“I awoke to find myself in a strange cave.”

This is the fairy tale opening of Fumito Ueda’s heavily anticipated game, 10 years in the making and only the forty-six year old Japanese director’s third major work. But then, of course, the first two – Ico and Shadow of Colossus – are legendary. Film director Guillermo del Toro once described them as the medium’s sole masterpieces; anticipation is accordingly high.

Like its predecessors, this is the story of young boy – this time, one whose actions are narrated by an elderly man looking back on his former journey. Within moments familiarity is challenged via Trico, a bruised and chained alien creature with whom you share a forgotten, tumbledown cell.

Trico is a composite animal: he has the claws and feathers of a bird, the ears of a cat and the tail of a rodent. But his temperament, as anyone who has ever owned and loved a dog will immediately recognise, is pure canine. It’s there in the way the creature questioningly cocks his head, or fires off a volley of sniffs. It’s there in the way Trico flings his prey from side to side with deadly vigour. It’s there in that never-sated interest in treats, those glowing barrels of some presumably delicious syrup used to lure and coax the creature into position, or revive him when he’s famished and lethargic. It’s there, of course, in that clever face, always so eager to please. And it’s there in the silent friendship that in time binds boy and animal, a bond that also stretches, mystically and joyously, through the controller, and into the player’s heart.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest If the game’s notoriously difficult and protracted development was spent on perfecting its animations, it was time well spent. Photograph: Sony

Empathy is established within moments. With horns shorn and spears punctuating his back, the Trico you first meet is weak and panicked. Before you can ask who?, what?, why?, where? and when?, you must first busy yourself with nursing the animal back to health, a tone-setting act of kindness. Unlike Ueda’s first game, in which you led a waif-like girl from her prison across similarly ivy-draped, dilapidated walls and masonry, Trico is no damsel in distress. The boy has no weapon to fend off the pursuing ghoulish, clinking suits of armour. Time after time you must put your entire faith in Trico’s intelligence and ability, a direct inversion of the usual video game setup that casts the player as the omni-competent protagonist.

Trust builds through adversity. At first, the boy and Trico tentatively aid one another. You can point at places where you’d like the animal to move in order to provide an impromptu platform, or point at objects you’d like him to snatch or pull at, in order to, for example, raise a grate. The crucial moment comes when you first place your life in Trico’s jaws, leaping into space in the hope he will snatch you from the air. By the end of the journey, the bond is such that Trico will playfully pick you up in his mouth and flick you overhead to land, cartwheeling, on his back. After a battle, you are the only one able to soothe Trico by clambering on to his back and petting him.

Eventually, the bond between boy and beast deepens to such a degree that you’ll be able to direct the creature with greater specificity. While clutching the feathers on the scruff of the creature’s neck you’ll be able to, for example, guide him toward the edge of a broken bridge and, if the distance to the other side isn’t too great, order him to leap. At other points Trico can be used as a slope leading up to a high ledge. Video game environments always reflect, in some way, the abilities of the avatars designed to move through them. Trico has a demonstrable effect on The Last Guardian’s world. Where in Tomb Raider or Uncharted every structure must have a through line of ledges and ladders, here the architecture isn’t forced to accommodate a human climber at every turn. It upsets our deeply learned patterns of spatial reasoning in video games. You could be stood in the middle of some high-walled space, trying to pick out a route around its ramparts and jutting masonry that will get you to the next place only to find that, when you clamber onto Trico’s back, he simply leaps the obstruction.

If the game’s notoriously difficult and protracted development was spent on perfecting its animations, it was time well spent. Trico’s tics are masterfully cribbed from nature. There’s the gruff snort, the inquisitive tilt and the focus-clearing waggle of the ears. There’s the squint of pleasure when you itch his nose. There’s the way in which he crouches and shuffles his backside before making a tall leap, signalled by the warning flap of those useless wings. Trico’s animations are more than mere dressing. They give the puzzles a uniquely organic feel. In video games we’re used to finding specific keys (both literal and metaphorical) to unlock specific hindrances. Here, a designer may have authored the solutions, but they are arrived at via a lunge and a frantic scramble to gain a foothold.

While the texture is organic, beneath the loveable frame, Trico is inescapably an artificial intelligence, one to whom you can only make suggestions rather than explicit directions. This, surely, has been the root of The Last Guardian’s development troubles (as indeed it has been in countless other games that have replied upon companion AI). There are few frustrations in the medium as raw as those experienced when you know exactly what you are supposed to be doing to progress through the scene, only to be stymied by a stubborn or confused AI. The Last Guardian has these moments (particularly in its latter, water-based stages) but they are rare, especially for the patient player who, rather than screaming at the beast to run hither and thither, issues clear, sporadic instructions. The pleasure when boy and beast work as one is as tactile and satisfying as the click and yield of a key in a door.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Last Guardian is a story of a therapeutic friendship. Photograph: Sony

The elegant mechanics of The Last Guardian’s puzzles (which, in contrast the the vast majority of games, do not have the whiff of designer’s contrivance) are of secondary importance to the game’s emotional life. That Trico is an abuse survivor is made explicit. The creature wears his wounds unashamedly: black streak lines stain his nose beneath the eyes, while crimson stains appear on his feathers with every newly sunk and plucked spear. He recoils from stained glass ornaments to which terrible memories are clearly attached. This is a game, as much as anything, about rehabilitation through kindness and companionship, its emotional impact compounded by tasteful, infrequent bursts of Takeshi Furukawa’s rich orchestral soundtrack.

That story of therapeutic friendship and survival is told lightly in the dialogue (“Stop following me; go home,” orders the boy early on, an attitude which, by the game’s conclusion, has entirely changed). But it’s far more meaningfully told through the action, which shows an unspoken, healing bond forged in real time by two underdogs together facing otherwise insurmountable odds. This theme alone would be enough to mark The Last Guardian out as almost unique in games. But it’s the execution that marks The Last Guardian and its creator out as singularly brilliant. Here is an exquisite gem, the brightest in Ueda’s enviable clutch.

Japan Studio; PlayStation 4; £44.99; Pegi rating: 12+