Gavin says no one reads anything on Fridays, so I may just be shouting into the void, here. I very nearly didn’t write this post, but shouting into the void is a such a compliment to the theme of the piece that I couldn’t help but feel the universe egging me on.
Gavin and Daniel have both talked about Ico’s exaggerated verticality (here and here, respectively), and now my most recent session has me thinking about it, too. The castle in Ico has a fairly small footprint—there’s a lot of up and down when it comes to progressing through the game, and a lot of doubling back to revisit rooms and courtyards already explored, albeit from new vantage points.
While I certainly noticed the castle heights before now—and I am reading my compatriot’s pieces as we go, of course—I wasn’t actually struck by them until I started working through the East Arena. I had climbed and shimmied across plenty of ledges, and even fell to my death from a couple, but running across the long, L-shaped bridge that led to the first reflector puzzle made me realize just how high up we were. I started my journey in the dungeon, rescued Yorda from a cage (hung from a moderate height, sure), and even though there was a lot of traversing downward in order to come back up, grabbed her hand and climbed. The bridge (and in many respects, the much-maligned camera) finally showed me the bottomlessness beneath.
Bottomless pits are a trope as old as time in videogames, and to a lesser extent, so is climbing upwards. You climb a beanstalk to find a coin-filled heaven in one game, ascend an almost endlessly spiraling staircase to get to the big boss, listening to his organ playing grow louder bit by gloomy bit in another. In Sonic the Hedgehog 2, you fight the final fight in the stratosphere, falling back to the earth after exploding Robotnik’s Death Egg.
Hipster Sonic was space jumping before it was cool.
Fear of falling is such a visceral thing. So many people have a fear of heights, and for good reason—if humans were meant to fly we’d be born on Krypton. And yet that instinctive fear certainly hasn’t stopped us from skydiving from outer space. Maybe that’s the draw of all these videogame falls and climbs. A natural tension is maintained: up is the unknown, the powerful, perhaps even the divine; and so the drive to clamber ever upward continues.
I have a recurring dream where I’m flung into the air, usually via some kind of machine I had been previously controlling. I keep rocketing skyward, the ground quickly receding from me. It’s not the sudden lack of control that’s most disturbing (and that’s always where this dream is coming from subconsciously), it’s the idea of coming back down.
Good god, I think, what happens when I fall?
Running hand in hand with Yorda across a narrow bridge, the camera moves above us to reveal misty emptiness far below. Good god, I think, what happens when I fall?
I guess I’d better keep climbing.
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Project Ico Posts
Week 3:
Read Daniel J. Hogan’s Big and Tall at Clattertron
Read Gavin Craig’s Just a little longer at GavinCraig.net
Week 2:
Read Daniel J. Hogan’s Take My Hand, Leave the Camera at Clattertron
Read Gavin Craig’s Broken to work at GavinCraig.net
Week 1:
Read Daniel J. Hogan’s First Thoughts at Clattertron
Read Gavin Craig’s Fear and trembling at GavinCraig.net
Read Videodame’s previous Project Ico posts.