I saw video on my recommended about Ico and that made me want to replay it. I beat it prior and did not like it much, so I thought replaying it might make me appreciate it more. It did not made me appreciate it more. It made me dislike it more.

The lack of a map, the awful combat, and constantly needing to hold Yorda's hand were not great the first time I played it and they still are not replaying this game. This game is a hassle and I cannot believe I had a patience to beat it years ago. Now, I cannot even bother.

Very weird game. I love the PS2 era games, because some of them just were batshit crazy convoluted stories filled with action, demons and shit like that. This is like the antithesis of that.

Ico got my interest after I played Shadow of The Colossus for the first time and got obsessed with it. I had to know more, to immerse myself in this world. Then I learned that all games made by Team Ico are supposedly in the same universe. So I booted up my emulator and got to it.

I loved the mysterious nature of SOTC - Ico has that too. I loved the art, the characters - Ico has that too. I loved the Zelda vibe - Ico has that too.

Still, Ico FELT like something else. Whereas Shadow was beautiful and entrancing, Ico was eerie and unnerving. It feels like something’s always creeping around the corner, in the shadows of this abandoned castle. It’s not a horror game, but it is one the scariest games I’ve ever played. But instead of jumpscares, it seeks deep into your mind, makes you uncomfortable and uneasy. I’ll probably have eerie dreams about it.

The absolute SILENCE of this game had me tense, if not sometimes bored. Midway through I was talking with a friend about it and said “it’s missing a soundtrack, it’s too empty”. I don’t think that anymore. It’s supposed to be like that. When something DID HAPPEN it always gave me some reaction, frequently shivers or stiffness. The sound of flapping wings of the shadow monsters while they try to get the girl had me in shambles.

Story wise it’s just as cryptic and mysterious as Shadow of The Colossus. Even weirder though. It follows the same structure too, cutscenes at the beginning - gameplay - cutscenes at the end.

Gameplay is solid puzzles, annoying combat (maybe on purpose) and good platforming.

When there is music, almost never, it goes hard.

I can see how this is considered influential, the way it tells a story with gameplay and minimal use of cutscenes feels very modern. Kinda like Inside. Very artsy game too, for sure. One of those showcases of games as art type of situation, Fujimoto definitely is an auteur.

Can’t wait for The Last Guardian now. This Fujimoto Ueda guy has me intrigued.

Ico is the type of game I dread to play, critically acclaimed, landmark classic of the medium, influenced various games and designers I love. I dread playing those because of a fear I have, a fear that's come true : I don't like ICO, in fact, I think I might hate ICO. And now I will have to carry that like a millstone around my neck, "that asshole who doesn't like ICO". Its not even really that external disapproval I dread, its the very reputation that causes me to second guess my own sincerely held opinions. I thought I liked minimalism in game design, and cut-scene light storytelling and relationships explored through mechanics but I guess I don't. There's some kinda dissonance, cognitive or otherwise reading reviews by friends and writers I respect and wondering if there's something wrong with me or if I didnt get it or played it wrong or any other similar foolishness that gets bandied around in Internet discussions. "I wish we could have played the same game" I think, reading my mutuals' reviews of ICO. Not in a dismissive asshole way of accusing them of having a warped perception, but moreso in frustration that I didnt have the experience that has clearly touched them and countless others.

But enough feeling sorry for myself/being insecure, what is my problem with ICO exactly? I don't really know. Genuinely. I wasnt even planning on writing a review originally because all it would come down to as my original unfiltered reaction would be "Playing it made me miserable". Thankfully the upside of minimalism in game design is that its easier to identify which elements didnt work for me because there are few in the game. I think the people who got the most out of ICO developed some kind of emotional connection to Yorda, and thats one aspect which absolutely didn't work for me. As nakedly "gamey" and transparently artificial as Fallout New Vegas' NPCs (and Skyrim and F3 etc) locking the camera to have a dialogue tree, they read to me as infinitely more human than the more realistic Yorda; for a few reasons. Chief among them is that despite some hiccups and bugs the game is known for, you are not asked to manage them as a gameplay mechanic beyond your companions and well, my main interaction with Yorda was holding down R1 to repeatedly yell "ONG VA!" so she'd climb down the fucking ladder. She'd climb down, get halfway through and then decide this was a bad idea and ascend again.

ICO has been to me a game of all these little frustrations piling up. Due to the nature of the puzzles and platforming, failing them was aggravating and solving them first try was merely unremarkable. It makes me question again, what is the value of minimalism genuinely? There was a point at which I had to use a chain to jump across a gap and I couldnt quite make it, I thought "well, maybe theres a way to jump farther" and started pressing buttons randomly until the circle button achieved the result of letting me use momentum to swing accross. Now, if instead a non-diegetic diagram of the face buttons had shown up on the HUD instead what would have been lost? To me, very little. Sure, excessive direction can be annoying and take me out of the game, but pressing buttons randomly did the same, personally. Nor did "figuring it out for myself" feel particularly fulfilling. Thats again what I meant, victories are unremarkable and failures are frustrating. The same can be said for the combat which, honestly I liked at first. I liked how clumsy and childish the stick flailing fighting style was, but ultimately it involved hitting the enemies over and over and over and over again until they stopped spawning. Thankfully you can run away at times and rush to the exit to make the enemies blow up but the game's habit of spawning them when you're far from Yorda or maybe when she's on a different platform meant that I had to rely on her stupid pathfinding to quickly respond (which is just not going to happen, she needs like 3 business days to execute the same thing we've done 5k times already, I guess the language barrier applies to pattern recognition as well somehow) and when it inevitably failed I would have to jump down and mash square until they fucked off.

I can see the argument that this is meant to be disempowering somehow but I don't really buy it. Your strikes knock these fuckers down well enough, they just keep getting back up. Ico isnt strong, he shouldnt be able to smite these wizard of oz monkeys with a single swing, but then why can they do no damage to ICO and get knocked down flat with a couple swings? Either they are weak as hell but keep getting remotely CPRd by the antagonist or they're strong but have really poor balance. In the end, all I could really feel from ICO was being miserable. I finished the game in 5 hours but it felt twice that. All I can think of now is that Im glad its done and I can tick it off the bucket list. I am now dreading playing shadow of the colossus even harder, and I don't think I ever want to play The Last Guardian, it just looks like ICO but even more miserable. I'm sure I've outed myself as an uncultured swine who didnt get the genius of the experience and will lose all my followers but I'm too deflated to care. If there is one positive to this experience is that I kept procrastinating on finishing the game that I got back into reading. I read The Name of the Rose and Rumble Fish, pretty good reads. Im going to read Winesburg Ohio next I think.