Ico

Ico is a third-person action-adventure game produced and published by Sony Computer Entertainment, and released in late 2001 — unusually, in September in North America, and only in December in Japan.

At the time, the game was notable for its use of bloom, an effect hitherto little-used in games due to the large processing capacity necessary to render it; the new Playstation 2 console's “Graphics Synthesizer” was significantly more powerful than any other consumer-available graphics hardware of the time, and Ico showed off its capabilities well. (It was not for another console generation that bloom would become common: Team Ico was no doubt assisted in their efforts by two years' worth of attempts to get the game running on the original Playstation, a task they eventually abandoned in favor of the then-still-in-development PS2.)


Ico's use of bloom is still notable today: not so much because it uses bloom more heavily than most modern games — although it does, I think — but because it does so without being obtrusive or trite. There is a certain freshness and an honesty to it, aided by the sense of almost Myst-like wonder that the game manages to consistently evoke.

The game is relatively short, and the storyline simple; it's the characters — the protagonist Ico, the sinister Sorceress-Queen, and our little firefly of a glowy damsel-in-distress Yorda — that bring the game home. Their characterization is (writers take note!) aided, rather than constrained, by their inability to communicate verbally with each other.

The gameplay itself is admittedly nothing to write home about, reaching its none-too-widely separated zenith and nadir in, respectively, the puzzle-interaction and combat action sequences. (Many would reverse these, complaining about their inability to direct Yorda; strangely I never found that to be the case, though I did once or twice find myself playing a 3D version of the old game hunt-the-magic-pixel with various scenes.) Still, ‘nothing to write home about’ is very good indeed for a game designed, as Ico explicitly was, to be first and foremost a work of art and only secondly a game: such rarely succeed at even the former endeavor. Ico does.

As such, I suppose, my usual metric doesn't do Ico justice; but for the sake of completeness, it does receive a 1 out of 1 — a humble enough thing to give, in return for a fairy-tale's worth of memories.