Saturday, December 09, 2006

Hotel Yorda

I'd like to write a little about ICO and Shadow of the Colossus. However, I am well aware that in doing so I am bound to restate things that have been written a thousand times by other people. Still, perhaps I can convey something of my own viewpoint in there; who knows?

As you may be aware, ICO and SotC were both developed in-house by Sony under the direction of Fumito Ueda. You may also be aware that ICO is pronounced with the I as in Igor or Iannucci, and not as in Idaho or iPod. The games share certain thematic similarities, and whilst Shadow of the Colossus is a worthy successor to ICO, I believe ICO to be the better game. Perhaps my reasons for thinking this will become clear at some point.

One of the most discussed aspects of these games is their aesthetics. The graphics in both are indeed beautiful, and have inevitably given fuel to the endlessly tedious "can games be art?" debate. (Oh, all right. My opinion is that it is a meaningless question, given that art is an entirely artificial and man-made concept, and thus has a definition which extends to anything we want it to.) Perhaps less attention is paid to the soundtracks - for one thing they are less easy to convey via the medium of screenshots. ICO has a relatively sparse soundtrack, with only two actual songs, both semi-inspired by Simon and Garfunkel's Scarborough Fair. SotC, conversely, is home to a wide selection of majestic orchestral and choral pieces, which well suit its theme of titanic battles over ICO's claustrophobic/agoraphobic isolation, which was for the most part scored only by a vaguely sinister ambience. Both games are well suited to their music, although it must be said that Colossus sometimes suffers from some unpleasantly jarring musical transitions, which take you out of the experience somewhat.

Controls are the barrier between player and avatar. (It's pretentious because it's true? I dunno.) ICO certainly has the upper hand in this stake, as SotC is slightly too ambitious with its control system and aspects of it, especially the camera, can feel unnatural. By way of contrast, I will tell you a story about ICO. My first experience of the game was with a demo disc which a friend had received with a magazine. I was round at his house when we put the demo on, and for whatever reason I ended up having first go. When the opening cinematics had finished, I set to running and leaping around the crypt. After a few moments, my friend asked me uncertainly: "Is that you controlling it now?" Years later, no such uncertainty was expressed as I stumbled ineffectually against Agro's flanks.

What of the themes of the two games? What does each have to say? ICO is about a companionship born of need, and the entire game is geared to make you care about this helpless girl with whom you share no common language. For me, it works. Some people found it annoying to have to shepherd Yorda around all the time, and on one level I can see where they are coming from, but to complain too loudly is to miss the point. Battling a wave of shadow monsters in a desperate struggle to stop them from dragging Yorda into the pit is not a pleasant experience, nor is it meant to be. You can only survive through her salvation, and I suppose whether this makes you care about her or resent her says something about you. (Probably nothing more than how seriously you take this sort of game, but still.) Here is what is symbolic of ICO as a whole: often, you must jump across a chasm and then beckon Yorda across, and because she cannot jump as far as you, you must catch her and pull her up by holding R1. Now, if you let go of R1 mid-maneuver, it doesn't matter. You can't drop Yorda. But it took me a while to find that out, because it was a long time before I dared to see what would happen if I let go.

Shadow of the Colossus, on the other hand, is a study of inevitability and perhaps a comment on the nature of games. One of its most striking features is that it presents you with a vista suggestive of endless possibilities, and yet permits you only one. To play the game is to buy into the wanderer's ill-fated quest, whether or not you truly believe it is a good idea. You might think that if you could take control of a fictional character, as you do here, that you could make wiser choices. But it turns out that you are driven on by a sense of narrative inevitability. And as ruin approaches, you are equally driven in a doomed effort to escape it. These, then, are the defining moments of the game: every time you slay a colossus, black lines emerge from its crippled form. They race through the air towards you, and soon they plunge into your body, knocking you unconscious. I quickly learned that there was no way to escape them. But I never stopped trying.

Now that I come to dwell on it, I think that games rely more on suspension of disbelief than any other medium. You can sit in a cinema making sarcastic comments and the show will go on, but a game relies on the player to drive things forward. If the player becomes bored, the story will quickly grind to a halt. If a game is good, I'll usually buy into the reality it presents to the greater extent. I don't think I have it in me to be one of those gamers who is always shooting the hostages for a laugh within the first five minutes. I lived in abject fear of Catherine the nurse in Gregory Horror Show, purely because I was supposed to. (Oh, and because she genuinely is terrifying. Come on.) This could go some way toward explaining my utter inability to get on with survival horror games, as I can never bring myself to walk past the first screen.

I'm straying from the point, and I'm not sure I've explained why ICO is better than Colossus. Perhaps it isn't, and I'm being unfair. Shadow of the Colossus certainly has more things wrong with it, but then it might also have more things right with it. It's probably a matter of personal taste (++SHOCK REVELATION ALERT++) but I will leave you with the tale of the most memorable thing that happened to me playing ICO.

We were in a courtyard with a drainage stream running underneath it. I could get out of the stream by getting Yorda to stand on a switch to open a gate, but for the life of me I could not figure out how to get Yorda up there too. I don't know how long I ran around looking for a solution. A long time. Frustration was setting in; the point at which the only reason you haven't looked up the answer in a FAQ is sheer wounded pride. Suddenly, Yorda paused in her random wanderings. She stood on one point, pointing up at the ceiling excitedly. "Ico!" she exclaimed. I looked to where she was pointing, and sure enough - one of the drains had no cover. All I had to do was help her climb up.

She solved the puzzle for me. She had worked it out for herself. Because we were a team.