Ico is a bizarre game to review. It set the standard for Team Ico's methods and staples that still topple over the industry today, with their near-perfect understanding of how to make you interpret everything perfectly with practically no words. The animation is gorgeous, the environments are serene and the story is heartfelt, yet I hesitate to call it a masterpiece of any kind. It does everything right as an action-adventure-puzzle-platformer-you name it, but it's still not really effective at the core goal at hand: making you and Yorda feel a connection. You'll be fighting, she'll be standing there, you'll be solving puzzles, she'll be standing there. She practically never gets involved in any way, which isn't to say she needs to, but I started relegating her as "the puzzle solving tool" by the end as she awkwardly sits, awaiting me to call her to do this specific thing while she has no mind of her own. It stops feeling like a connection and more like she's just something you need to progress, which is self-destructive for a game like Ico, where immersion and believability might as well be the focal point. A beautiful game, yet it could've been much more to me.