Having just finished ICO a couple days ago, what's really bugging me is that I can't think of a damned thing to write about it. It didn't feel like a video game, and I don't ever remember thinking the things I usually do when I'm playing through a game for review. There are some things I can definitely remember: the feelings of almost agonizing loss whenever I had to leave Yorda behind, frantically swinging my field of view around trying to find her, and - this is silly, but I did this at least five or so times - running up to her after leaving for a while and just standing there, holding her hand, for a few seconds as if to reassure both of us that we were safe and sound for the time being.

Because of the intense realism of the characters and environment, any little thing the characters did had me enthralled. One of the biggest emotional reactions I think I've ever had over a video game was in the first part of the Symmetry section. I was jumping back inside the castle and was about to lower my hand to Yorda when she jumped right up onto the ledge and hauled herself up to stand right next to me.

And yeah, I just realized that I've been talking about the character Ico in the first person.

ICO, to me, represents the next step in the evolution of gaming. Having removed 99% of the artificial trappings (no life meter, no score, no wildly incongruous bonus stages save for the basketball game), we are left with two people and their environment, and those people and that environment feel that much more real and tangible in ICO than in any other video game.

Chris Kohler

PS. Son of a gun. As it turns out, I wrote the SECOND editorial for RPGamer.

This is the storybook I read religiously as a child, poring over its depictions of a dough-clad youngster flying his dough biplane into a towering glass of milk, until the pages were soggy and yellow with my terrified tears. While the nightmares didn't cease until at least my 9th birthday (at which point they combined with ghostbusters-induced visions of a night kitchen universe marshmallow man), I consider myself a better man because of the stark world it introduced my naive mind to like so many tons of bricks.

Now, had that favorite storybook been some kind of version of the heartbreaking story that ICO tells so eloquently, I might be saving starving children in the middle east right now instead of writing into a videogame letters column.

For me the clinching moment of ICO, the simple scene that cemented it as one of ps2's all-time defining games, was after the credits had rolled, and you find yourself awash in a sea of white sand, waves rolling lazily across your feet, gulls crying out to some distant nothing... and then there she is.

That image of Yorda, wrapped in her half smile and her siren hair, full and found and content and loved and complete.

There has yet to be anything its equal on ps2. I doubt even mgs2 or ffx will be able to completely engrain one canon image in my mind of what games should all strive to accomplish the way ICO did.

Too bad the boxart gives me more nightmares than Sendak's terror bakery opus could ever hope to.

ilameda, who is equally out of gas, road, AND car

I liked the game because it left so many unanswered questions at the end. Questions like, seriously, who saves on a couch? How come, when they both sit on the couch, the "select save slot" screen covers what they're doing. What's going on behind that box? Are they censoring something, or are ICO and his ethereal counterpart laughing at us for even wondering? And why does the couch glow?

I love these real deep games that keep you guessing even after the PS2 overheats and dies.

Vince XII - wants Super Monkey Ball because he see's similar potential.

Anyone who can whup on demons with a two by four prior to puberty is one cool kid in my book.

that damn sailor again

1) Did anyone else think the color scheme was deliberately based on first or second-gen NES adventure games? I'm thinking of Zelda in particular here. Each area has its own specific dominant color, and they're usually very monochrome, stark 8-bit style hues.

2) Besides the obvious boy/girl gender roles implicity in the whole relationship between Ico and Yorda, the specific things they manipulate (the stick/sword and gates, respectively) are sort of, um, sexually suggestive. I may be reading WAY too much into that one though. I'm not saying that the game is sexist, exactly, because obviously neither Ico nor Yorda could escape the castle without the other.

3) Obviously the reflector and gate areas are basically symmetrical, but did you notice that the entire game structure is symmetrical, too? Ico arrives (unconscious) through the waterway-- the player's input starts in the tomb-- Ico finds Yorda-- they journey a short way to the gate, where they meet the Queen-- they reach and activate a reflector -- there's a short intermediate sequence-- they reach and activate a reflector-- they journey a short way to the gate, where they meet the Queen-- Ico LOSES Yorda-- the final battles take place in the tomb -- Ico leaves (unconscious) through the waterway.

4) The spirits you fight in the tomb just before the final battle are extremely humanoid, there are exactly as many of them as there are individual stone caskets, a casket lights up for each one you kill, and horns appear to be visible on their heads as they vanish. This is kind of obvious, but I thought it might be worth mentioning anyway; it seems to be saying that the spirits are the ghosts of the dead horned children. (And notice that the only empty casket is Ico's, suggesting that he was the last one the Queen needed to enact her plan.)

Just food for thought. Thanks for letting me rant.

SK

Where do you begin with a game like Ico? All I'm gonna say is that after seeing the lush flora in Ico, I finally gained an appreciation for the plants and trees in my suburban neighborhood. I never imagined my neighborhood was so alive.

-Fares

If anything, I believe Ico proves that subtlety can speak volumes. There has never been anything like the feeling aroused by this game, or the undertones that are never mentioned but can nonetheless be easily apprehended. If the player has any understanding of compassion, it will be elicited. The first scene where the girl's mother comes into play, for example. The pain evident on the girl's face when she peers up at the boy; it's not stated, it's not overdone, but the mistrust and fear on her face twists my heart. She's not used to compassion. It's almost as though she expects that the boy will simply walk away without her, at any moment.

Then there's the scene where the main bridge splits apart, and begins to separate them. The first time I played that scene, I made the jump and the game continued. I promptly hit reset, wanting to know what happened if I remained on one side of the ledge. I was horrified as the scene continued to play out, the girl staring hopelessly at me from way across the gap. I pressed R1, and he called to her but she couldn't come. It was tragic and incredible.

The understatement inherent to the ending was superbly done as well. The boy's horns are broken off. The girl washes ashore, less pale, more human, than before. They can find a place where they'll be accepted now. There are so many themes underrunning all of this friendship, belonging, compassion.

I'd just like to say that I think Ico did precisely what it attempted to do—it captured a memorable event in a small, precise world. It was short but inexpressibly sweet.

Ico? I think there's some sort of unwritten law that compels me to speak my mind on Ico whenever the opportunity arises. Its a need.

Ico is one of those games that takes the argument that graphics and new-fangled technology can't make a game better, and unloads a few rounds from a 12-gauge shotgun right in its face. Its not a pretty sight. Ico takes the power afforded by the new generation of systems, and uses it to create a game that left me caring about its characters more than perhaps any other game has, and it did it with less readable text than this letter contains. I think that right there is the greatest indictment of what Ico does differently than any other game.

Even outside of the much vaunted character animation and AI, there's just something intrinsically different about it's presentation. The entire design of the castle as being a vast, lonely, serene and mysterious place just sort of looms overhead the entire game to give the player an eerie feeling that perhaps this is less of a game, and more of an experience.

Some people have bitched and moaned that the praise is undeserving because, at its heart, the game is still just a simple adventure game loaded with puzzles--essentially a design that's been around for over a decade. To them, I say its better to look at it all in context, seeing how the puzzles are ingrained in the overall design and artistic flow of the game as much as any of the moody graphical elements. Again, I think its a sight to behold that the game's central gameplay crux, and its biggest artistic and emotional achievement are one in the same (Yorda, of course).

I've always felt that Ico is such an odd and unique achievement, that its almost obsurd to attempt to catagorize it, and score it as one would a standard game (good luck with the game of the year debate, GIA).

Bottom line, Ico really and truely is one of the very few things in existence to have melded technology and artistic design so well.

There; I feel fulfilled.

-Justin Freeman

~Ian P.