Review: Ico & Shadow of the Colossus Collection (Playstation 3) (From Your Local Guardian)

Review: Ico & Shadow of the Colossus Collection (Playstation 3)

9:00am Friday 7th October 2011 in Video Games By Adam Pettifer

At last – I've got a chance to try Ico. I missed it the first time around, when it was launched for the Playstation 2 back in 2002. It has now been re-released and remastered in full HD as part of the Sony Classics HD range. Included, too, is the spiritual (if unrelated) sequel – Shadow of the Colossus.

I do remember reading the rave reviews of Ico when it first launched – it was a game I said I would always get around to trying. And then before I knew it, the PS2 was a dead platform and I had sold mine. That was that. So, with some anticipation, I booted up Ico to see what was what...

The plot is like the rest of the game... minimalist. You play a boy called Ico, banished for having horns on his head (?) and imprisoned inside a stone egg-shaped cell inside a castle. Your captors then walk away muttering about how “this is for the good of the village”. There is a small earth tremor and Ico then rocks his stone-egg-cell off of its shelf it smashes on the floor below – freedom!

Well, not quite. You still find yourself trapped inside a strange, vast castle. Full of rooms and chambers which require ingenuity and skill to escape from. Switches have to be pulled, ledges climbed up, windows jumped through etc etc. Within minutes, you find that you are not the only one trapped in the castle – a translucent white coloured girl, called Yorda, is also trapped. Once Ico frees her, the pair of you are then on the run – speaking in different languages, each unintelligible to the other.

There are times when you each have to become seperated – Ico sometimes has to go on ahead to open doors, lower bridges and so forth. Sometimes Ico has to rush back to defend Yorda against strange shadow-like creatures that come to attack her. Again – no answers are given. You just have to make sense of what you see. Every few rooms, there is a sofa of all things – it gives you both a moment of calm to sit down – but this is how you save your progress in the game. It means you can only save the game if you are both together, it also means you start the next puzzle together.

It still looks pretty good – the castle rooms are large, open spaces – pretty open without much clutter. The characters look charming, simple, almost anime-like. You can tell there aren't as many polygons as in a modern game – but the aesthetic still... works. There's no HUD, no information displayed on the screen, no numbers displaying ammo or energy bars or any clutter like that. It's clean, simple, different. But although it does looks great in HD, but not all of the textures look totally convincing. It's possible to see textures repeating in sections of floor and wall just occasionally.

But it plays very, very well. It's an original, calming, enjoyable experience to play. Ico can be completed in about 5-6 hours – but there is a trophy achievement to be gained for beating the game in under two. I'm glad I got the chance to see what all the fuss was about back then – it's a very original and worthy title, a game for the ages if you will. I can see myself returning to this every once in a while to burn through it again – I guess it's now among my favourites.

The other half of this collection is Shadow of the Colossus. This one completely passed me by back in the day. It was written as a spiritual sequel to Ico, with the same team but with no relation to its ancestor. Within seconds of starting it's obvious that this is a different proposition. The mood is different – things are more serious, perilous. The charming vibe is gone. You play a swordsman, called Wander, travelling across a vast open medieval landscape. The first thing you see him do is place the body of a dead girl on an alter. A dark voice in the background directs you to leave and kill 16 Colossus (colossi?) wandering the land – presumably in exchange for the girl's life. And that's it.

It is effectively a collection of 16 boss battles, with the very act of finding them in this open landscape as the interlude. And they are colossal. Huge, lumbering brutes, tens and tens of metres tall. One by one you attack them, finding their weak points and hacking with your paltry weapons. There are places on the bodies of these huge beasts where you can climb up and rest – recharging your health. Yes, unlike Ico – there is information displayed on the screen. A little gauge will pop up to show you when you are about to lose grip, when your health is low etc. It's a small difference, yet a big one for this game...

But, the key thing that makes this a darker game to play is the unfairness of killing these beasts at all – they just mind their own business until you barge in on them and begin attacking, completely unprovoked. This makes it all feel...wrong. The optimism and charm of Ico just isn't there and the controls are far worse. The game is viewed in the third person and it has a fixed camera point, like Ico, but every time you try to move the viewpoint, it just goes in the opposite direction to what you would expect. This can be changed in the options menu but it's a layer of aggravation that Ico just didn't have.

So I loved Ico – it's under my skin, I will return to it and replay it again and again over the years. Shadow of the Colossus wasn't for me. I enjoyed roaming around in its vast, open spaces, but I'm not big on unprovoked murder of big lumbering beasts. I'm sure this is the precise ethical feel the creators wanted – everything is so carefully crafted here – but it's not the gaming experience I wanted. I'll stick with Ico. For that reason, this collection gets a “mere” 9 – Ico on it's own is worth more...

9/10

Ico & Shadow of the Colossus Collection is out now for Playstation 3