Video game journalism may just be coming out of its heady, hormonal teenage years. Previous decades of writing on gaming have grappled with the same PR issues as gaming itself, namely the desire to be taken seriously while gearing towards an audience of puerile young men. Basically, if you were looking validation that games were art through IGN, Gamespot, and the hordes of amateur bloggers staking their place on the internet, you might be discouraged — for all of the love that went into this coverage, most of it was written in the tone of hobbyists, not serious critics. That is, until the past decade or so, where journalists have increasingly found a vocabulary to describe and analyse the medium. General news publications — such as the Guardian and New York Times — were covering games as they might films or books. Meanwhile, the original grubby purveyors of gaming news from the dot.com era became more consistent and mature. Video games have even had an increased presence in academia, both as a topic of study and subject in itself.
If perceptions towards video games as an art-form are now skewing favourably, then games like Ico may be partly responsible. In 2001, when the original Playstation 2 game was released, it was noted for being a different experience to what gamers were used to. As a medium practically still in its cave-painting era, gaming has seen many innovations in a relatively short period of time, both from a technological and design perspective. Games hailed as masterpieces for their groundbreaking design will often feel aged, in one way or another, only a decade later.
Ico naturally risks falling into this category. It’s a 3D adventure game: from a purely technical standpoint, many things can go wrong. It’s also a title largely designed around the original Playstation’s limited hardware. But barring some slightly awkward controls, Ico is refreshingly minimalist — a firm, if not entirely convincing, case that videogames can be as timeless as paintings, novels or films.
Designer Fumito Euda is known as a maverick art student, who jokes his unconventional design choices stemmed from lack of experience. Ico, his first game, would nonetheless lay the foundation for (at least) two successors — Shadow of the Colossus and The Last Guardian — while influencing the wider industry, demonstrating that games could elicit complex emotions with a barebones approach.
Nature of play
Superficially Ico has some stock aspects of an adventure game: you are the titular Ico, a cursed boy navigating a castle, while solving puzzles and fending off faceless spirits. Not allowed to run through the castle thoughtlessly, the player is entrusted with a luminescent girl, Yorda, whose main power is opening mysterious stone gates. As they progress through each segment of the interconnected structure, impulsiveness is discouraged — run too far ahead and you may slip off an edge into a chasm, or leave Yorda to be abducted by shadow beings. The gameplay largely consists of puzzles that bear some resemblance to those of The Legend of Zelda series, but designed around a far more limited toolkit. Everything at your disposal is introduced to you practically at the start of the game: the ability to climb objects, push or pull them and swing, not a sword, but wooden plank. The only other mechanic concerns Yorda, who can also be pulled by hand, or called to follow.
Aside from the satisfaction of solving puzzles, Ico is not much concerned with creating the feeling of empowerment and progression that games typically strive for. The mood is far more meditative. The soundtrack consists largely of ambient sounds: footsteps on stone, birds, wind, the rustle of a chain. An understated music loop accompanies key moments, but that’s it. With its sparing use of non-diegetic sound, Ico was an outlier in its day, achieving a sense of immersion that eluded many designers because of technological limitations.
Ico didn’t completely challenge the problem of female representation in video-games — Yorda lacks agency, particularly because of the limitations of her AI. And yet, her presence profoundly defines the experience of navigating the castle. In making the player traverse the castle alongside her character, Ico becomes a distinctly empathetic experience.
But it is also still a game, whose interactivity can detract from the immersion rather than enable it. Yorda’s dependency on the player leads to frustration when she fails to follow orders. Nor are the ‘platforming’ elements that great — Ico moves slowly, sometimes clumsily. The combat essentially involves him pathetically swinging a stick at far more agile shadowy enemies.
According to Euda, it’s not accidental that the game feels occasionally unsatisfying. In a 2019 interview, he said:
‘I wanted the protagonists to have some kind of vulnerability that players could empathise with rather than… be immaculately perfect…’
Ico is exiled for his growth of horns, imprisoned in an isolated castle where he rescues Yorda, the daughter of a magical, but ailing, queen. Though speaking little, and seemingly in different languages to each other, their animations communicate a lot about their traits. Ico is impulsive in his movements, becoming out of breath as he runs. Yorda is taller than him, so she stumbles as he pulls her arm. She takes slightly longer to climb walls, and hesitates before she jumps across a gap. These details help establish a bond between the player and the characters. Euda has talked about how games can create a realistic ‘feeling of presence’, believing that more than any other form of media they ‘are suited to… expressing a personal experience.’
Deconstructing the Castle
The player is made to feel like a small agent in a world of oppressive scale. In some very loose sense, it’s comparable to Franz Kafka’s The Castle, a novel whose protagonist is stuck in an opaque system; both contain a castle whose purposes are malicious but ultimately esoteric. In Kafka’s novel the protagonist, K. cannot gain access to it — in Ico, the titular character tries to escape its walls, but the structure’s isolated geography casts doubt on this objective from the beginning.
While The Castle is anxiety-inducing (like many things Kafka wrote), Ico is oddly comforting. The towers, bridges, courtyards and rooms are dilapidated and vacant, yet flooded with warm light. Given its setting and the restricted way the player moves around the world, it’s not implausible to see elements of horror games in Ico, especially since Euda has voiced appreciation for the restricted viewpoint of the first Silent Hill game.
Despite being a defining aspect of the game’s experience, Ico’s architecture has neither any solid historical or artistic basis. In an interview with the Guardian, Euda claimed:
‘I don’t do a lot of study — I haven’t really travelled to see anything as reference… We just go from our imagination. Although we create very large structures, it’s all down to the little details that make it seem as though they really exist.’
The castle is something of a puzzle in itself, with its implacable architectural design rife with ambiguous technology and structural features. It is interesting then that Euda insists that most of the decisions he makes are purely from a design perspective. In many of his interviews he declines to name any direct influences, claiming that his worlds come from his head, and from the design process in itself. One conclusion to draw from this is that the environment of Ico is captivating precisely because it doesn’t try to be real. Its semiotic engine runs on a video-game language, not a literary or artistic one. Any attempt to recreate a perfectly realised castle design in a virtual world would always be inadequate, because how we interact with video-games is inherently different to how we interact with reality. Indeed, holding somebody’s hand in the real world assumes a different meaning in the virtual one. This might be why Euda designs his environments almost entirely within video-game engines, rather than on paper.
One memorable moment is when the player encounters a windmill in an exterior part of the castle. The windmill does not hold any narrative function, nor does it represent a significant mechanic in the game design. It’s notable because of how the player interacts with it. After completing an interior puzzle, Ico emerges onto a quiet platform looking onto a vast horizon. The windmill is giant: you can see its reflection in a pond. Soon the player realises they must climb up the structure, then grab onto one of the blades. When it reaches its peak, the player has to jump onto the top of the structure.
Euda clearly felt an affinity for this moment, because the windmill appears on his original painted cover art for the game. This artwork, at least, does signal a clear influence: the metaphysical paintings of the Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico, whose harsh contrasts of light and shadow produce a sense of emotional desolation and disorientation. Quite unusually for a video game box art, its mood is ambiguous and not really focused on the characters. The tiny, indiscernible figures of Ico and Yorda are towered over by the windmill. Not only does this communicate the mood, but for once champions the unsung hero of architecture in video-game worlds.
Crashing back into reality
The game, perhaps in spite of itself, uses cutscenes (unplayable film sequences) for its most significant plot moments. In a prevalent convention of games of its era, Ico’s cutscenes are framed by a letterbox camera effect, inadvertently referencing cinema. This technique is so widely used in video-games that it seems hardly worth mentioning. Unless, of course, you want to make the case that video-games are a distinct artform. We wouldn’t expect a film to resort to text in order to communicate its most dramatic scenes, so why does the video-game industry rely on cinematic techniques in the same way? You could justify their inclusion as a reward for the player, but this makes less sense for a game like Ico, whose emotional weight stems from its interactivity rather than completing tasks. Thankfully, the game doesn’t rely on these sequences, with those at the beginning and end arguably giving form to what would otherwise be too abstract an experience.
With the castle crumbling at the finale, the player can feel a sense of catharsis. They have completed the castle and defeated its queen, Yorda’s vampiric mother, so why shouldn’t they get to see it fall apart? Ueda has claimed his team chose this ending to give the game a sense of resolution, but also to bring players back into the real world. I’m afraid to say it didn’t work: many of us are still mentally stuck in Ico’s castle.
