Masterpiece: Ico

A note from Ben: I’ve learned, in my time with Ars Technica, that when John Siracusa contacts you saying he’d like to write something for your section, the best thing to do is lean back and let him do his thing. I asked for 800 words or so, and this is what he gave me. When someone is this passionate about a game, it’s criminal to send the story back and ask him to cut. So instead, we have our first feature-length Masterpiece entry. Enjoy!

Ask a devoted gamer to make a short list of the best games of all time and there’s a good chance that Ico will make an appearance. Indeed, due to its relative obscurity, Ico is often enthusiastically promoted to more casual gamers by its rabid fans, and offered up to non-gamers as a paragon of the medium.

This is actually kind of a shame. Just as an understanding of the history of cinema is needed to fully appreciate a movie like Citizen Kane, a deep personal history with video games can raise the experience of playing Ico from merely enjoyable to revelatory. This game generates rabid fans for a reason.

Ico opens with an in-engine cutscene showing a boy being transported by armed men on horseback through a secret passage into an vast, apparently abandoned castle. The men carefully place the boy into an upright stone sarcophagus, putting his hands in stocks, all the while asking him for understanding. “Do not be angry with us. This is for the good of the village.” What originally appeared to be a viking-style helmet on the boy’s head now bears reconsideration. Does the boy have…horns?

The sarcophagus closes. The men leave. The camera pulls back to reveal a huge room filled with similar sarcophagi, each presumably containing the remains of another small, horned boy.

The boy thrashes against the stocks, trying to escape. A lucky crack in the stonework finally causes the sarcophagus to topple and crack open. He is free, but alone, and in a strange place.

The camera moves into to a traditional third-person view, and the telltale black letterbox bars that denoted cutscenes in the pre-HD era fade away. The player is now in control and the game has begun. But other than the boy standing alone in a castle, the screen is bare. There is no health meter, no mini-map, no targeting reticle, no equipped weapon indicator, no score, no level, no number of lives, no nothing. No HUD of any kind.

There’s also no music, just the resonant moan of the wind passing through the castle walls, and the loud, echoing footfalls as you start to explore.

Just a few minutes in and everything about this game is whispering its intent to be different. The mood of the opening cutscene is contemplative, not bombastic. Nothing explodes; no one is murdered; there aren’t even any raised voices. On the surface it seems timid, almost boring, but it quietly insists that you take this game seriously.

Technological limits and choices

Though a high-definition PS3 remake is planned for 2011, Ico was originally a PlayStation 2 game, released in 2001. This was less than a year after the PS2 came to the US. Even as a first-party title, Ico had to contend with a new hardware platform whose potential had yet to be fully explored. Other launch or near-launch titles faced similar problems, and most chose the safest route, using straightforward extrapolations of earlier PlayStation 1 graphics engines. Team Ico chose differently.

Rather than extending all areas of PS1 game engine technology to new heights, Ico‘s developers decided to focus on a few very specific engine features. You can see the results of this decision in any screenshot from Ico. The textures are muddy and repetitive. The geometry is simple. At a glance, you might even mistake it for a PS1 game. But what you definitely won’t do is mistake it for any other game. Ico looks different, thanks to Team Ico’s concentrated efforts in a few key areas.

The lighting engine is the first standout feature. Where other games were content to slap textures onto geometry, light the scene by fading from full-saturation color to black, and call it a day, Ico employs a huge (especially for its time) dynamic range of light and color saturation laid over an almost comically limited set of textures. Like an impressionist painting, Ico is a mess close-up, but becomes ever more convincing as you pull back to take in the entire scene. Ico aims to achieve a mood, an atmosphere, an emotional result. The graphics are a means to an end, not an end in themselves. Just look at the three screenshots below, all of which feature the same handful of repetitive, low-resolution stone block textures.

By embracing the limitations of the hardware rather than fighting them, Ico made game players and designers alike expand their notions of “realism” beyond quantifiable features like texture resolution and number of triangles per second.

Ico took a similar approach to geometry. Stone buildings are pretty simple to model with a limited number of polygons. Team Ico seized this opportunity and decided to expend computing power not on more varied environments, but on draw distance and scale. Ico presents towering structures and expansive vistas. The lighting complements this choice, of course. Vast distances don’t seem quite so vast if everything is tack-sharp and brightly colored all the way to the horizon.

The last big piece of Ico‘s technology budget was spent on character animation. The character models themselves have limited detail, but the extensive movement and climbing animations, all painstakingly created by hand, stand head and shoulders above the generic Male Space Marine animations of the day. The boy moves like a little boy. He struggles to climb up ledges. He slips and falls in pre-pubescent spasms. He runs and leaps with childlike abandon. All of this cements the character and pulls the player into the game.

Gameplay

At the start of the game, you discover that a mysterious girl is also trapped in the castle. Together, the two of you must escape. On the surface, this sounds like a gameplay doomsday scenario: an entire game spent playing one long escort mission. But that’s not how it plays out at all.

In lesser games, the experience of escaping the castle with the girl (Yorda) in tow would crash on the rocks of imperfect pathfinding algorithms and the feelings of powerlessness and frustration that have been the hallmark of escort missions since time immemorial. But in Ico, you don’t have to rely on Yorda’s ability to follow you. You can take her by the hand and lead here where you want to go.

It’s a brilliant game design decision, and it’s implemented beautifully in the engine. Seeing the animation as you dash across the screen leading Yorda by the hand is akin to seeing the original Prince of Persia for the first time. It’s still startling even in today’s age of sophisticated procedural animation, if only because games so rarely choose to show something as “unmanly” as leading another person by the hand.

The gameplay itself consists of solving environmental puzzles and keeping Yorda away from enemies that are trying to take her away from you. The puzzles are good, though there’s little that hasn’t been seen before. But the purity of purpose elevates the experience. You’re not solving an environmental puzzle so you can get to the next power-up or boss fight. Escaping the castle is the game. There’s no ice level, fire level, jungle level, vehicle section, etc. There’s you, Yorda, the castle, the world. Everything is of a piece. It’s a seamless, coherent experience.

This is the type of thing that does not impress immediately. But as you play, the setting slowly seduces you. Remember, there’s nothing on the screen to take you out of the moment, to chip away at your suspension of disbelief.

The combat fits neatly into the mold of this seamless world—which is to say, it breaks the mold of traditional video game combat. Your first weapon is a wooden stick; later, you get a sword. You can only carry one weapon at a time. There are a handful of enemies, all roughly the same size and appearance (a lovely, dream-like smoke effect with glowing eyes—another example of concentrating development effort where it counts).

Combat consists entirely of whacking these enemies with whichever stick-like weapon you happen to have. There are no combos, dodges, parries, fatalities, or quick-time events. There’s just a single attack button. Furthermore, the combat is overwhelmingly defensive. Enemies appear out of dark, magical holes and try to pull Yorda back down with them.

The first encounter with these enemies can be strangely disconcerting. A few appear and you instinctively bat them away with your stick. But all the while, your inner gamer is being thrown off balance. There are no health meters with which to gauge your progress. Are these enemies invincible? Can they kill me? What are the rules here? The boy in the game doesn’t know, so you don’t know either.

As you progress, and the number of enemies increases and the environments get larger, combat becomes surprisingly intense. But unlike most games, the drama is entirely within the game world. There is no combat system to be mastered or power-ups to be carefully managed. You stop thinking about that stuff; you stop thinking like a gamer. You’re just a boy frantically trying to keep an overwhelming enemy at bay, to keep Yorda safe.

Storytelling

Ico is a quintessentially Japanese game. The story unfolds slowly, and with restraint. There’s a decided un-western expectation that the player doesn’t need every detail of the plot and backstory explained. After all, why would the forces of evil explain themselves to this boy? You may not understand everything because the boy doesn’t understand everything. But in the end, it matters little. The opening cutscene alone is enough to propel the game to its conclusion. Everything unfolds naturally from there, with relatively few interruptions for more exposition.

The voice acting is likewise limited, and everything is subtitled. Oddly for a top-tier first-party game, the Japanese voices (with English subtitles) are used in the US release. This might have been a cost-saving measure, but I think it actually enhances the experience by making it seem more exotic. (It also neatly avoids the grim but all-too-likely possibility—especially in 2001—of horrible voice work by English-speaking actors.) Going even further in the same direction, Yorda is subtitled in undecipherable runes, emphasizing the language barrier between her and the boy.

There’s not much music in the game, but the few motifs that punctuate dramatic and quiet moments alike are exquisite. The silence between these moments is filled with sounds of the environment: footsteps on stone, the distant ocean, a lone bird calling, the ever-present wind. When you call out for Yorda to follow you, or she gasps off-screen as an enemy grabs her, these sounds pierce the quiet to great effect. And of course, there are no “game sounds” to destroy the illusion: no lock-on beeps, weapon-change clicks, critical hit klaxons, etc.

You were there

Ico has so many little touches that I’d like to describe, but I don’t want to spoil it any more than I already have, so I’ll limit myself to just one. Ico features an old-school explicit game-saving mechanism, but true to form, it’s done in a way that’s both tender and unobtrusive. You save by sitting down on what look like stone couches, which are strategically placed throughout the game. But sitting down alone won’t do it; both you and Yorda must sit together.

There is no explicit instruction on this matter in the game. Instead, the first time you encounter one of these couches, Yorda sits down on her own and motions for you to come over, patting the seat next to her. Within the game world as without, saving is a respite from the struggle.