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A wind-scoured castle, crumbling into a sun-bleached sea. A towering shrine, rising above a landscape of decaying ruins and moss-skinned rocks. An isolated tower surrounded by vast chasms, speckled with high-arched walkways and overgrown ledges. Though the games of Fumito Ueda may depict delicate relationships, vast beasts and impregnable mysteries, it has always been their distinctive architectural spaces that gave them a concrete form. Ever since Ico's castle hazily emerged from the bloom and mist on the games title screen in 2001, these monolithic structures have become symbols for the sense of scale, mysticism and artistry that have made Ueda's games instantly recognisable and widely loved.With The Last Guardian, Ueda and his team at Gen Design and Sony's Japan Studios have once more returned to the ageing stones and high arches of their singular world. Like Ico, the game isolates the player in a vast empty megastructure, tasking them with finding their way through its labyrinthine halls. It's a structure than many games have shared, from the original Metroid through Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time all the way up to this year's Dark Souls 3. However, despite this familiar rhythm of puzzles and vistas, there is something distinct about The Last Guardian's architecture.
It's not something that's easy to put your finger on: there's a strangeness to the heavy blocks, angular buttresses and gridded stonework that isn't instantly recognisable from real life. There's an Aztec feel to the geometric patterning that surrounds The Last Guardian's gates and archways, but it lacks the animal imagery and the stepped forms that make images of ancient cities like Teotihuacan so memorable. There's also something of the ancient architecture of Rajasthan too - in the balconies enclosed by ornate arches and the pillars overflowing with ornamentation - but again, The Last Guardian builds these structures out of simple, ambiguous forms not the strong religious and pictorial details of, say, the Dilwara temples. There are hints of each of these styles, and many more, in Ueda's world, but none seems to fit, each one remaining distantly related. The Last Guardian's real world references remain a mystery then, but there are clues in the Ueda's previous games that begin to explain why that is.
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