WOW! You can feel the passion and emotional weight poured into this game for every minute of playtime. I love the puzzles, I love the game logic, I love the combat, and I love the characters! To me this deserves the ports that shadow the colossus has gotten, not to disparage that game, but this game has an incredible soul in it that you can still feel. I'm still not entirely sure why shadow of the colossus is labelled a "spiritual successor" to this game. It can make sense in terms of gameplay with the ledge hanging, jumping, and acrobatics you can make your little boy do, but to me the AI companion role is not filled in by Agro. I like that there are no collectibles in Ico. I don't think this game would have been as good with the modern sensibilities that many games have now. This game is so focused, brilliant, and enlightening that I need another dose of it.

What a game! I don't know how they packed so much life into a game released only a month or two after the console's release, but playing this, at any point in time, feels like I'm peeking into a microscopic world of its own. The gameplay and controls are pretty simple and leave a lot of room for you to master them. For this playthrough I beat the game in 16 days, but I know I could have gotten all 30 ship parts much sooner. This game comes from a tangible trend of games that deliver an ultra-dense, tight experience that rewards replays, like Devil May Cry, Resident Evil, and others. So quaint and so charming.