I just picked up Ico

I just picked up Ico for the PS2 and I have thoroughly enjoyed playing it so far. You play a boy who was born with horns and has been cast out of his village to die in an empty castle. You escape your tomb and discover a quiet beauty named Jorda who needs to be rescued. Now you have to solve puzzles to navigate your way out of the castle and avoid spirits that roam the castle who will steal your soul. The game is in many ways an update of Sokoban, one of my favorite games. You have the added challenge that you have to guide Jorda through the puzzles with you.

The character animation and sound is top notch. Watching your character climb chains, ladders and walls is a delight in and of itself. At times you have to yell for Jorda to come to your side, and sometimes you have to grab her hand and tug her along with you. Jorda’s animation is just as intricate as Icos. When Ico grabs her hand and runs off she is jerked off her feet and she struggles to maintain her balance and keep up. The animation is lovingly detailed in every case. The sound is another spectacular aspect of the game as the score is ambient and unobtrusive and adds greatly to the sense of fantasy that the game invokes. It perfectly echoes the sparse and empty landscape that you are walking through.

Another interesting facet to the game is the AI that drives Jorda. She moves as she wants and understands how to open doors just as well as you do. It has been interesting to watch her walk around a room discovering its nooks and crannies. Reviews I’ve read lament the games length. It’s about 10 hours. It seems a bit harsh to reduce a game as enjoyable as this one to statistics and data. I’ve had my fair share of 50 hour RPGs that went nowhere. Ico is truly greater than the sum of its parts. This and Extreme-G3 have made me yearn for unemployment again and more time to play these great games.

I liked this from the IGN review:> That said, anybody should at least give this game a try, and fans of a quality adventure should trample the homeless and small children on their way to picking up a copy. Even if it may not seem like your cup of sturm-und-drang tea, you owe it to yourself and the games industry at large to chip in a bit of horizon-expansion all round. Ico is something new, different, and brilliantly executed – the more we see this kind of innovation, the better off we’ll all be in the long run.