character quests, you're basically just trying to keep everyone on board happy by hugging and feeding them and that never got annoying to me. Yeah, each character has two or three specific kinds of food they wont eat but like that was a non-issue for me.

The art and music for this game are fantastic. This game might have my favorite video game soundtrack ever, DEFINITELY the coziest one in any I've played. Each area in this game looks gorgeous, even the little unique patches of sea you sail across. Every character has a fun unique design and it's always exciting to have that reveal of what they look like once they step onto your ship.

Speaking of the characters, THAT'S where the game truly shines. Every spirit you come across has their own story that you learn about the more time you spend with them and you really do start to feel for them. Some are definitely more likable than others, some of these guys ARE kinda fucking assholes, but the stories behind them are all just so heartbreaking and sad and sincere that I cant help but at the very least feel bad for them. Hell, some of the stuff the characters go through resonate with me and make the game hit even harder. And the fact that you KNOW that no matter how attached you are to these characters that you HAVE to say goodbye to them eventually... this is the first game, maybe even the first bit of media ever to actually make me cry and it did it a LOT. There is a greater overarching story of course, it's not just the individual stories of each passenger... and I fucking cried at that too.

If you enjoy cozy games and are willing to just take things slowly, and dont really mind playing a game that's characters and story first over the gameplay itself, then I genuinely GENUINELY cannot recommend this game enough. It's just such a beautiful and emotional experience that will absolutely stick with me for a long time, and will probably forever stay on the higher end of my all-time favorites.

There seems to be a prevalent expectation that as games evolved, they also became exponentially more approachable. Higher budgets resulted in smoother graphics and fewer bugs. More complex controls (adding left/right triggers, then adding one/two joysticks, then dabbling with motion inputs, etc) gave players a firmer grasp over their characters. AI became more predictable as their algorithms became more intricate to capture a wider range of responses. In a sense, as the technology expanded, the resulting products seemingly became more streamlined to better suit the player’s needs while more thoroughly capturing a developer’s vision.

Team Ico has never been about following tradition, however. If anything, the evolution of their titles embodies the regression of player control, choosing to instead utilize technological advancements not just to refine its premise via "design by subtraction" as chump has pointed out, but to deliver an entirely new experience altogether. Ico was a classic tale of boy meets girl; the girl had to be freed from her cage and pulled around the castle, as the boy protected her against everything in her way to prevent her demise. Shadow of the Colossus, however, was a story concerned with the struggle over control. The lone wanderer, in his quest to revive Mono, hunts down various several-story colossi capable of swatting him about like a fly. In the resulting desperate dance of death, he at first struggles to climb their hulking figures, hanging on for dear life until he discovers their weak points and stabs the colossi while they helplessly flail about. In other words, it's a game about trying to regain any semblance of control until you realize after the fact that the only shadow left was the literal shadow cast by Wander over their fallen corpse.

The Last Guardian then, can be thought of as the natural evolution of Team Ico titles, in that it melds previous design sensibilities and thrives off of disempowering the player throughout its entirety. Trico, the player’s companion and a cross between cat and bird, is essentially the analog to Wander’s horse in Shadow of the Colossus, Agro. Fumito Ueda designed Agro as a companion rather than just a vehicle, and had his team develop specific movement algorithms that would allow Agro to steer herself without the player’s explicit control, forcing players to put their trust in their steed during certain fights emphasizing bow aiming. Ueda and his new team at GenDesign iterated upon this idea, explicitly creating environments where the player was forced to rely upon Trico’s actions to progress and thus establish dependency between the boy and his companion.

While the game can be thought of as an inversion of Ico in this sense, its design influence upon The Last Guardian should not go overlooked, particularly in how the game captures Ico’s physicality. Ico’s key strength was establishing a sense of presence through minimalist puzzles that lacked overly gamey elements, namely in how Ico interacted with his surroundings. Players are subtly guided into climbing chains, pulling levers, sitting on stone sofas to save, and most importantly, holding down R1 to hold Yorda by the hand around the castle and pull her out of danger whenever captured. The Last Guardian innovates upon this by combining several of the traversable elements and the companion into one. To better navigate the vast ruins, the boy must guide Trico and utilize their tall body of climbable feathers in order to scale heights, while occasionally dragging around their large tail and dangling it over ledges to safely climb down. Most importantly, you get to pet Trico whenever you feel like it to comfort your friend in both their happiest and most emotionally taxing moments. In both Ico and The Last Guardian, the player’s constant contact with both the environment and their companion keeps them firmly rooted within its constructed sense of reality by regularly reminding them of their companion’s physical presence.

This physicality would not be as significant without the lessons learned from Shadow of the Colossus however, not just regarding AI behavior but also specifically in how it adapts the game’s sense of scale. Trico is large, and the boy is small. As mentioned previously, Trico can utilize their size to lean against walls and give the boy a step up, but they can also utilize their weight to hold down large chains and swipe away at imposing bodies of armor. Meanwhile, the boy is much more agile and can fit into otherwise inaccessible small spaces by Trico, squeezing through narrow tunnels and gaps in metal gates to pull switches and let his partner through. This obvious difference in size creates consistent room for contrast, not just in how the two characters differ in terms of functionality but also in terms of their scale when measured against the traversed liminal spaces of the ruins, constantly transforming from immense empty rooms to constrained and suffocating tunnels and corridors.

What is particularly interesting is not just The Last Guardian’s disempowerment or sense of scale, but rather what it manages to achieve with said elements and the resulting contrast to establish interdependency between the two characters and solidify their relationship. The combat, an almost complete inverse of Ico’s combat, is the most obvious example. Rather than defending Yorda by whacking shadow enemies with a stick, the roles have been reversed, in that the player must rely upon Trico to guard against scores of possessed armor as to avoid getting kidnapped himself. Even so, the game plays around with this idea of vulnerability, shifting the onus of responsibility about as the boy often finds himself in positions where he must actively support or protect Trico, such as disposing of glass eyes that scare his friend or scrambling to pull a nearby switch to lower a bridge and give Trico room to climb up to safety. The game is even willing to occasionally break its own rules to demonstrate how this sense of caring evolves past its defined guidelines. In almost any other game, this mechanical inconsistency would be regarded as a flaw, but it is this sense of doubt that creates room for the relationship to build from in the first place, and is perhaps the game’s most understated strength.

This is not to say that The Last Guardian was bereft of limitations regarding the execution of its ambitious scope. The most pressing challenge that Ueda and his team faced was how to balance its constructed sense of reality with regards to player expectations; that is, it had to find meaningful ways to commit to its vision of establishing the relationship between the boy and Trico while also acknowledging and appeasing players that would otherwise get lost or frustrated. Perhaps the most obvious downgrade from Ico is the presence of constant button prompts appearing on-screen to alert the players on how to better control the boy and instruct Trico; while the frequency of the prompts lessens over time, it is a slight disappointment that the game doesn’t simply force the players to experiment with inputs and commands as a more subtle and trusting substitute. This downfall however, is an anomaly amongst The Last Guardian’s other shortcomings, as it manages to successfully disguise many of its other concessions and limitations. There’s a classic “escape from the collapsing structure” sequence where all you do is hold forward and jump, but the game gets away with it because the player is used to being framed as a helpless participant. There’s occasional voice-over dialogue hints whenever the player has been stuck for a while in the same area, but it feels far less intrusive than Dormin’s repeated and booming hints in Shadow of the Colossus because the game has already established itself as a retrospective re-telling from the now grown boy’s point of view. Trico doesn’t respond immediately to the boy’s commands when being told where to go, but it makes sense that they wouldn’t function like clockwork and would need time to spot and process the situation from their own point of view, so the lag in response feels justified. It doesn’t matter that certain isolated elements of the game would crumble under scrutiny. What matters is that the situational context to allow players to suspend their disbelief is almost always present; in other words, the illusion holds up.

I’m still learning more about the game to this day. There are so many little details that I wouldn’t have spotted upon a first playthrough, and it’s an absolute joy finally getting to gush upon spotting them in replays. Of course it makes sense that you can’t just issue specific commands to Trico at the very start as a sequence-break despite not being taught by the game; after all, Trico hasn’t had time to observe you and mimic your actions to carry out such commands. Of course the hostile creatures that look exactly like your friend behave similarly; how can you then use your preconceived knowledge of their physiology to aid your friend in a fight against their copycat? I also can’t help but appreciate how GenDesign condensed so much learning within its introduction; in the first ten minutes alone, you’re hinted on how to later deal with the bodies of armor (the magical runes that appear before waking up are the exact same as the runes that appear when grabbed, and are dispelled in the same manner of furiously mashing buttons), you get to figure out how Trico’s eyes change colors depending upon whether they’re mesmerized or hostile, and it quickly establishes the premise of building up trust with a very wary creature that’s more than likely to misunderstand or ignore you at first. Combine all of these nuances with the game’s ability to destabilize and diversify playthroughs via Trico’s innate curiosity and semi-unpredictable instincts, and you get a game that becomes easier to appreciate the more the player familiarizes themselves with its inner workings.

I think a lot of criticism for The Last Guardian ultimately comes down to less of what we perceive the game is and more of what we perceive the game isn’t. It’s not a fully player-controlled puzzle-platforming game like Ico, it’s not a puzzle-combat game with spectacle like Shadow of the Colossus, and it’s certainly not a classic companion escort-quest game where you can just order Trico around like a robot and expect automatic results every time. Instead of focusing on the progression of more complex controls and puzzles, The Last Guardian is focused on the progression of a seemingly more complex relationship. I’m not going to pretend that everyone will get something out of this game, as it definitely requires a good deal of patience and player investment to meet the game halfway. It’s certainly more difficult to appreciate given its lack of influence unlike Ico or its lack of exhilarating boss encounters unlike Shadow of the Colossus. That said, it’s this element of danger in its ability to commit to its vision while alienating impatient players that makes it such a compelling title once it finally clicks. Many before me have pointed out how powerful the bond between the player and Trico felt upon learning from others that improperly caring for Trico results in your companion stubbornly ignoring the player’s commands; after all, volume swells cannot exist without contrast to provide room for growth. Perhaps this is why at the end of the day, I find myself transfixed by every word that Fumito Ueda has to offer. In an era where developers feel overly concerned with the best and brightest, he doesn’t seem concerned about what video games mean so much as what video games are. I can only hope that someday, he and GenDesign will return to bring us a new title that captures our imagination as thoroughly as many of his works already have for me.

Since its initial reveal, this game has faced heavy backlash, but now it is widely regarded as the most creative & enjoyable title from Ubisoft in a while. Having played the game myself, I can confidently say that I share this sentiment.

Even though it has shifted in the genre, this new direction of PoP still manages to keep the three key PoP elements that I find to be very important: platforming, combat, and challenge. Despite being a 2D game, The Lost Crown takes these aspects to arguably a higher level, making it the most challenging game in the series since the classic 2D games. However, the controls are so smooth & precise that makes traversal as Sargon fun through platforming sections, and the clever level design ensures that it never gets stale.

I'm genuinely surprised by the combat; it's incredibly deep right from the get-go, even before unlocking new powers or finding items. I highly recommend taking on the training challenges to learn the mechanics and earn rewards. It's really useful to have a good grasp of the combos and the satisfying parry because enemies or bosses won't go easy on you if you mindlessly just mash buttons, even on normal difficulty. The platforming and puzzles, especially with the optional sections make this game much more challenging than any of the 3D PoP games. I'd say it's more in line with the difficulty of the 2D PoP games but without any unfairness or rough edges.

I wanted to emphasize how this game gets the essential elements of the PoP series so right & elevates it to another level. While it doesn't bring much new to the table within the Metroidvania it shifts into, that doesn't bother me because it is incredibly well-crafted and seamlessly incorporates the key PoP elements. The rewards such as amulets and powers that augment your abilities or arsenal, it ain’t just meaningless stat boosts like in many Ubisoft games. Additionally, discovering optional platforming sections, puzzles, and boss fights is highly rewarding, and the map is easy to navigate.

The memory shard feature in this game is a great addition though, allowing for screenshots taken during gameplay to be displayed on your map. However, the game doesn't offer much innovation to the Metroidvania genre outside of that. What stands out is how Ubisoft Montpellier incorporated PoP elements so well into that shift in genre on their first attempt similar to how Nintendo transitioned The Legend of Zelda franchise with Breath of the Wild. I would argue they did an even better job.

Let's talk about the presentation for a moment instead of focusing on the gameplay. I don’t care much for the character designs, but apart from that, the environments and animation are incredibly stylish and visually stunning. Combine that with the amazing atmosphere and energetic soundtrack created by the talented Ori composer Gareth Coker and newcomer Mentrix, and you've got a winning combination.

Now, I do wanna express a few complaints that I have about this game that I want to address to acknowledge its imperfections. The skins that you come across are quite disappointing, one minor character has a text-to-speech voice while others with less dialogue are voiced by actual people, and the pacing of the story in the middle is practically non-existent (although it does pick up again towards the climax). The last thing is that despite being well polished for the most part, the few bugs that I have encountered are noticeable.

To sum it up, I was expecting Ubisoft Montpellier to create a decent game at the very least when I found out about them making this new PoP game. However, it's not just good, it's exceptional. This talented studio known for bringing us Rayman 1-3, Origins, Legends, Beyond Good & Evil, Valiant Heart, and even the underrated gem Rabbids Go Home has once again delivered with The Lost Crown. It's great to see that this studio still possesses its magic touch and has brought Prince of Persia back to the forefront of high quality. I'll be genuinely surprised if this doesn't end up being my game of the year, and it's only the first month of 2024….

There’s a boldness in trying to stand toe to toe alongside the giants; Portal Revolution caught my attention the very moment I saw its trailer last year, and since then I’ve had my eye on it till the day on its release, and I got it easy, think about the people that were there from the beginning! Revolution has been in development for 8 years, a crazy amount of time for any game, let alone one made by fans a s a way to celebrate the series, tho in this case it makes sense when you really think about its intentions.

The most known and popular Portal and Portal 2 mods are all test chamber centered, by that I mean they don’t really venture in the aspects of the series aside of expanding on the puzzles; this is nor a jab nor a complaint in the slightest, in fact some innovate with the original concept in genius ways, and plus, it’s completely expected for them to shy away from the narrative department except for maybe a nod or two, because creating a new story in your fun little mod would be inserting yourself within Portal’s narrative, something not many would even consider as a possibility to do, because, how could they even attempt it?

The thing about Portal Revolution is that it does, it does not want to limit itself to just be a succession of puzzles one after the other, it wants to go further beyond that, it was to surprise you with its presentation and sequences beyond normal gameplay, it wants to have its own voice, one that can fit right with other two. And, listen, I’m not trying to imply or make a statement about how both of the Portal games’ narratives are unparalleled or a master class is videogame narrative —even if few games can say they have the ‘’part where he kills you’’—, they really aren’t the most impactful narratives in all of gaming, but what they are is both well executed and managing to feel important, especially in the first one, where the story melds perfectly with the gameplay, rather than being at the service of it and just an excuse for why are you shooting portals and going though puzzles. Portal is not simply a great series, it’s an excellent duology whose story is pretty much told and its gameplay basically perfected, and trying to add onto that is a herculean task that I don’t blame Valve for not wanting to take.

But Revolution doesn’t even come from Valve, it’s from a group of fans that really love the series and wanted to face all of this dilemmas, which is an even more scary prospect at that, because ironically enough, those that unabashedly love a certain work are the most prompt to make mistakes that those that recognize its successes as well as the flaws, and it’s through that mixture of both undying love for the originals and fear at failing to be lesser than them… that you get Revolution’s story line.

Stop me if you heard this before: a story about a woman is woken up by an orb-shaped hysteric robot in a room part of a giant infrastructure that is decaying and falling down with the promise of getting out if you help him, only for halfway through the adventure getting thrown into depths of the oldest parts of the facility traversing through its older and abandoned test chambers seeking to reach the top and becoming allies with another robot whose conscience was once part of a human, and reaching the original facility that’s now at the risk of collapsing because of the true intentions of the first robot you met and you and your new companion have to stop him to save the entire building and yourselves… also one of them may or may not have a British accent. First of all, wow, I’m surprised you didn’t stopped me, you sure you have played the original series before? And secondly… yeah, the game practically follows beat by beat Portal 2’s narrative, specially half-way through. It’s a real shame that hits doubly hard because even when these similarities where present from the very start, at first they felt more like interesting and even warranted parallelisms than anything else; there were a set of key differences that kept thing pretty exciting and that made this felt like a worthwhile pre-quel, one that isn’t necessary to get the story at full, but one that makes sense withing this world and this narrative, but then you encounter your first ‘’broken bridge’’, and you realize that this games that follows its inspiration even more than it seemed. Listen, I really like Portal 2… but not as much as the original Portal, not by a long shot; and it isn’t because it has a more expansive narrative, but because, unlike I said about its predecessor, it doesn’t feel like the story and gameplay work together, but instead that the story is constantly trying to find weird ways to throw you into puzzles; either by GlaDOS putting you through them because reasons I guess, Wheatley doing the same because… reasons, I guess, and then there’s Old Aperture, or as I like to call it, ‘’J.K. Simmons’ nonsensical puzzle hell’’. These moments aren’t enough to poison me in the slightest, but they represent a intrinsically problem with Portal 2’s design and how it messes with its own pace… and then Portal Revolution looks at it and says ‘’Wouldn’t be cool if I also did it? Yeah, it’d be pretty cool…’’

Roadblocks that just sorta… happen, diversions that don’t make any sense (fun fact, a chapter is fact named around said diversion!), and we even get to return to old Aperture for a much more random and nonsensical reason than ever before! It’s a moment that just happens because I guess it was cool in Portal 2 and hey, we gotta make you meet this important character and have two extra chapters before the finale somehow! At some point it just starts going through the motions and never stops from there, and I have to say, it certainly managed to remind me of Portal 2, but I’m not sure if it was for the reasons the team wanted. No joke, at some point a character just throws you into a chamber and says ‘’Well, you have to do this puzzle, why you ask?... Idk LMAO’’ and at first was pretty cute, but that moment definitively soured when the game said the same thing like another 5 times.

The roots of this insecurity also reach the dialogue a bit; I want go on a tangent for a second and praise the amazing work both VA’s put into their role and the effort behind the screenplay, everyone on board clearly wanted to make this as close to a official Portal experience it could get, and the professionality of both voice actors on their roles fits what you would say in an official game to a tea, and dialogue for the most part feels genuine and got a few smiles out of me!... However, there are still some weird oddities here and there; things like names like Black Mesa or Borealis thrown around just for fans to catch the reference instead to doing a meaningful connection or joke like in the originals, but worst of all is what they did to poor Stirling. I really liked the guy at first! Loved his introduction as a kind of more upbeat amicable GLaDOS that serves the same purpose as Wheatley, and I really enjoyed his attempts at comedy and impressions, but after a while, all of his character is… gone, and by the end of the game we are left with what I could only described as a ‘’Poor-man’s Wheatley’’. Also it has certain lines like ‘’It’s time we bring her back, isn’t it?’’ that made me roll my eyes so hard they went numb, I don’t know how else to describe it except by saying that. The second character is actually super cool tho! Don’t want to get much into spoiler territory concerning them since it’s introduced late into the adventure, but it’s super unique personality wise with what we’ve come to expect in this series but it fits naturally into the series mythos like a glove, I don’t mean it as a joke when I say I wished they were official and got even more screen time.

There seems to be this idea of ‘’If you want to make it again, you have to make it grander’’ that Portal 2 subconsciously introduced and that Revolution just decides to go on with for despite its own detriment: it never reaches the genius simplicity of the original, but also never manages the same level of wonder and surprise of Portal 2 setting wise, it’s stuck in this middle-valley, sandwiched between a monument of a game and another monument of a game, seemingly having nothing to compete with neither or lacking anything new to offer…seemingly.

Stefan Heinz, main developer behind Portal: Revolution, has stated that Portal: Revolution’s puzzle difficulty starts where Portal 2 stops, something that can be read on the game’s own Steam page, and while there’s truth in those words, when reading it you may arrive to the conclusion that it picks up from where it let off and completely expects you to have played the previous games, and even tho of course the fact that you’d play the original duology is the more sensical thing, Revolution acts as if it were a completely independent entry, and it does it with a mastery that simply awed me, and it never stopped from there. It slowly teaches you the basics little by little, and from there its uses them to unimaginable potentials; I never thought so much could be done being able to only shoot one portal, but Revolution shatters that conception and goes completely wild with it. I had so much fun in this chambers, so much joy experimenting until finally finding the insane solution, thinking outside the box in ways I could only expect from the original series and going even beyond that, using the ‘’going out of bounds’’ idea and never looking back, taking everything that was established and reaching new heights, presenting old concepts in a new life, and even introducing its own ideas like with the laser cubes, but it never gets stale, every idea and set of puzzles is used until it can’t give anything more, at which point it jumps onto next. I find the words to describe how amazingly these are designed complicated, not all are bangers, but most are, and it’s not just because they tried to make harder puzzles, it’s because they made puzzle that feel novel and creative. Also resolving them while the original compositions sound in the background is incredible, I linked one before and I really mean it, the new songs are all amazing.

But Portal Revolution is not just a collection of test chambers, it tries to be more than that, capping things off with a final boss fight, once that forces to repeat segments, that doesn’t pose much of a spectacle, and that feels derivative story-wise… honestly it’s sad to see how it perfectly fits the rest of the game’s story…Revolution wanted to be a lot, and calling it a failure is both a lie and a disservice, the fact this is even real is worth of praise, and the moments where it shines and where it’s puzzles really hit, it achieves peaks that face the originals, and I’d say in some cases even surpasses them, and that alone makes it worth a recommendation! If only it was more consistent in that regard, instead, I leave wishing it wasn’t so scared, that it didn’t love Portal 2 so much, that it kept innovating, that it yearned to be even more unique, because at the end, that’s the true spirit of Portal.

Also, the finale is really weird, aside of the kind of jarring final boss, it doesn’t feel like there’s a proper ending it just sorta—