ICO (PS3) Review

Remember last week when I said that Shadow of the Colossus was still awesome? Well, the same can’t really be said about its older sister, ICO. Team ICO’s first adventure on the PS2 was released within calendar year of the PS2’s launch. Developers were still fumbling with the power they were given and hadn’t perfected the dev process for the hardware. Because of this, the original version of ICO is terribly ugly, and by ugly I mean the general resolution of the game. Unlike Shadow, it looks old very old. The User Interface looks old, the handling and platforming feel old and the environments, while beautiful, are blocky and reminiscent of past technologies. With that said, the game is still good.

ICO tells the story of ICO, a poor boy sent to a prison because he has horns. He breaks out of his cell and meets Yorda a white girl that has seemingly cosmic powers. The game is ICO and Yorda trying to escape their castle/prison. The story is vague throughout. Like Shadow of the Colossus, Team ICO depends on the art style and visuals to tell the story. The platforming and puzzle solving is a standard affair, with your character only having two basic moves, swinging a stick, and the vaguely named “action” button. Not including the standard navigation, and jumping mechanics that’s the entirety of your abilities.

The right shoulder button is used to call Yorda and/or hold her hand; this is where the game mechanics get frustrating. Yorda spends the entire game with you and in no way is she self sufficient. She has to be guided through every section of the game usually by holding her hand and running or physically helping her climb onto ledges (a process that takes entirely too long to transpire). At context sensitive spots, she will stay still and stand on switches, but most of the time she aimlessly roams around the room she is in waiting for you to direct her or pull her to where she needs to go.

This effectively makes ICO the longest escort mission in the history of gaming. When moving from screen to screen, if you are not holding Yorda’s hand, she doesn’t follow you. If you leave her in a different room, the shadowy bad guys come and take her away. You are essentially babysitting this girl the entire game. Sadly, this will probably be the deciding factor in whether a player likes the game or not. The puzzles are solid, the environments are lush and the enemies are creepy, but toting her around from room to room, may be the breaking point for you.

As for the port, Bluepoint obviously put more work into ICO than they did Shadow of the Colossus. When looking at side by side shots of the original and the re-release, redrawn textures can be seen in places. It still looks like a PS2 game, and if anything the new textures bring it more inline with its disc-mate Shadow of Colossus. The controls are still clumsy, and the environments are 99% unchanged, so if you played ICO on the PS2 don’t expect it to be too different, just a bit cleaner.

Having played the original, I wasn’t prepared for the stylistic shock that would come from booting up the re-release. I described ICO as Prince of Persia without the excitement on last week’s podcast, but that really only scratches the surface of the antiquity of the base game structure. As stated above the controls aren’t really clear and the items you interact with in the world are not labeled as such. The “action” command, attached to the circle button, is used for a variety of things in the world, but the game never tells you what they are. Essentially, ICO wants you to just figure it out.

This style of gameplay is all but gone from gaming these days. Sure, there are a few hold outs, namely Demon’s Souls, but games are much more willing to hold your hand or guide you through areas than they were a short ten years ago. It’s pretty ironic that a game where a major character mechanic is holding hands doesn’t hold the player’s hand at all. If you aren’t keen on environmental puzzles, its possible you could roam an area for hours without seeing that one thing that is the key to moving on to the next area.

Alot of people have never played ICO and will be experiencing it for the first time on PS3. These people need to know exactly what they are getting into before embarking on the journey. There will be and has always been a very vocal minority of people that love this game, but its age is not doing anything to help that minority’s argument. It has an extremely slow pace and rarely does anything truly exciting. However, ICO is an experience like none other.

Verdict: Not as good as I remembered it.