So I’d heard lots of good things about this game and decided to finally give it a go. I picked up the PS3 HD collection, which includes Ico and SOTC.
From the get go, it felt like a frustrating experience. Very little is explained to you about how the mechanics of the game work. I found myself trying to grab ledges on the colossi that weren’t intended.
The game clearly wants you to experiment to find out the different ways in which the colussi will react, but it’s often such a slow process that it starts to feel like a chore for half of the battles. And often I was so close to a solution but some small thing would be off, so I’d try something else instead. Then it would turn out that I had it right the first time, I just needed to be standing a metre to the right. So many times the solution felt illogical.
And whilst holding on to the head of a colossus and getting that final hit in is extremely satisfying, on some occasions the window would be so small that I’d get shaken off and have to repeat the whole process to slowly chip away at its health. Knowing exactly what I needed to do, but having to do it multiple times soon became quite dull.
About half of the colossi were genuinely fun to fight. The bird one in particular stands out - soaring through the air as you climb along his wings was incredible.
I will say that the atmosphere, music and story were beautiful. It’s a great piece of art. But a lot of people claim that this is one of the greatest games ever made, and I feel like the ‘game’ part is lacking quite a lot.
Is there something I’m missing? I actually enjoyed Ico a lot more.
The stumbling in the dark aspect was intentional and added to the charm of the game. Modern games these days and even most of them back then were very heavy on the hand holding and this one just slaps your hand away when you reach out.
I can see how that is not for everyone though.
In some respects it wasn’t that the game didn’t tell you what to do, but instead that it wasn’t clear what to do. Knowing if something is or isn’t a climbable ledge for example. Many other games make clear the ‘meta’ of the game without being hand-holdy
This is one of the things Josh Strife-Hayes pulls games up on. Making people learn things the hard way is one thing, but when they’ve learned it, it has to be something they can then trust in future. Learning a thing and applying it is a game; learning a thing and finding it’s not actually a thing half the time is frustration.