A boy and a girl walk across an old stone bridge, stopping when they reach a section that has collapsed. The boy jumps across the gap, reaches for the other side and pulls himself up. He stretches his arm out and calls out over the roaring wind for the girl to jump across. Nervously she paces the edge, trying to decide whether she can make the jump, then stops and leaps. For a moment it seems she will miss the boy's hand, but he grabs her wrist, almost pulled off the bridge by her weight.
As she hangs hundreds of feet above the water, a dove flies by, dropping a feather that floats down into the mist. Breathing heavily, the boy pulls his companion to safety.
Jumping has been a part of videogames for decades, but it has never been as enthralling as it is in Ico, an action-adventure game from Sony Computer Entertainment America that turns game play into rare and wonderful art.
The Game
The game begins as the boy, Ico, is abandoned to die in a decrepit castle. His village considers him cursed because, like one boy in each generation, he has horns growing from his head. Breaking free of his chains, he discovers and frees a caged girl, Yorda. Fragile, mysterious and glowing with an ethereal light, Yorda speaks in a foreign tongue and is unable to answer Ico's questions.
The player controls the movements of Ico, whose goal is to escape from the castle with Yorda. Ico can leap over chasms and climb ropes, but frail Yorda can do little, so Ico must remove obstacles and create pathways so she can cross. He must also fend off the shadowy creatures of oily black smoke that seek to drag Yorda back to her cage.
In spite of fanciful touches like Ico's horns and the shadow demons, the most striking element of the game is the sense of reality conveyed through the characters' movements. If the player has Ico take Yorda's hand and start running, she stands passively still until her arm is pulled taut, then stumbles forward, her weight slowing Ico for a moment before she starts running along with him.
That small series of movements takes less than a second or two but brings the characters to life. The movements are so real that I assumed they were created through motion-capture technology, in which people are filmed and digitized, but I learned later that the characters were animated by hand.
Yorda's reactions are as realistic as her movements. When Ico is not holding her hand she may get distracted and run over to look at an object, sometimes excitedly running from one thing to the next.
If Ico calls Yorda, she looks around to see where he is and then runs towards him, stopping at corners to orient herself. If Ico hits the wall with his weapon, Yorda will step back with a cry.
The shadow creatures are unusually intelligent, and two may attack Ico while a third grabs Yorda and runs or flies away with her. While the fights are not especially challenging, the creatures' evident intelligence makes them remarkably compelling.
The castle the two children must escape is a wonderful creation, a crumbling behemoth set on cliffs overlooking the ocean with a weak sun shining through the mist. Desolate and beautiful, Ico creates scenic panoramas as gorgeous as anything in Myst but with fully rendered 3-D environments rather than still images.
Strange thrill
There is a strange thrill in gazing down from a castle turret at the rotating sails of the windmill you climbed hours before. Ico is the most beautiful game yet created for PlayStation 2, which suggests that even with newer, more powerful consoles coming out this fall, PlayStation 2 is still a force to be reckoned with.
RSS