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I live with a very big cat. He likes to sprawl across my lap when I play games. He’s good company but pretty stupid. I often wonder what’s going on behind his big wide eyes.

So perhaps it’s not surprising I fell so hard for Trico, the house-sized, big-eyed feline in The Last Guardian. Trico is obviously fake – he can fly and shoot lightning from his tail. But when I clamber up his feathered flank to rub him between the ears he responds with that purry nasal whine, and the emotional punch is as real as it comes.

The Last Guardian was finally released in December. Made by GenDesign, a Japanese studio led by Fumito Ueda – whose two previous games, Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, are widely recognised as classics – it had been in development for a decade. Spend a few minutes with Trico and you get a good idea where that time went. There has never been anything quite like him in video games before.

The Last Guardian is about a relationship. When you first meet Trico he lashes out, hurt and afraid. But after 10 to 15 hours together the big beast is risking his life for you, pushing himself to overcome instinctive fears to keep you safe. The overall experience is remarkable.

That’s why many players keep going back, playing the game multiple times. This is not a game with different paths to explore or branching storylines. Each time you play, you have the same experience. But players are returning to spend time with Trico.

We look to films, TV and books not just for entertainment but to help us explore what it means to be human, including experiencing strong feelings, says , who studies games and human-computer interaction at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and is the author of the 2016 book How Games Move Us. “I’d say we’ve barely tapped the potential of games to create strong emotions,” she says.

Not everyone is smitten, however. Some people are convinced that Trico is broken. In most games, you press a button and something happens. In The Last Guardian, you can mash a command button repeatedly and get no reaction at all. Trico will stare at you stupidly or bound off in the opposite direction chasing butterflies. Since the game’s release, players have argued about whether this is a feature or a bug. Some enjoy spending hours figuring out how to interact with Trico, while others complain the character is too unresponsive. What’s going on?

For a start, Trico probably is a lot less smart than he looks. “The type of AI that goes into a game character is very different from what you’d expect from self-driving cars or Amazon’s Alexa,” says , who works on artificial intelligence and games at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. “In a video game, what matters is the experience.”

Companion characters in games are often notoriously bad. Take a game like Skyrim, for example. Players wander through a large wilderness, interacting with dozens of characters in dozens of believable ways. But it’s too easy to break the spell, says Ontañón. “You can walk into a house, throw all the pots and pans on the floor, jump on the kitchen table – and the house’s owner will greet you with enthusiasm.”

In games, the AI typically works to stop companions getting in the way or getting themselves killed. When it does something more interesting, it is often not what you would expect. For example, quite a lot of AI went into controlling Elizabeth, the main companion character in BioShock: Infinite, says Ontañón. “Some of the most complex AI went into predicting where the player was going to go next, so that Elizabeth can anticipate that and stay in front of the player.” But this was primarily just so players did not have to keep turning around to interact with her, he says.

Yet even with the most sophisticated AI it would be hard to remove all sources of frustration, says Martin Cerny at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague, Czech Republic. “When players cooperate with other other players, they still get annoyed that the person is not doing what they want.”

Cerny called Sarah and Sally to explore how players respond to an AI companion that is more competent than they are. People seemed to enjoy themselves, he says. But in a small study, most players had more fun when they controlled the companion character themselves.

He thinks the complaints about The Last Guardian are therefore unavoidable. “Even if we shipped a skilled human actor with the game to control Trico, some players would be unhappy,” he says. “Relationships are hard. Training your pets is hard.”

Which is perhaps why many players who love the game are pet owners, themselves. Some joke about Trico being their second or third pet and replay the game to visit him. Others talk of being brought to tears by the emotional connection at the end.

“The game’s creators clearly spent a significant amount of time observing various animals,” one player told me. A veterinary surgeon based in Australia, he has so far played the game five times. He is certain his day job has influenced his bond with Trico.

In his multiple play-throughs, he experimented with different approaches. He says when he did not take the time to stroke Trico, or overwhelmed him with lots of different commands at once, the bond that developed was not as strong and Trico became less responsive. “The fact that Trico doesn’t always respond immediately or gets confused is realistic,” he says. “Do the same thing when training a dog, and you will get a dog who seldom does what you want them to do.”

It seems Trico is not so much broken as designed to make us think it has a mind of its own, like a real pet. Some may find it frustrating, but for others that’s the charm. The first truly believable sidekick in video games turns out to be an uncooperative 10-tonne kitten with wings.