At the end you’ll know what happened without exactly understanding the consequences. Ico never shows the big picture, but in holding back Ico actually manages to add enhance its tranquility. The castle’s existence and the world its set in has an intriguing story to tell, but most of it is left to inference. Yorda’s language is left untranslated, and while her dialogue is sparse it adds a lingering curiosity toward the greater picture. Ico fights demons, but never with anything beyond a meager assortment of melee weapons with a primitive one-two combo. Games didn’t manage nuance too well in 2001, and honestly most still don’t in 2011.īut it’s restraint that’s ultimately the theme. Ico deals in these intangibles like Bulletstorm dealt in profanity all over the place, and especially in ways you wouldn’t necessarily expect. A simple tug on her wrist when Ico tries to drag her along speaks more for a character than pages of contrived text or binary moral choices. Ico is absorbed in the way Yorda nearly falls to her death when she tries to make a jump, when she’s startled by Ico hitting a stick against a wall, or the way she casually plops down on the couch (a contrived yet oddly appropriate excuse for a save point). Exploration, solving puzzles, and bashing nefarious demons qualifies as more tangible pieces of gameplay, but Ico’s most respected assets and memorable moments aren’t understood through traditional means. A calm sense of place is realized not only through Yorda’s angelic and fragile appearance, but also from a visual pallet that seems to saturate every environment with the beautiful twilight of an evening sun.
On its surface Ico is a game about a boy, Ico, and a girl, Yorda, trying to escape a castle together. Ico and Colossus featured their respective highs and lows, but also kept plenty of room for the player’s subconscious to devour the spaces in between. Such is modern game design with each iteration, Call of Duty and Gears of War crank it up to eleven and then break off the dial. Properly mixed songs hit high and low while maintaining an engaging rhythm, while today’s pop mixes consistently blow out the highs without paying any sort of attention to lows. A great comparison is a modern music producer’s insistence on filling out a histogram. Better yet, both games managed to exercise restraint without sacrificing pacing. Both Ico and Colossus deliberately held back in areas where other games would have kept cranking it up a notch. It’s also not struggle to define Team Ico’s best asset restraint. This could speak to the fall of Eastern development, but it’s better appropriated as an example of how far ahead Ico and Colossus pushed the medium, and, in many ways, how most developers are still trying to catch up. It’s been six years since Team Ico’s last release and both critics and consumers alike haven’t (with the possible exception of Demon’s Souls) adored a game like Colossus. Fumito Ueda and his colleagues at Team Ico sketched two master strokes that not only illustrated the fundamental difference between Eastern and Western design, but also captured to former at the pinnacle of its influence. It’s hard to find a pair of games held in higher regard than Ico and Shadow of the Colossus.
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