Wander
through
the
wilderness
T H E
b a c k
S T O R Y
O F
T E A M
8
Chris Olewicz
L
ater this year, Team
ICO will finally release its long anticipated follow up to Ico and
Shadow of the Colossus, seven years after
the first trailer and nine
years after the game
first went into production.
The recent unveiling
of 15 minutes or so
of The Last Guardian
confirms that the game
combines the gameplay mechanics of the
team’s previous two
games, Ico and Shadow of the Colossus,
while attempting to update the aesthetics for
the latest generation of
consoles.
The plot revolves
around the relationship
between a boy and a
bizarre Trico creature
(a portmanteau of the
Japanese words for
bird and cat), the latest
iteration of the player–virtual
character
relationship that Team
Ico developed to such
great effect.
Both of Team Ico’s
previous two titles are
classics of the PS2
era. Ico, a melancholy
puzzle-platformer in
which a young boy
with horns bids to rescue a young girl from
a booming, cavernous
citadel characterised
by large chambers
and ambitiously outsized architecture, was
as haunting as it was
charming, particularly
as you led the girl by
the hand through the
world. Shadow of the
Colossus ramped up
the ambition, as you
guided the young warrior Wander and his
horse Argo through a
vast landscape, with
the mission to defeat
a number of huge elemental giants. Neither
game made a huge
profit, but their impact
among game designers was equal to that
of the games that had
inspired their creator,
Fumito Ueda.
Ueda has cited that
the main inspirations
for Ico were the classic
Delphine releases Another World (released
as Outer World in Japan) and Flashback,
which used cinematic cutscenes to drive
the plot forward, but
lacked any consistent
forms of communication to heighten the
sense of otherworldliness.
Both Ico and Shadow of the Colossus
share the sensibilities
of those classic Amiga
titles in their obliqueness, and their highly
stylised graphics, and
it appears that The Last
Guardian will update
the same aesthetic but
with one twist. This time,