I'm an unapologetic cynic when it comes to artsy indie games. Games that attempt to conjure some sense of wonder by having you stand atop a sacred monument, so you can float and glow as you acquire your new power-up. It's shallow and insincere. A painting you bought at B&Q. Fucking... products. I know where it comes from, and it's fucking ICO.

This isn't a game that's dated. It's always been this unique and defiant of trends, but I think people tend to overlook its strengths on the criteria of a standard videogame. It's like a surreal, somewhat realistic version of Zelda. Like a regular kid actually had to go through all of that, panting and wheezing through every climb and fight. It's not a game that gratifies, but it's so much more tangible and relatable for that. Puzzle pieces are obscured by the imposing scale of these giant halls and walkways. You're very small, weak and unsure of where to go. You'll enter a room you don't belong in, and you feel unwelcome. That's something everyone has felt before, and the game is so effective in conveying that emotion.

ICO is a real credit to the group at SCEI that would later be known as Japan Studio. The cutscene animator from Enemy Zero on the Saturn walked in with an experimental pitch video he'd put together and they supported his project from PS1 prototype to complete overhaul and eventual release on PS2. It's no wonder that when Uncharted 2 turned Sony's fortunes around and determined the trajectory that the company would radically shift towards, would they fire every member of corporate responsible for that decision.

The game runs on a consistent sensation of weight and frailty. The boyish tug at Yorda's hand. The sense of dread whenever you have to separate. The distrust of yourself before attempting a perilous jump that might be the route forward, and the subsequent fear when you have to ask the emaciated Yorda to do the same. Ico, reassuringly holding out his hand to catch her, but shaking in fear at the uncertainty. The relatable tangibility in all of that massively benefits from Ueda's background in visual art and animation. This game is a keeper.

Ueda has described his approach as "design by subtraction". ICO was seen as shockingly sparse and minimalist in its day. Even its most influential and daring contemporaries like GTA3 and MGS2 were still utilising floating power-ups, on-screen status bars and detailed objectives, and it was strange to see a game without them. Picking up an old save today, there's an almost instinctive search for a map screen as you try to recall your bearings. Ueda has frequently cited Another World as a primary influence, and it wouldn't be right to suggest that this style of game design was entirely his invention, but for a game with this level of nuanced interaction and free movement, it was quite daring. There's no old RPG mechanics holding this thing together. You're not looking at numbers and trying to determine the best strategy you can afford. It feels physical. If you need an item, you have to go find it and pick it up. You're not told what state the protagonists are in, or how strong the enemies might be, and there's a fear in the ambiguity.

I expect this is basic knowledge to anyone with a similar attitude towards games, but so much has been lost in the utilitarian homogenisation of camera systems today. The right stick swivelling around the playable character as its constant centre. It's so boring and limiting as a design principle. Back in the early days of game design, there was real thought put into what a screen needed to show. That one screen was your whole game, so it better be good. Predetermined camera angles have as much potential to games as they have to films. It's also good when your artists don't have to piss around texturing every pebble from every conceivable angle and just focus on making each moment look as good as possible. In ICO, you're always looking down at the characters. Ico and Yorda are always very small, and the full dimensions of the giant, suffocating castle are difficult to discern. In the action scenes, you don't always know where the shadowy figures are. Yorda might turn her head towards them, as a subtle warning, but that aide is gone if she's ever taken away, and it's a scramble to determine where she is. The emotion in the game wouldn't resonate nearly as effectively if it played like Ratchet & Clank.

Then there's the sofas. A surreal sight in the middle of these stone ruins. Ico and Yorda sit side by side on them and you can save the game. They don't exist in the scenario's logic. I don't know if I even want to recognise them as canon. They're brilliantly symbolic, though. A small home comfort in this desperate, lonely situation. You don't have to suffer through this. You save and return when you want to come back. Ico and Yorda sit side by side. There's no implication of romance or anything, just mutual trust, respect and devotion. The castle is intimidating, but there's nothing to distrust in these two.

The rigid, uniform, endless brickwork you find yourself trapped within, and the rare glimpses of the boundless, vibrant forest beyond. The catharsis you feel whenever you work against the castle's symmetrical, straightline logic.

Sometimes, I like to keep the game paused and let the ambience take over. The rolling waves and birdsong. There's a mood that envelops the room whenever I turn on ICO.

ICO is in no ways a perfect game. It's easy for current fans to overlook how obtuse an old favourite can be, or even admire it for that very quality, but it's not really an aspect of game design to be applauded. Anyone who has played an old adventure game will know the frustration of not knowing how to progress, rummaging around in desperation and fighting off the growing desire to quit. A first-time ICO playthrough has plenty of those moments to offer. They add to that important sense of powerlessness, sure, but you feel you need to be very gentle in recommending the game to potential players.

I sometimes talk about the frustration and anguish in ICO's combat. How that complements the setting. You know - I'm not confident it's fully intentional. With as much as folk love ICO, we tend to forget the scene it came out of. Have you played any of those late-90s hack n slashes recently? When was the last time you had a go on T'ai Fu or Ninja: Shadow of Darkness? I'm not confident that they're a million miles away from ICO's punishing repetition. This game was made by a small, somewhat inexperienced team, and it's probably a little pretentious to suggest that everything in the game was done with great insight and intent. When there's something really great in this game, you can typically attribute that to Ueda and not the handful of software specialists under him.

The surprising thing is that ICO remains very gamey. You solve puzzles by sliding big blocks onto platforms and lighting giant Tom & Jerry bombs. Puzzles are self-contained and utilise a small selection of playing pieces. Core Design-era Tomb Raider climbing and Pikmin 1 partner management. It's good. We like games.

Ueda has frustrated interviewers who have attempted to pry into the game's setting and lore with a down-to-earth, utilitarian attitude. He insists the ruins aren't intended to suggest anything. They were just a good match for the gameplay he wanted to explore. I don't think he's being dishonest. ICO is first and foremost a video game, and seemingly, any abstractions on top of that are only intended to guide the player's emotion. I've always enjoyed reflecting on the out-there ceremonial purpose of each location in the castle, but that's really just me seeing what I want to in this series of elaborately decorated puzzles. There isn't a fantasy novel behind this, though Ueda's never deterred audiences from their interpretations. ICO is just a distinctive, ambitious artist trying to make his own version of Kula World. If this was all a serious, dour exploration of the nature of trust, do you think he'd have put a hidden lightsaber in this thing?

Even though I haven't played through the original PS2 version since getting my CRT, I found myself sucked into the PS3 HD remaster this time. What can I say? I'm weak. I like wireless controllers and an internal hard drive. There are arguments to be made against the purist approach, though. Ueda was deeply involved in the remaster, and the level of detail in some of the more ornate texturework is really something to admire. It's still his vision, even I have my reservations about the sharp, high-contrast tiling covering every floor. I think a washed-out, foggy presentation really benefits ICO's atmosphere, and if there was ever a PS2 game to play on a CRT, this is probably it (please stick with me here, Silent Hill 2 fans), but there's appealing qualities unique to the PS3 release too. Don't get too high and mighty about it. It's a fine way to play. And no matter which revision you play, jumping on that piston always blows.

ICO is just a very different idea of what games can be. What we thought they might be when the PS2 came out. It's so richly evocative of that promise. The launch-era dream that makes me cherish my Horizontal Stand so dearly. The quiet before the Vice City boys got in, and Sony went full boar on getting themselves a Halo Killer. I couldn't put my finger on what was missing from them at the time, but the market's influence on this year's Zelda and Pikmin sequels really made me appreciate another run through ICO. No matter which direction the industry goes in, this game will still exist. The dream goes on.

This is better than I remembered. Everything is right in its place. Disregarding the obvious inherited aspects of the original (lack of a map, floating jump mechanics, only having one type of weapon at a time) that work just as well here, the changes reshape the meaning of the experience. The close camera to represent a dark cavern where watching ahead is difficult, the repeated tiles to simulate the feeling of getting lost the more one enters into labyrinthine places, and the black-and-white coloration that strengthens the limited vision. In a sense, you can interpret these elements as the developer's way to put the player in Samus's perspective, and they help as well to give thrill to the anticipation of an encounter. Even if the game is linear, it's easy to stop having track on where to go if you don't pay attention, and even if the game has some modern conventions such as save points and healing spots, it's not nearly as bad as modern works because they're hidden, more dispersed across the world, and require effort to get there. So even if the game isn't as radical as its predecessor, the modern conventions it applies aren't nearly as disruptive to the experience as later games.
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The only real major drawback however are the Metroids themselves. They are fittingly aggressive and non-deterministic in their behavior, which contributes to close, even personal brawls, but their lack of solid damage output in combination to the game's floating physics allowing maneuvering over them made them non-threatening, and the fear of facing them diminishes once the player realizes that merely staying healthy for the fight suffices to engage them. It's an exploit in the design, but one that doesn't make the experience of facing them ring false.

The most beautiful aspect of the game for me however is in the little spaces that Samus can enter. Paths in the ground that lead nowhere, but exist as an extension of the landscape. These places, which have no purpose, are representative of the developer's intent to create a wild planet, a place not built for the player but to be an habitat to its fauna. Or edifications in ruins, abandoned long ago that tell the history of the planet with just their existence. And the feeling you get by navigating through them is to be in virgin soil, untouched by human hands, even sacred, through mere abstraction. And this feeling, unique in any game I have seen, is why Return of Samus is one of the vital games of 1991.

It’s a common joke that Samus Aran never hunts bounties. She’s always either stumbling into heroics for free by accident or hired for, essentially, mercenary work by Da Army. The only game where Samus’ work could I think be conceivably considered actual Bounty Hunting is Metroid II: Return of Samus. She’s given her hit list and she trudges down into the depths to do her job.

And what we get out of it is arguably the most ambitious Metroid game to date, clearly pushing the limits of its hardware in terms of delivering a gameplay experience that, similar to its predecessor with the NES, is just clearly beyond the ken of the Gameboy but also accidentally in terms of themes and mood. It’s not a secret that Metroid 2 has gotten the coolguy art gamer reevaluation over the years as a secret death of the author gem but that doesn’t make it work any less well as one.

Samus takes up a huge chunk of the screen. You can barely see where you’re going. You can barely remember where you’ve been. The world isn’t hostile, necessarily; how could it be hostile when you dominate it so powerfully from the very beginning? Samus is untouchable – more agile and powerful than anything she’ll face from the first second to the last as she trudges down, down, ever downward, through endless twisting corridors as she practices the tedious chore of genocide. She only becomes more durable and more powerful as her targets become fewer and more vulnerable to her weaponry.

No, the only resistance is from the world’s indifference, its ambivalence to Samus and her violence, and even then only in the few places where she cannot enforce herself upon it. The only dangers on SR388 are momentary environmental hazards, getting frustrated by disorientation, being frightened by surprise or by unknown sounds. But never by anything remotely similar to what Samus herself brings to the Metroids, to the other fauna she might encounter.

Atmosphere is king in Metroid, and narrative – explicit and implicit – is rarely given much heft in these games, especially early in the series. It’s hard to imagine that Samus, given what we know of her (with her military background, her most frequent contractor being the Federation marines, literally spending all her time with one of her hands replaced with a gun) has spent a lot of time considering the morality of her place in the galactic landscape. She probably doesn’t have to think much about it, since she mostly seems to fight, like, animals and the Space Pirates who do seem like assholes (I don’t have time to go into the absolutely batshit colonialism allegories happening in Prime 2 but that game is a weird can of worms). So I really have to wonder what’s going through her head when she’s struck by the burst of compassion that leads her to spare the last metroid. What’s she thinking about as she makes that long ascent back to the surface with a little buddy who doesn’t know that its mom just butchered its race. Does she think she’s done a kindness? Is she considering the enormity of the act she’s just failed to complete? Are these things she thinks about at all?

I don’t know. Metroid 2 is a masterpiece.

The station was abandoned long ago. Through its corridors of twisted metal and fire, among the mazes of green overgrowth, and deep in an abandoned cavern, there walks a robot. A robot designed to discover the Lovecraftian mysteries of the station, and to teach the multitude of enemies and bosses that await one lesson - in space no one can hear you scream.

Environmental Station Alpha is the Metroid game that I always wanted. While the majority of the game takes place on a man-made station, the atmosphere feels genuinely alien and isolating, yet somehow still comfortable in a way that encourages exploration. The best example of this would be the juxtaposition between the 8-bit art style, which lends just enough clarity to let your imagination run wild - like trying to see a whole image in a rippling pool of water - and the soothing soundtrack, which enfolds you like an electronic blanket of fuzz. It's all at once exciting, unsettling, and comforting.

Part of this comfort comes from the map design. Throughout the game, you are given checkpoints to reach, but no route is specifically laid out for you. This allows for free exploration to use new abilities, discover secrets, or just time to pause and catch your breath. The environment traversal is done through platforming sections that test your skill with ability upgrades such as a double-jump, dash, and the grappling hook, and the movement is precise and fluid. The grappling hook works on nearly every surface in the game, making it satisfying and easy to use after some practice. All of this combines to make traversal and exploration much more meaningful than meticulously bombing tiles or scanning walls with radar in order to find the path forward. After a certain point in the game, teleports will become available for fast travel, which also helps encourage exploration, as you won't fear having to backtrack to the ends of eternity if you stumble upon a dead-end.

Checkpoints throughout Environmental Station Alpha are also placed in sensible locations as well, such as before difficult platforming sections and bosses. Boss fights range from fairly easy to challenging but fair, and rely on pattern recognition and planning rather than aggressiveness. Your only weapon is a laser, which can be upgraded up to three times, which means you'll be quite familiar with its range and limitations while in combat. Victory over bosses does feel well-earned, and often comes with an ability-upgrade as a reward. There is an easy-mode for the game which increases health and decreases damage done to the player, and the creator of the game even condones save-file editing in order to further tailor the game's difficulty to your skill level (this can be done with using notepad or a similar text editor with ease). Just like any good Metroidvania, you will start the game feeling nervous upon any enemy encounter, but by the end, the Station's denizens become nothing more than environmental obstacles as you make your way across the map.

While the gameplay is certainly fantastic, it's the strangeness of the world that showcases Environmental Station Alpha's genius, specifically the post-game sections. The beginning of the game plays like a straightforward Metroidvania - you fight bosses, earn upgrades, discover hidden items, and unravel a bit more of the station's mystery, however the post-game throws the entire narrative into Lovecraftian overdrive and switches the gameplay into a platforming puzzler. In some of the most bizarre yet compelling post-game content in any game, you'll be dashing through a deadly maze of spikes, translating an alien language with real-life pen and paper, solving non-Euclidian puzzle rooms while being chased by a ghost, fighting through a glitched version of the station, and earning the ultimate upgrade in order to unlock three more endings to the game.

Each of the endings are satisfying in their own way, but most of the story-telling is done through computer logs in an esoteric fashion. The main story of the game is actually quite simple and does become clear by the end, but don't expect to have all of your questions answered - the story isn't even necessarily the point of the game; the journey is. Knowing that, the post-game puzzles become an interesting insight into a world that our robot isn't fully prepared for or able to understand, and like any good cosmic horror narrative, that's what draws the excitement. Honestly, the most impressive part of Environmental Station Alpha is that a game this ambitious and outside-the-box was created and developed by just one person. While the game certainly owes its existence to the Metroid franchise, for me ESA manages to not only capture the soul of those classic games, but it improves on them in nearly every way for a much more satisfactory and enjoyable experience.

sexy mutyumu recommended this to me as part of this list thanks dude

de chirico has always been one of my favorite artists of all times and even though i connect a lot with the evocative and dramatic use of chiaroscuro in passionate baroque fashion by caravaggio the surrealist and almost mentally exhausting paradise of nonsense that brimmed with symbolism in dalì or even the impossible geometry and perspective of timeless beauty by picasso among many many others of great painters sculptors and whatnot de chirico still shines of a genius that to this day feels even wrong to talk about in this manner

in the most pure and plain form the metaphysical works of the italian painter show desolate sceneries adorned with strong and sharp lights and shadows that gently embrace everyday life mixed with mythology (trains and statues mannequins and towers modern and ancient objects) and stripped down perspective to evoke a sense of estrangement and emptiness and yet also freedom and power

clearly when i looked at ICOs box art i had a hunch that de chirico strongly inspired the style and composition of this cover and the fact that director Fumito Ueda painted it himself echoing La Nostalgia dell’Infinito made me realize that the game would have the same exact feeling of a de chirico painting and now that i finished it im 100% convinced thats the case

ICO is about a boy that grows horns for some reason that isnt explained here and he is then locked inside of a humongous fortress to rest in peace forever i guess because his home village wanted him the fuck out even though those horns kinda look sick i want them too tbh the villagers were just envious

that being said ico escapes gets a mystical cute girl of some kind that looks like shes made of pure light out of a cage and the two begin this longass trip through this incredibly complex architecture

lemme just put out of the way the stuff that i didnt like so i can go on to talk about the things that made me love this game so much to the point that in this moment im not so sure as to what score i should give it lets see how it goes

i dont like playing this game . here i said it
personally i got frustrated too many times during this experience because of janky as fuck platforming movement that got me falling into the abyss more than one time and deleting like 20 mins of progress honestly this game is a test of patience and i barely passed it
the combat also sucks which ranges from enraging in the first part of the game (poop ass controls enemies that dodge every fucking time and yorda getting kidnapped every 3 seconds) and pointless later when you get the sword or the mace or whatever when you kind of one shot them but they still manage to take yorda away somehow
puzzle games arent for me honestly ive never really gotten into them and will never be able for the life of me to enjoy them as much as id want to because im 1 stupid 2 impatient 3 traumatised so this game was setting itself up for failure in my eyes

and somehow it ended up being an experience like nothing ive ever touched in my life the sheer beauty of every single scenery and architecture is mind blowing for a game like this the castle is intrinsically against you theres traps cliffs rocks bombs waterfalls (very sexy waterfalls and mountainous paths in the later parts id say) everything is trying to kill you (and managed to many times) and it keeps twisting in itself in a labyrinth fashion and still it feels breathing humming and feeling the same dread and longing for freedom that ico and yorda are experiencing

in your escape through this interconnected wonder of architectural might you have to care for yorda in every and any moment she cant jump cliffs or climb ropes or even fight so you have to be there for her 24/7 youre basically her eyes her arms her brain (for a girl locked up in a cage all her life its kind of expected) all together for the entirety of the game and you cant even leave her behind because shes essential to unlock puzzle doors that require her magical powers (apart from the fact that shadows getting her into the dark splotches trigger a game over)
this sounds like a fucking dumb and stressing situation and in some ways it kind of is but it never feels like that i ended up caring for yorda toooooo much i became emotionally attached to her to the point that i would just take her hand every time because i just didnt want to lose her in any way and this sort of sentiment happened throughout the many dangers of the game (when she jumps in the void waiting for you to catch her its so psychologically drenching to me every time i was shaking even tho i knew fair well that its an animated sequence and that she couldnt just fall like that) to the point that i would sometimes just chill with her on the sofa safe point listening to the atmospheric music

this kind of relates to the relationship that these kids share . even tho this is very boy meets girl tropey theres this invisible barrier that separates them theyre 2 completely different beings they dont speak the same language and they have no knowledge of what the other person is like or has been through and somehow they still bond through their similar fate and hardships and cooperate to get the fuck out of this dark and cruel environment and it feels so genuine and so real its just UGGHHHHHHH great i love them this is great they share minimal interactions minimal dialogues minimal everything and they still feel like they cant live without their counterpart and thats just how i felt with yorda i couldnt just leave her alone for more than 3 seconds or id feel physically sick

theres a very important moment during the story where yorda is weakened by the castle dark energy or whatever and so when you walk hand in hand with her again if you pick up the pace too much she cant holp up anymore and falls to the ground . at that point i just took her and gently walked with her because if i made her fall again i would cry and thats just how emotionally fastened to yorda the game made me and this is after like 3 dialogues and 3 hours of wandering in the castle with no sound at all

thats also another interesting aspect of the game . in its goal to make this experience as lonely as possible the music department is stripped to the minimum (currently i can only remember the save point music and the final boss music both excellent soundtracks id say) and all the immersive work is left to astoundingly evocative SFX that really push the experience further into its dreamlike atmosphere

in cooperation with this the glimpses of the world surrounding the fortress enchant and scare you equally youre on a deserted side of the land where a towering castle sits on top of a hill and no way to get to the forest around it but a single bridge that youre trying to unlock and yet it looks breathtaking and youre struck with the beauty of what awaits you after this journey ends

the introduction of the story that i made is literally the entire story i wish i could be joking but thats basically the whole point of the entire narrative + you add a brutal and villainous queen whos trying to nurture yorda as the new vessel for her body and thats the full description so i am gonna talk about the more spoiler ish stuff even if its things kind of foreshadowed from the beginning of the game basically

after you unlock the bridge ico and yorda get separated (i was fidgety as fuck not having yorda around was lethal for my well being) and ico falls to apparent death in a river below soooo he just goes back to the castle sees that yorda got every life sucked out of her and decides to beat the shit out of the bitch queen with a new magical sword

so you go there beat the queen allegedly save dark matter yorda but get in a coma like state because of an intense damage to the head that also breaks icos horns and then seeing him lifeless and almost killed by the ruins falling off of the now collapsing castle yorda decides to put his life before everything else finally take action and save him on a boat and then says goodbye and thank you and then i cry like a fucking baby because shes an entity deeply entwined with the castle and cant leave

then ico gets on a shore and gets watermelon and yorda is there happy ending lets eat watermelons under the scorching sun or something

still deeply traumatized me tho

now that i think i said everything i needed to say do i think ico is an objectively great game ? the fuck not it was tedious as hell almost frustrating and mechanically theres more that i dont like instead of stuff that i like but do i think this is a thematically and atmospherically great game ? absolutely and it probably will feel like that even if other games try to emulate this kind of vibe

i cant explain how this works but this is the closest a game has ever been to a de chirico painting at this point i just know Ueda completely understood the hidden art of the artist and tried to put it into a full length videogame project like nothing else

in all those architectural geometries contrasting shadows and lights lifeless environments and imposing dreads resulting in a feeling of solitude and alienation you are still able to find warmth and familiarity like youve always been accustomed to and still feels like its a completely new experience

now you tell me if this is a description of ico or a de chirico painting

THAT WAS LONG OK ended up playing and logging the ps3 version that has hd graphics or whatever but first and foremost i did that because this page has the ueda cover art and not the highkey unbearable NA version so yeah
ICO good i will be playing shadow of the colossus next and that game looks sexy as fuck can i just say that

also tbh partly liked it this much because it gave me some dangerous the legend of zelda twilight princess vibes which is one of my fav games of all times so you know i may be biased i thought i would hear midna going incomprehensible fictional language and now i want to play tp again thats great

maybe i just do love games with invented languages

anyway the shadow enemies designs were great i loved them they were kind of hot can i say that is this legal

if that cover art were in a national gallery i wouldnt know a thing its just compositionally amazing i cant get enough of it also i did see the shadow of the colossus art concept in the same style of this cover and while i do think its also stellar the ico one is just something else entirely i swear to god i might cry rn

boy do i love ICO overall 11 mins ost

I was at the rope in the chandelier room early on trying to get yorda to descend with me and quickly got frustrated. she kept noodling about at the top, pacing in place, occasionally looking down at me, and for the life of me I couldn't understand why she can't just climb down (at this point I had seen her climb ladders so I hadn't realized that ropes were off-limits). every so often she would look over to the windows to our left and stare for a bit, and after I had exhausted my options on the lower floor I decided to return to her. what I found was that these windows were actually my key to progressing, and once I had scaled them and explored the collar beams above I soon realized she was pointing me in the right direction all along. that was the moment I transitioned from simply seeing her as just another mechanic to keep track of to trying to respect her autonomy and trust her as an actual companion. there's a point late in the game where she's been weakened and will trip if you drag her along too quickly, and I found myself legitimately gently keeping pace with her arm in arm.

this "design by substraction" methodology interests me because in a lot of ways it's more of a process of substitution. as an early representative title for the ps2, it spends the vast majority of its time playing up the strengths of the hardware's rendering at the expense of its mechanics. this isn't a bad thing at all. these simple environmental puzzles encourage the player to explore each room and contextualize their location in this vast castle that interconnects the more you progress. long sequences of riding elevators or scaling walls are framed with far-off vistas in the background, detailing a sense of time and space that simply couldn't exist in a prior era with poor draw distances. objects bleed together in murky rooms to highlight bloom effects from light streaming from windows, which often higlight where to go next or what objects to examine. the gameplay itself is perfectly functional, and its simplicity enhances the world around it in a way that earlier generations absolutely could not replicate.

while I do like the majority of the puzzles here, it's the platforming that really pulled me out of the fiction and into frustration at multiple points in the adventure. ico has a weird contextual jump that is fickle about when it follows realistic physics, and thus it can be distressing when the dev's design implications don't quite reach the player and expected actions can't be performed. upwards and backwards leaps feel interchangeable at points, and it's tricky to determine forward momentum during certain leaps when it's obvious that they're semi-scripted. the game's final main section is an uncomfortably long platforming challenge that kills the mood at what should be a critical emotional point, and I wonder how my opinion of the game would have changed had this part been shortened or changed to be more puzzle-driven (it doesn't help that the section before this is an abridged and somewhat disappointing redo of the east arena section, which is my favorite part of the game).

I also have to admit yorda is a bit underused in terms of actual puzzle design. at best she serves as a virtual tether on ico; anytime he needs to explore an area without her, it becomes a race to solve the puzzle before she is taken by the shadow creatures. this creates multiple nice parallel puzzles where you are searching both for how to progress through the castle as well as how yorda can follow without navigating the same treachery. other than a few simple puzzles where she must hold down switches for you to get through certain doors early on, she rarely ever actually directly interacts with the puzzles, and as the game progresses more puzzles arise where she can remain by your side constantly and thus is more just there than anything. the shadow creature sections also could have served as tense moments where block puzzles or similar must be quickly solved while keeping yorda away from the creatures. however, in most cases they can simply be extinguished without progressing nearby puzzles, and by the latter half of the game they barely register as present given the power of the sword.

I am a massive fan of Shadow of the Colossus, yet I have never gotten around to playing the other games that Team Ico has developed. I own The Last Guardian, but I never got around to playing it, partly because I wanted to play the game that started this unique, lore filled world.

Ico is incredible. For so many reasons. I know it has been praised by many for its art, world, story telling, and so on, even by the likes of Hideo Kojima, Guillermo del Toro, and numerous developers of well known, beloved games.

The game starts with a short cutscene, and after that there is very little dialogue to explain what is going on, but you are constantly piecing things together and you never stop wondering what has happened/gone wrong in this cruel, strange place. And one of the best features of the game is seeing the bond that Ico and Yorda develop throughout the story. They have no reason to help each other, but both being outcasts that are so isolated from others they form a trust for one another, and it’s beautiful.

As far as gameplay, it is 5 percent combat, 10 percent exploration, and 85 percent puzzle solving. Let’s start with combat. It’s… fine. Really you just press the attack button until the enemies are gone. I do appreciate the different weapons you can find, especially the hidden ones that reward you for your exploration! Speaking of, I wish there was MORE exploration involved, because I loved wandering around the massive castle you are tasked with escaping. I don’t know how they could have done it, but I wish there were more items that were placed secretly around the map, or maybe flashbacks that explain a bit more of the story? I don’t know, I just wished there was a bit more here. Finally, the puzzles are super fun. Some very simple, some challenging enough to make you wonder if you are doing the right thing, but never cryptic and frustrating, a perfect combination.

Of course, this game does have its flaws. As with every Team Ico game so far, the controls aren’t the best in the world, but in this game they aren’t too bad. However, the camera is not good at all. I was constantly fighting it, or wishing it would fix itself. Then comes the most frustrating part of this game, the waiting. There isn’t a ton of it, but when it does happen it is painfully slow. Climbing up ladders, turning specific dials, or waiting for Yorda to figure out how to get out of a damn hole in the ground are not fun to sit through. A specific example was a ladder in the west arena, where Yorda couldn’t make up her find and would get halfway down, change her mind and go all the way back up, run around, and then finally come all the way down the ladder.

All that being said, this game is lovely. The ambiance, world, music, and story are all beautiful. And as a side note, I love how this ties directly to the events in Shadow of the Colossus.

This game is a must play for anyone who considers video games to be an art form, and pretty much anyone who likes video games. One more game to play in the Team Ico library!

Substantial improvement over the first game in nearly every way. It may not have the soulful PS1 aesthetic but it makes up for it with more developed and interesting stages. 1 had some fairly generic environments while 2 has more variety like amusement park levels and fun surfing levels. The 3D visuals are also plenty nice-looking even if I prefer the look of the first game. The gameplay is generally more interesting thanks to the level improvements, new enemy functions like the lightning, bomb and charge enemies, and more diverse (yet still easy) boss fights. The story of klonoa 2 is less emotional than the first game but there's more depth to it and the new characters are nice. Lolo in particular is very cute. The made up language did start to get on my nerves a bit thanks to the increased amount of cutscenes, popka sounding annoying and the song during the snowboarding level. I appreciate the increased length of klonoa 2 but a few levels did go on a bit longer than they had to. I loved the forgotten kingdom stage and its moon kingdom throwback song though.

playing klonoa feels like reminiscing about childhood with a friend who came from the same sorta social patch. some details won’t match up and some details are too broad generic to get caught up on, but every once in a there’s some hyper specific throughline. could be as minute as also happening to marching around barefooted looking for pecans sometimes, doesn’t really matter—that mutual nostalgia feels all the sweet regardless

i imagine if you could lift the misty veil off our dreams, you’ll probably see the phantasmic-but-oddly-photorealistic landscapes of phantomile. not to say there was some massive movement here, more so a handful of isolated incidents, but i really dig the odd fixation on oneirology we saw throughout that gen. no idea if this was the product of developers registering that technology was just at the right level to render vague, dreamy approximations of reality but not quite at the level of making new york city replicas, but it works nevertheless

nights played with this and mixed in suggests some analytical psychological theories; lsd dream emulator rejects any sense of formality by haphazardly throwing cultural, social, and religious sign around to create a game that is one part eerie, one part tender. klonoa takes this theming and dials it up on the whimsy, framing itself as a harlequinesque pop-up book concerning around human desires. what should be meek, passing touches on high concepts are deeply afflicting, all thanks to their shared framing device

again, beneath the mirage, there’s a real sense of familiarity ingrained here. they’re distant as they are true to life. it taps into a primordial understanding of our world and how we interact with it. i’d honestly say accurately articulating this is unattainable feat, but i really mean it when i say there’s something about these game’s audiovisual presentation that gives them an unmatched intimacy