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.

All games are products of their time, even ones which "bucked trends" or "were ahead of their time" are only so in comparison with their contemporaries. RE5 is interesting historically because it definitely screams 7th gen : the color grading pejoratively described as the "piss filter" of brown environments assaulted with bloom, the co-op multiplayer focus of the days where such things were starting to become mainstream in the console market, the mowing down of hundreds of racist caricatures by a buff white guy, the fact that Albert Wesker's tailor discovered normal maps and is really excited to absolutely plaster them on his jacket etc.

Its hard to avoid noticing the main two things which jump at you when playing re5, namely that its RE4 but not as good and more racist. Asset reuse is fine, honestly, even mechanics recycled from re4 arent unwelcome but its the rehashing of re4 set pieces whilst doing them worse that lets re5 down. Similarly, the ingenious inventory management mechanic of the RE4 attache case : equal parts survival horror resource management and tetris space allocation is replaced by a dull 3×3 grid whose ultimate depth involves exchanging shit to your ai partner to reload a weapon before exchanging it right back.

The multiplayer aspect makes re5 have kind of an absurd difficulty curve based on your luck in finding partners. Some sections with the Ai partner were a bit patience testing, given their passive nature and limited commands, but then Id get randomly paired up with a god on their fifth playthrough who'd hand me 300 bullets for the machine gun and absolutely tear mfers up with endgame weapons. Very funny to me as well, how certain doors and weights and stuff require the cooperation of chris and sheva because of course its too heavy for a guy whos built like a brick shithouse, he needs help from a small framed spinning instructor to move it.

That being said, its got its bright moments and thankfully the multiplayer aspect made the use of QTEs for custcenes impossible so it does have that over RE4. In all honesty, its not an AWFUL game gameplay wise. There are a few levels which are quite striking visually, namely the temple areas and the faster arcadey nature of it all makes it not better but different to the pace of RE4. The implementation of a cover system and gun wielding zombies is as stupid and unwelcome as you'd expect, and the smoking gun for me that the island in RE4 is not only the worst part of that game but an incredibly ill omen of things to come for the franchise.

I suppose I should mention the elephant in the room : the game is set in "Africa". Not very specific where in Africa except the locals speak French so theres about 20 countries that could apply to. The spectre of the war on terror looms large as the intro depicts an american leading a counter terrorism operation and soon we see Akihiko from Persona 3 doing an arab accent get executed by frenzied locals riled up by a preacher. And sure, like in re4 the reason for it all is a parasitic infestation but the visual language of the game borrows a lot from contemporary wars that its hard to miss. There are heroic black characters like Sheva and her captain buddy but they seem there more as a pre emptive defense at criticism.
Admittedly, considering the state of AAA games at the time, RE5 is not THAT much more racist that the other shooters about doing imperialism in thr global south; that is until you get to the chapter where the enemies are all black people wearing grass skirts and chucking spears at you. And im sorry but zombie or no zombie, that sequence made me surprised to find out that Rudyard Kipling's ghost didnt have a writing credit in the game.

Smarter and more personally invested people than me have already talked about this aspect so I won't go much deeper into it except to say that its an odd obsession with studios who thrive on schlock and silliness to try to delve into more serious or thorny subjects that they are not equipped to handle.

Finished my replay of this game on hard mode. There wasn't much of a difference with normal except that obviously you take fewer hits before you go down. Perhaps one day I'll play on realistic but something tells me that will cross the line into being annoying for my playstyle.

If you've followed me for a while or even if you've been in the same room as me for more than 15 minutes you might now that I despise stealth games. I've tried, but I genuinely hate them all. MGS, Thief, Dishonored, even stealth sections in games I like (shenmue, max payne, disaster report 4). I've had bad luck with so called Immersive Sims because of it, as most of them are essentially stealth arpg hybrids like Deus Ex, but so far its basically only the OG (and consortium by virtue of not having stealth) that I mess with. Its not exactly a mystery why, and consider this a plea for other games to follow suit : let me murder everyone. Give me an actual choice between stealth and combat and not just stealth and "you fucked up the stealth you idiot! you might as well reload a save"

Importantly, Deus Ex's combat is deceptively fun to get to grips with. Its so simple but really effective the way that you start out as someone who takes 2 business days to line up a pistol shot to being able to run around with the gep gun blowing people up like nothing. I'm surprised no one else has tried emulating the system, with your RPG esque weapon stats determining how fast your crosshair takes to narrow and become fully accurate, presumably imitating how it takes someone to aim down the sights and prepare to fire a shot.

Now, obviously for this kind of game there has to be push back, and even with a combat build your ass is not going to last if you're trying to play the game like half life, which is precisely why its satisfying to completely forgo stealth and murder everyone through traps, ambushes etc. This playthrough I discovered how useful the non lethal gas grenades are for murder runs (ironically) cause it makes enemies freeze up to rub their eyes, lining up to get headshot with the pistol for maximum murder efficiency.

The playthrough did however highlight Deus Ex's biggest flaw : the save system. Its one of those systems which is simultaneously too annoying and too forgiving. Its annoying because I am forgetful, and losing 15 mins of progress because I forgot to save is just... frustrating. On the other hand, there is basically nothing stopping you from hardcore save scumming every 5 seconds. Ironically, there is nothing more appropriately "mean" for a choice based rpg than an aggressive auto save, as it is, you can basically game most of the big decisions and encounters. Maybe even a save room system like RE4 might be appropriate? Could even lock them behind doors with an interesting weighing up of resources if its worth risking a loss of progress for a lockpick or multitool? Idk now Im playing armchair designer but either way.

Area 51 is still kinda annoying, I didnt use console commands to noclip through it this time but I still fused with Helios because it was the fastest way to complete the level, the later bits of the game are kind of a downgrade from the initial half of the game.