Ico's simplicity is remarkable. As a game, it is simply a collection of clever, challenging puzzles interspersed with mild action, equal parts Tomb Raider and Myst. While other games try to woo the player with elaborate plots and clever dialogue, Ico is a pure game experience: The story is nothing but the player's thought process as he guides the protagonists.
Personality is expressed almost entirely through movement and sound. At times you'll want to stop playing just to observe Yorda's tentative movements or to hear the children's ragged breathing and unsteady footfalls echoing through the castle. Ico is not a perfect game, but it is a game of perfect moments.
A competitor
3DO's action-adventure game Portal Runner offers a similar kind of jumping and puzzle-solving but replaces Ico's minimalist sensibility with bright colors and a nonsensical story. If Ico is as perfectly drawn as a Kurosawa film, Portal Runner is as garish and goofy as a Hollywood action movie, and just as much fun.
Like nearly a third of 3DO's games, Portal Runner is part of the Army Men series, in which all of the heroes and villains are small plastic toy soldiers. While the conceit is a clever one, the games themselves tend to be forgettable. More spinoff than sequel, Portal Runner stars a peripheral character from the series, the reporter and army brat Vikki.
The plot is fairly absurd. The buxom femme fatale Brigitte Bleu decides to marry Vikki's boyfriend, Sarge. Describing Vikki as "a precious treasure ready to be buried," Brigitte lures her through one of several accessible glowing portals into a prehistoric world.
With the aid of a friendly lion, Vikki battles dinosaurs, jumps across gorges and solves puzzles, all of which have so little to do with the story that I was surprised when the plot kicked back in.
Portal Runner is a wonderfully calculated piece of entertainment, with a spunky heroine for girls, a zebra-skin bikini for adolescent boys and a friendly lion for younger children. For older girls, Vikki has a costume change with each new world, and one can imagine every outfit in a Britney Spears video.
While Ico's lyrical, melancholy finale is far more affecting than Portal Runner's noisy one, both games succeed in their goals. Portal Runner's toy action figures are as plastic as Ico's characters are real.
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