In Ico, there was one button for managing your interactions with the magical female. When separated, the button caused the horned boy to call to his companion. Together, the button causes the two of you to hold hands. That Ico has a button for holding hands is, though technical, beautiful. When the horned boy sits alone on the couch, pressing the button causes him not to yell or hold hands, but rather to raise his head in a precious tilt to face his companion. It simply describes the difficulty of their task and the wordless compassion of the two. The characters are described most strongly by these emotional components, and for this they are appealing.
Occasionally, the dungeon's exteriors are key to the puzzle, as in an early task I remember for having played several times with nieces and nephews. While ascending a tower's interior staircase, one reaches an impasse which can only be overcome by exiting the tower, walking past the obstruction on the outside, and then reentering the castle. It's a clever puzzle which plays well on the game's strong sense of unity of place. It's novel in that such things rarely happen in other games.
While other games have castles and dungeons set in some explorable environment, rarely does one move so fluidly between dungeon and context. For example, in Zelda, one travels to a lake and then swims underwater to enter a water dungeon. While you can explore the lake and the surrounding fields, once you've entered the dungeon all the elements for solving the dungeon and progressing in the storyline are found in the dungeon. One may have to perform some tasks prior to the dungeon in order to complete it, but this is not the same sort of connection that Ico makes. In Zelda, you have to complete some tasks in order to obtain a breathing apparatus to survive underwater, but once one obtains the apparatus, one completes the dungeon all within the dungeon's confines, one never has to leave the dungeon to flip a switch outside, then return to the dungeon. The tasks are comparmentalized, whereas in Ico the tasks include the context.
This is not intended as a criticism of Zelda, but rather a description of Ico. It also sets up the fact that Prince of Persia has this same puzzle in one of its levels. Ubisoft Montreal must have really liked Ico to have ripped it off so completely. Of course, they added swords, and replaced the original world full of menace, magic, and mystery with, well, India. A fair trade?
I saw the dothead bitch die. And I said to myself, "Gee, if only I had a way to turn back time." Played for a dopey joke in the end, and it's dopey and of course they hook up, because this isn't sexless ico anymore. And you look into the clear dark sky in the middle of the night, it is the dread that grasps your neck and compresses your spine, forcing all the nervous impulses into fusion until your neck's thick cords and that should help with the chronic pain but it limits your range of motion.
Posted by mattb at January 02, 2004 11:03 PM