Famitsu recently talked to Fumito Ueda and this is what he said about *snifff* The Last Guardian:

“People use the term ‘companion characters’ to refer to characters like [Ico’s] Yorda or Ellie and perhaps Ico was sort of the forerunner in getting people like that into games. Of course, compared to Ico, I feel like people are much more used to creating game stories that handle these companion characters well than we were. With Ico, we had puzzles and such; we couldn’t fully do away with the really game-like aspects of it. Ellie plays a game-oriented role in The Last of Us, of course, but in terms of stories and games focused on storytelling, I think they did a really thorough job. It’s very modern in that way, or you could say the game design matches well with modern times. We don’t want to lose out to them, and we’re working on The Last Guardian so it works in similar ways. [The Last Guardian] is under earnest development. However, SCE Japan Studio, who’s working on The Last Guardian, also has titles like Puppeteer and Knack, and those are only the ones currently announced. Those are taking priority right now.”