Project Ico: Rest You Happy

Due diligence: spoilers after the jump.

Gavin’s summation of his playthrough is a beautiful rumination on the spiritual mysticism—and even science—of Ico’s story. Do give it a read when you have a moment, especially because I agree with nearly every conclusion he makes, and I’d even go so far as to declare I couldn’t have said it better myself.

You can skip the rest of his entries.

(I kid, I kid.)

Rather than focus on Ico in a similarly broad context, I’d like to focus almost entirely on its ending. For the purposes of this piece, I’m considering that to be everything after the opening of the front gates.

And holy hell, how about everything that happens after the opening of the front gates?! Daniel mentions in his final post that this last leg completely changed his mind about how he felt about Ico and Yorda. He also talks about how the absence of sound—or moreover, the act of sound becoming absent—can have a significant impact on the listener. If you’ve been reading my other pieces in this series, you already know I agree wholeheartedly.

This concept of taking something away in order to make you realize just how much you appreciate it is nothing new, of course. “You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone,” was a common refrain long before people were talking about paving paradise and putting up parking lots. The final stage of Ico separates your avatar from the NPC companion with whom you’ve spent the better part of four-ish hours, and Team ICO does a nice job of making the pain from that separation palpable.

It might just be the absence of a save point that makes me think of everything after the main gates as of-a-piece (I’m sure the devs would say that’s the entire reason), but I don’t want to discount the consuming sense of urgency I felt when I woke up below the castle. The game threw me back down to the dungeon after I had climbed so high—not back to where I began, but further—almost to where the very first cutscene of the game began. I passed by a boat like the one that delivered me to the castle. Maybe it was the boat that delivered me? It offered a tantalizing glimpse of possible escape, even if my seasoned gamer instincts assured me there was no sense trying.

But who wanted to try? Reuniting with Yorda was priority number one.

When I found her in the room filled with caskets like the one from which I initially escaped, she was turned to stone and surrounded by shadow spirits the same shape as me. Everything about the scene was heartbreaking. I already knew in my gut her fate would probably be a bad one, and now I was faced with evidence that the antagonistic shadows I had been battling throughout the game were related to the sacrificed children that came before me. Even the music, which had so terrorized me during every other shadow encounter, was different. There were new, distinct strains of longing and despair.

And so I made quick work of them with the very recently acquired Royal Sword, futilely guarding Yorda’s statue from their touch, mostly just to make the music stop.

I fought and destroyed the Queen, too. It was a battle that was appropriately non-epic. As soon as I passed through the two statues in front of her throne I knew what they would be used for, though that might just be yet another indication I play too many videogames. At this point I knew Yorda would come back a shadow at best, so I was fighting through grief. I wanted to destroy the Queen because I needed to do something. I knew I couldn’t bring Yorda back, and I didn’t want to be a hero by vanquishing a great evil. I just wanted to feel better about losing my friend.

Ico is a short story of a videogame. Like alot of short stories, the player-reader is dropped into a world without a whole lot of backstory, and so must puzzle one out with contextual clues. We’re a child with barely a grasp on the world, specifically how the world wants to hurt us; we’re shown over and over the world does want to hurt us; we find a companion who won’t; we help her; she helps us; we lose her. We dabble in futility to assuage the pain. Her spirit guides us to a place where we’re set free, and we finally let go of each other.

Pretty profound for four-ish hours.

——

As for the after-credits coda on the beach? I told Gavin yesterday: storyteller me wishes Team ICO had been a bit braver and let us keep hold of the bittersweet ache they delivered so well.

Emotional me currently has storyteller me gagged and bound to a chair, and she says she’s going to let us have this.