I was always curious about Team Ico and Fumito Ueda's highly praised trilogy, but truthfully what finally did it was hearing that my favourite creative director, Hidetaka Miyazaki, played Ico and was inspired to give up his day job to pursue games after it.
Ico is a platform adventure game in which you play the titular young Ico, who is left to rot in a castle for being born with horns. Instead of rotting away, you find a weird magic girl (Yorda) and go off on a quest to escape the wretched castle you're in, with evil forces attempting to stop you.
Reading up on it, it's fascinating to see what things this game revolutionised, light functions that didn't exist before Ico, the team's creative 'subtracting design' to keep the player's path focused, and the incredibly clever level designs & area puzzles. This game has inspired almost every major and minor game that came after it, and it's so easy to see why. It feels like there's a clear historical divide of pre-Ico games and post-Ico games, shaped by its world-changing innovations and creativity.
The game is incredibly charming in spite of its minimal narrative and dialogue. The feeling that courses through you when you discover a new path or solve a puzzle is like no other, and the castle's world feels incredibly vast and complex for a game that's 23 years old.
Ofc the game is imperfect (which feels like mostly part of an inevitable obstacle in hardware limitations that the developers had to deal with). There are moments where the jankiness leads you astray from obvious solutions for needless amounts of time, or enemy fights get very repetitive. But for a <10 hour game it's not only forgivable, but a contributing factor to its raw charm and underdog spirit.
Ico has fully got me on board for its successors. On to Shadow of the Colossus and the Last Guardian!
Ico is a platform adventure game in which you play the titular young Ico, who is left to rot in a castle for being born with horns. Instead of rotting away, you find a weird magic girl (Yorda) and go off on a quest to escape the wretched castle you're in, with evil forces attempting to stop you.
Reading up on it, it's fascinating to see what things this game revolutionised, light functions that didn't exist before Ico, the team's creative 'subtracting design' to keep the player's path focused, and the incredibly clever level designs & area puzzles. This game has inspired almost every major and minor game that came after it, and it's so easy to see why. It feels like there's a clear historical divide of pre-Ico games and post-Ico games, shaped by its world-changing innovations and creativity.
The game is incredibly charming in spite of its minimal narrative and dialogue. The feeling that courses through you when you discover a new path or solve a puzzle is like no other, and the castle's world feels incredibly vast and complex for a game that's 23 years old.
Ofc the game is imperfect (which feels like mostly part of an inevitable obstacle in hardware limitations that the developers had to deal with). There are moments where the jankiness leads you astray from obvious solutions for needless amounts of time, or enemy fights get very repetitive. But for a <10 hour game it's not only forgivable, but a contributing factor to its raw charm and underdog spirit.
Ico has fully got me on board for its successors. On to Shadow of the Colossus and the Last Guardian!
Karim
13 days ago