Review

Ico is a game that should be played, in my opinion, in spite of its gameplay. It is an experience more than a game; a totally unique, yet fundamentally human, experience that will cling permanently to a corner of your consciousness and intrude upon your thoughts long after you've played experienced it.

Ico is the most aesthetically resonant game I've ever known. Talking about its gameplay, puzzles, AI, etc. seems almost trite. They are, at the risk of being insulting, irrelevant. Actually, I offer that as the highest compliment, since I think that Ico succeeds so phenomenally well at its objective, an objective which I believe has nothing to do with any of those technical things. Ico has no aspirations of being "fun" (not to imply that it isn't), or humorous, or even challenging. Ico is feeling. That is its objective, to make the "player" feel. Oh, sure, it gives you things to do along the way, but they seem merely ritualistic prerequisites for the carefully staged catalysts of emotion that form the soul of the game. I say this because what I mostly found myself doing while I played Ico was feeling. I felt betrayed and defiant at the beginning, as we see the boy's sentence manifest. I felt cautious and exuberant as I began to explore. I felt chivalrous and shy when discovering Yorda. As we then dismantled the obstacles set before us on our quest to escape the castle, I felt, above all, melancholy. Our "enemy" was powerful and yet helpless before us. I felt lonely and yet simultaneously content.

So, it feels foolish for me to discuss the peripheral chore of pushing boxes, climbing chains, jumping chasms. They were none of them difficult. Neither was the dispatching of the shadow creatures. In fact, I'm tempted to label the combat superfluous. Initially it felt so disjunct that I nearly quit the game in frustration. Having to fight the shadows seemed like having to eat one's vegetables for the privilege of desert. Fortunately, though, I came back to the game and learned that the combat sequences were infrequent enough that they didn't irreparably harm the experience. And in hindsight, I'll refrain from calling them superfluous, as they are legitimate, perhaps even vital, ingredients in the formation of the relationship between Ico and Yorda. That they felt mechanistically frustrating is likely just a reflection of my own peevishness.

I developed similar mixed feelings about the camera. On the one hand, it fulfilled its mandate to maintain a cinematic perspective for the player, and thus played a vital role in crafting and maintaining Ico's signature impressions. On the other hand, it's actions engendered a special kind of frustration that seems to only manifest in 3rd person games with "cinematic" cameras. The problem is fairly simple: when entering a new area, i.e. passing through a doorway, or otherwise triggering a full scene transition, the camera insists on positioning itself with the worst, most useless, utterly annoying orientation conceivable, namely pointing right back where you came from. Here's a good example. What's the last and least valuable thing that I want to see when I move into a new area? I don't care how cinematic or stirring is the view of the last 5 feet that I just traversed. I don't want to see it. It's particularly useless when it's just a blackened doorway, or (as in the example) a window into nothing. More to the point, what's the one thing, the single most serviceable thing, that I would like to see when I enter a new area? Anyone? Righto, the new area! This isn't rocket science. In Ico, it's not as troublesome as it is in other games, since you're rarely (never?) tasked with doing something reflexive when you transition scenes. I am undoubtedly hyper-sensitive to this issue because of the utterly miserable time I had playing another 3rd person adventure game: Silent Hill. In that game, the problem is exacerbated because it's a horror game, so you necessarily are more desperate to see anything except where you've just been, and because combat plays a more central role.

At any rate, I couldn't stand it then, and I didn't like it any better in Ico. Furthermore, I also did not care at all for the limits placed on the camera's rotation. In fact, this was more of an actual problem than the poor behavioral orientation, because there were numerous times when I literally could not look where I wanted to look. This seems so arbitrary and wasteful to me. Ico is a game filled with jaw-dropping vistas, and it made no sense to me to restrict the player's ability to simply look around. I so desperately wanted to just be able to freely orbit around Ico, to pan my perspective up or down. I've yet to play a game with a cinematic 3rd person camera that in the end left a net positive impression on me in that regard.

Having said some mean things, however, I freely admit that the nature of the camera has a very specific affect on the player, one that I believe is not at all accidental. Because the player experiences this world from a perspective that is disassociated from the characters, the player necessarily also becomes disassociated from the characters. The player is not Ico. The player is not Yorda. The player is an observer, initially, and then an accomplice. As Ico becomes Yorda's guardian, so does the player become Ico's guardian. I think this is very important to the experience as a whole.

Ultimately, none of the negative things I mentioned should keep you from playing this game. I almost let them dissuade me, but I gave the game a second look and am extremely glad that I did. I guarantee that I'll be thinking of this story, this world, and this boy and girl for a long, long time. That kind of lasting impression is very rare in gaming.