Horny Boy Sees Girl with Gaping Hole, Puts Big Stick to Good Use

Ah, ICO. Before it was an X-Play Game for Cheap Bastards, it was sitting on my shelf with a $10 price tag. There it stayed until recently, when I was gently urged, through varying degrees of sanity, to play the game.

I put 4½-5 hours into it Saturday, a pretty good chunk of game time for me in one day. Going until 2AM (the second 2AM... lousy farmers, can't see in the dark) didn't make my bloodshot eyes too happy.

I'm probably borrowing liberally from someone else's words here, but the simple act of holding hands gives you an immediate bond to the characters. You don't know who the girl is, or why bull shadows are trying to suck her into portable holes. Yet you develop an emotional attachment, thanks to the literal one. The subtle Dual Shockery when you're guiding Yorda behind you helps add tacility to the connection. For example, you really feel worried when you've left her in another room, suddenly hear her gasp, and have to race back to pull her out of the enemy's grasp.

For a 2001 PS2 game, the shadows and water look amazing. The indoor environments aren't great, with the dull textures and whatnot. Out in the open, up in the towers, you get to see the huge world, with a very pretty background in the distance when you're on the outer edges of the kingdom. Despite the somewhat limited camera system, you can definitely get caught up checking out all its majesty.

The level design is great. There's usually several areas or objects that look like you can manipulate them to clear a path. It's just a matter of figuring out which one will help you at the time, and which ones you'll have to come back to. This has led to me spending near half an hour on an area, trying to climb walls and pipes, or knock blocks from windows, when the solution was something simple like pulling Yorda out of a sewer by hand. I very much prefer this style of platforming to, say, Rare's N64 efforts, where there's a lot of repetitive collecting, or slowly hauling blocks of cheese to a farting mouse.

One of my favourite parts is the way you save the game. Ico and Yorda sit together on a mystical loveseat. It's so goofy, and the "loveseat" sticks out among the scenery, but the image is still sweet somehow.

There's not a huge amount of useful or entertaining exploring to be done, as far as I can tell, so it shouldn't take me an inordinately long time to finish. Judging from the area I just completed, and the setup of the castle, I'm probably a little under halfway through. Should be another 6-7 hours, barring any more parts where I get totally stuck. It's only happened twice so far, and was more a lack of understanding the control scheme on my part than anything else.

Burnout Revenge came today (in suspicious shrink wrap for a "sealed" game, but oh well), so ICO may hit the shelves again for awhile. But I'm sure it'll come out again on another boring Saturday or two, somewhere down the line.