Few names in video games carry as much weight as Fumito Ueda. The Japanese developer and his GenDesign studio have only been responsible for a trio of games throughout their long history, but each one of them has left an unmistakable impact on the medium.
Ico was a crowning classic of the early PS2 era, telling a melancholic story about a small boy who must help a ghostly princess escape a castle filled with demons. With no dialogue, there was nothing the player could do but pay attention to body language, listen to each sound, and use their own intuition to figure out what sort of story this masterpiece was trying to tell. Fast-forward several years later and Shadow of the Colossus burst onto the scene, only to change video games forever. It was hard to believe something this big and epic was running on a PS2.
Fumito Ueda Is A Video Game Creator Like No Other
The Last Guardian would follow several years and two console generations later on the PS4 after a number of high profile delays and a lengthy stint in development hell. When it arrived, there was a justified worry among fans that it wouldn’t live up to the hype, or that we’d moved on from Ueda’s particular approach to game design and this once withdrawn beauty would now feel pretentiously arduous. Yet I, and many others, still believe Trico’s heartwrenching adventure is one of the most effective video games I’ve ever played.
Almost a decade later and Fumito Ueda has finally resurfaced with our first glimpse at a new title – Project Robot. Unlike other ‘auteur’ developers like Hideo Kojima or Neil Druckmann, it seems like Ueda-san is happy to hide himself away until there is something worth showing to the world, even if it means countless ideas have been thrown aside that we might never see. I love the mystery of it though, and in triple-A development there isn’t really a slate of games like this with a similar level of intrigue where every single experience is so unique, alien, and unafraid to push boundaries. We love these games because they represent the pure artistic form of what video games can be. Better yet, they ask us questions and offer no answers.
Project Robot is just as nebulous, and appears to be very early in development without an official title, release date, or even platform. But none of that matters when everything seen within the trailer invites intrigue and discussion with only two short minutes of footage. First, I’m convinced this once again takes place in the same world as Ico, The Last Guardian, and Shadow of the Colossus.
The language uttered by the strange machine our protagonist can be seen climbing has a similar cadence and tone, while the clothes worn by our hero are just as familiar. It seems like armour of sorts adorned with markings and features that aren’t too dissimilar to some of the statues found in The Last Guardian. While there is a cape that seems pulled straight from Colossus, and you could easily interpret the mech as Colossi of some form. There are so many hallmarks of Ueda’s past work found throughout, as if this is a spiritual successor to three classics with a path forward of its own.
A trailer was uploaded to the PlayStation YouTube channel, which is confirmation to me it will at least be coming to PS5 at the very least.
Project Robot Gives Us All The Questions And None Of The Answers
Every small detail in this trailer, whether it be the robotic head the character clambers upon or the markings on their clothes, hints towards a wider world and mythology that doesn’t need explanation to be interesting. The towering robot the hero clambers up is attached to a larger body, and as a countdown begins in the distance, our presumed protagonist ascends right to the top and uses thrusters to burst themselves to safety just as a blanket of darkness starts to creep in. The darkness in question also looks an awful lot like the dark energy in Ico.
Whatever this dark energy is, it seems to be a pervasive threat across this world that people must live with and try to protect themselves from, making me believe the game will send you on an adventure of sorts to find its source and put a stop to its spread. If that involves having to kill innocent animals or accidentally unleashing an even greater evil, then so be it. What if the world is also littered with abandoned robots such as this one we can control ourselves, much like the ruins from Ico or Shadow of the Colossus that hint towards a once thriving way of life that was impossible to salvage? See, I’m already making up eccentric stories in my head.
Fumito Ueda has always created games with simple goals and asked us to fill in the gaps. We need to save a girl, defeat giant monsters, or escort a strange creature, and little else will be explained to us as we figure out story beats, motives, and mechanics on our own. Such design choices not only make each of these games timeless, but allow them to lean into the eccentricities that make them so special. Macabre, beautiful, and unpredictable bits of art that frustrate and inspire in equal measure. That’s what I want from GenDesign, and this trailer points to another game exactly along those lines.
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The PS5 is Sony’s premier gaming console launched in 2020, and it comes with both a standard and digital-only version.