totally understand why this is put on such a pedestal and works for so many people but i really don't think it's for me. the bosses are pretty hit or miss to me, with many of them having solutions i could easily understand, but couldn't easily execute on. the prime example i'd say is the 15th colossus, where you can clearly tell you're supposed to climb up the sides of the arena, and you can clearly tell you're supposed to get it to dislodge rocks you can see in the ceiling, but the game is overly specific about where you need to be to do so, leading to the player kind of just trial and erroring the correct position. it's far from bad boss design, but it makes the limitations of the game very obvious, which is a feeling i had all over SOTC. i assume a lot of people probably played this on the PS3 remaster or on a non-hardware accurate emulator, because woo boy this game has very noticeable performance issues. i normally don't complain about this sort of thing, but drops are constant, sometimes just being the result of moving the camera around. i get the feeling that this wouldn't be considered shippable today. the lighting is also a great idea that gives a lot of emotional weight... but the implementation leads to the player being unable to see where they're going or what they're doing a lot of the time. the atmosphere is still gorgeous, but ico also had gorgeous atmosphere and felt far more complete and considered than this, to me.