They found out how to make an escort mission tense and emotionally satisfying. People who say this game doesn't control well don't know what they're talking about. I got stuck and frustrated perhaps twice with how much I was hitting my weapon into the walls. The spiked club is good to know to go for, but other than that it is straightforward and perhaps to short if anything. This and Colossus are of course the graphical powerhouses of what the ps2 can do. This baffles me how it was made in 2001..

This is the second game I've played by developer Fumito Ueda, and while not nearly as good as Shadow of the Colossus (which is one of my favourite games), it still holds up really well. I can really see how influential this game must have been when it came out. First of all, it has no instructions in the entire game, which means that everything has to be figured out through, logic, reason and/or luck. For the most part this works really well, but sometimes it backfires, resulting in one particular "bullshit puzzle". This doesn't really hurt the game at all though. Another thing I love is that the whole game is an escort mission that doesn't feel at all like an escort mission, and I think that is because Yorda feels so integrated into the game that she never is a hassle to guide around. You legitimately feel a connection to her, and that helps in setting up some of the scenes towards the end of the game. The greatest thing about this game, though, is the fact that this absolutely couldn't be anything other than a game. No movie could ever convey the feeling of actually leading someone along through an abandoned castle, rescuing her from all the dangers, and all the time using your own hands to do it. And that's really one of the things that elevate this game beyond just being a good game.

RESUMEN: me gustó mucho a pesar de sus controles ortopédicos.

Tal y como vi el final de Shadow of the Colossus tenía claro que iba a jugar a Ico inmediatamente. Me pareció que todo aquello que a nivel artístico hace bien SotC ya lo hacía bien Ico. Es verdad que los controles en Ico son peores (esas peleas contra "slimes" ejem ejem) y la cámara es más molesta (aunque ambos me parece que la usan de manera muy interesante). Pero me parece que las mecánicas de Ico para progresar por sus escenarios funcionan mucho mejor que en su sucesor.

"Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler." --Albert Einstein

In what is surely a record, I knocked Ico off my play list after it resided there for 19 years.

I understand and respect Fumito Ueda's game design philosophy and Ico's "design by subtraction". But I think too much got subtracted out of Ico, and the game suffers for it.

The combat is too simple. The one button action is repetitive, boring, and frustrating. Sure, Ico can't die, but Yorda can be kidnapped, ending the game. As a result, the stakes are raised not by doing damage to you, but by keeping you out of the fight for long stretches of time during which the shadow monsters can make off with Yorda. This is accomplished by having blows put Ico on the ground, unable to stand up for what feels like an eternity. This design mechanic may be realistic and the frustration it induces may be intentional, but it's still annoying. Even the offensive side of combat is frustrating. Landing a blow on a monster can feel like a game of chance, with indiscernible vulnerability windows, and after you whack one, you are unable to whack him again for what also feels like an eternity. Multiply by multiple monsters per encounter and multiple whacks per monster and it gets really old, really fast. All you can do is whack and hope you win. No block, no dodge, no counter, no alternate attacks, no strategy, no nothing. The closest the game gets to strategic combat is when the occasional monster will play coy with you and stay out of striking distance until you turn your back to it, so sometimes you need to turn your back on a monster and wait for it to approach Yorda before you can lash out at it. If I'm being honest, I'm not even convinced that is a gameplay feature and not a bug. It's impossible to say.

Otherwise, the gameplay is okay. It does some interesting things like make you hold onto Yorda by holding down a button as you drag her around the environment. The art direction and music create a sublime, melancholy mood, also aided by the layered, labyrinthine level design. The castle setting is laid out well and offers some neat paths which double back on themselves and open new openings, kind of Metroidvania-lite.

I like what Ico has going on, but it's just so barren. The world is barren, the story is thin, the characterization is non-existent, the gameplay is stripped down to the bones. Ico is more of an atmosphere or mood to experience than it is a game to play, which is why I appreciated it but was thankful that it's pretty short.

I'm glad it exists, and I'm glad I finally played it. I understand it's gone on to inspire game developers and influence games across multiple platforms and genres, which is awesome. I just think I respect it more than I like it. But that's okay.

What I like:
- The story is simple but interesting
- Level design is great, every object and placement has a purpose
- The puzzle is balanced, not that hard but still challenging
- Yorda

What I don't like:
- The graphics are too dark, sometimes key objects such as doors or stairs are unnoticeable at first.
- Ico's control and camera placement are clumsy. Often result in death by falling off of a cliff
- The battle is annoying feels unnecessary

This is definitely the first Team Ico game... This is a great game, don't get me wrong, but consistently feels like it stands in the shadow of (no pun intended) it's successors. Team Ico being named after this game fits nicely, their next two games feel very much like evolutions of the two main mechanics of this game.

Shadow of the colossus takes the basic three-hit-combo combat from this game and fleshes it out with traversal to make an entire experience based around that.
The Last Guardian takes the follower mechanic of Yorda from this game and evolves it from just being someone to pull along with you 90% of the time, to being the primary way of solving most puzzles in the game.

But the origins for both of those start here. Does this feel like a good midpoint between the two? I'd say no, with the hindsight of those two games the individual mechanics of this game feel half-baked.
The story of this game is like other TI games, has some lore to it but is pretty empty story-wise (on the surface level), yet despite that it creates a genuine emotional connection over it's run time. Again, this is something that they improve at in later installments.

The thing is, everything I could say about this game I immediately want to counter with 'but this is something they do better in later games', but this isn't a bad game, this is a great game, and definitely doesn't feel like the first game of a studio. The art design, audio ideology, animation and environment quality, story, world and characters already feel so evolved here, this feels like this studio's fifth game, not their first.

As much as it doesn't read like it, so far I've had nothing but good to say about this game, so what don't I like?
Well, besides the combat being way too simple, my main issue is the difficulty. When starting the game there's no difficulty options, and I breezed through the puzzles for the first two thirds (about four hours) of this game, never getting stuck for more than a moment. The combat, likewise, is just a case of hitting a room full of enemies with your one attack until they stop moving, and pulling Yorda out of a hole if she gets caught. It was a shame but never really took away from my enjoyment of the game.

This is the worst Team Ico game, and like most of this review that will sound like a criticism, but I'll be damned if that isn't a pretty high compliment.

It's fine as a light, atmospheric adventure and I like how the castle loops around and has a sense of place, but the gameplay holds the game back. The escort heavy nature isn't pushed much and usually Yorda just slows the pace down to a needless degree without adding anything interesting. The slow pace isn't helped by lack of automatic checkpoints, meaning that one mistake could easily lead to losing a fair bit of progress which is not fun to repeat and doesn't fit the general feel of the game. There were also one particularly clumsy section with a couple of very awkward jumps that somewhat soured my mood for the following sections.

The presentation in this game is absolutely beautiful and I could imagine when first releasing this game visually/aesthetically would've been breathtaking for many. I definitely understand why people love this game.

For me, this game gets lost in its own sauce. The gameplay is bottlenecking the aesthetics affecting the overall experience. Things are designed to be long and tedious and killing enemies is just mashing the square button. I know that this is an 'artsy' game, and I can see it, it's absolutely stunning in its presentation but I feel like in order for a video game to be 'artsy' it should at least make use of it being a video game. In that I mean in most of the game I'm just watching my character go back and forth from places, not much is interactable. I feel like this this is a movie experience, not a video game experience. There's not enough to make me care, just enough to make me wish I cared.

In a nutshell: ICO: Lost in the Sauce Edition.

A game about architecture, first and foremost, with the camera either positioning itself at the best angle to reveal the space, or making it clear to the player that they have to explore the offscreen space. Not exactly a masterpiece - the puzzles are sometimes perfunctory, and the combat is actively annoying - but there is something stirring about the hand-holding mechanic, the controller vibrating with Yorda’s every movement. She’s a fragile, real presence, with the standard “escort quest” frustrations - get over here, do that - a conscious part of the experience. (There’s a psychosexual triangle to be drawn between the virginal Yorda, the jealous mother, and possessive teenage boy Ico, whose “horns” are eventually removed/castrated.) All of which to say I found the ending very powerful. The castle we’ve grown so familiar with crumbles, and the power dynamic between the pair reverses - we are made helpless by a beautifully-scored cutscene, the untranslated farewell a perfect note to end on. (The epilogue is a mistake.) Clearly inspired many a developer to make their game as pretentious as possible, though Hidetaka Miyazaki would take the ball and run with it with Boletarian Palace.

The escort mission, a chinese finger trap for developers. Where games before it would only briefly utilize the escort to limited success, Ico lives, breathes, and thrives by the strength of this mechanic. Heavy theatrics, screenplay-like writing, and complex puzzling be damned. Instead, Ico wallows in the escort mission and any meaning of the game is derived from the relationship forced upon the player through this system. Many games since take clear inspiration from this title, and Naughty Dog hot off of Crash Team Racing may have learned a thing or two playing Ico.

+Unique experience
+Very ascetically pleasing
~Atmosphere is driving force for sound
~Many puzzles are visual based
~No direction
-AI can be wonky / slow
-Castle areas often too dark
-Combat can be frustrating and/or tedious

Fumito Ueda's hyper-sensual debut is the most influential single player experience of the 21st century. While Ico may have adapted Out of This World's style of puzzle-platforming gameplay from a decade prior (taking it from 2D into 3D), its most unprecedented innovations actually lie in its immersive value.

Here's a bold claim: Ico is the first 3D game with fully believable animation. It's difficult to believe that characters designed and animated at the turn of the century, appearing first on sixth generation hardware, manage to be so captivating in their motions. Yorda patting a save bench in hopes that you'll come sit with her is one of countless soaring moments. You'll believe she really was there and gesturing to you, not merely conveying some mechanic you need to make use of. There's nothing uncanny about it at all. Ico is a purely interactive experience, so almost nothing that happens in the game registers in the mind as text or 'concepts'. It all must be felt to be processed, and it never seemslike the game design is punishing your progress despite how uncompromising it is.

Also worthy of note, Yorda being older than you (or at least taller) prevents the game from seeming like it can adhere to a standard otaku fantasy. Yorda must be protected, but you'd have to be pretty depraved to desire possessing her. After all, the first thing you do with her is break her out of a cage.

The island bathes in the sun's bright rays
Distant hills wear a shroud of grey
A lonely breeze whispers in the trees
Sole witness to history