Crappy controls and infuriating camera, but regardless I still enjoy this game. I’m going to avoid sounding like a complete asshole, blathering about how enchanting and fragile the game looks and how it’s probably pushing some kind of envelope under the door of the Tate Modern gallery, because, if I’m completely honest, I like this game for three reasons: that dingly dangly music that plays when you sit on the save couch, its simplicity (in narrative, gameplay and the way it builds a relationship with the player – through action not cut-scenes) and its pace. Perfectly manageable portions of puzzle action and surprisingly little backtracking – even though ironically, in the penultimate level, you learn that you’ve been running round in a giant castle-shaped circle for seven hours – means ICO is a real charmer, and those niggling flaws soon become lost inside its labyrinthine levels.

Essentially, the game’s story involves freeing and pulling a member of Kings Of Leon around a vast castle, and protecting her from shadows of gorillas and spiders. If these mysterious black apparitions, which have been dispatched by a fierce witch-like deity, capture your companion she will be whisked away and dragged through a hole in the floor. If this happens your character, a small Viking boy named ICO, is given a small window of opportunity to reach her and pull her to safety. The fragile band member is pretty useless though, she can open doors and hold hands and that’s about it, so you’ll continually find yourself running, pulling levers and jumping precarious gaps in order to guide her to safety.

She’s high maintenance and is the most bone-idle videogame character you’re ever likely to come across; the perfect virtual incarnation of an egotistical superstar, with you playing a horned publicist wiping their batty with a plank of wood.

Every relationship that occurs in this game essentially develops in real-time, and while the game is relatively short - it holds about 6-8 hours worth of gameplay - there’s a real sense of reward and satisfaction found from finishing the game.

Sadly, due to limited release and poor responses from the US and Japan, the game is pretty hard to come by now, with copies on eBay fetching some pretty princely sums. Should you come by a copy though I urge you to pick it up, having replayed it this month it’s lost none of its charm, a timeless classic if ever I’ve replayed one.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 27th, 2008 at 10:29 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.