ICO is a Japanese Playstation 2 game designed and directed by Fumito Ueda. He was inspired to create ICO when he saw a commercial of a woman holding a child’s hand while walking through the woods. Another inspiration was the manga/anime series Galaxy Express 999 where a woman named Maetel adopts a young boy and they go on intergalactic adventures on a space train. He wanted to make a minimalist meet cute game.
ICO is the story of a young horned boy getting sacrificed in a castle. After being placed in a stone sarcophagus he manages to escape. While running around the castle he comes across this glowing girl whom he is hell-bent on escaping the castle with. By solving puzzles and fighting shadow creatures, the horned boy and the glowing girl try to escape the castle and its queen.
It was a long 4 year process to make the game. The team ran into limitations when they decided to make the game for Playstation. They had to use keyframe animation instead of motion capture. They used “subtracting design” to help keep the game’s vision on track. They tried to remove anything that would interfere with the reality of the game, thus making the game more immersive. They changed the plot focusing more on escaping the castle and only having one enemy type. Which is why the only enemies in the game are shadow creatures. In a 1UP interview “maybe in ICO, I think we subtracted too much” He did on the other hand want to have a happy ending but decided to leave it a little bit vague still.
The game’s cover (and the cover of the novel ICO: Castle in the Mist) in the Japan and PAL regions is drawn by Ueda himself. He was inspired by the painting The Nostalgia of the Infinite done by Giorgio de Chirico. Sadly the North American cover had the horned boy with a sword looking angry front and center with the girl faded in the background. But this is because the team ran out of time. The new game plus, co-op mode and better box wasn’t done in time for the North American release but finished in time for both the PAL and Japan releases. I didn’t even know there was a co-op mode or if you play through the Japanese version once the subtitles for the girl character now become readable.
The minimal dialogue, bloom lighting and animations have inspired many games over the years. In fact I heard someone say that “ICO is your favorite game developers favorite game”. Several game designs have cited ICO as an influence for their games. It was the inspiration for Naughty Dog when developing Uncharted 3 and The Last of Us and a big influence for Hidetaka Miyazaki when creating Dark Souls. It was also cited to influence Halo 4, Journey and Assassin’s Creed.
ICO The Castle in the Mist is a novelization written by Miyuki Miyabe. It’s a stretch calling it a novelization since it’s her interpretation of the story. It greatly expands on the mythos and backstory of the characters making it more macabre than the game. The novel is strangely paced but I think that can be attributed to the fact that it originally appeared in installments in a magazine. The novel is divided into 4 long chapters and an epilogue. Each chapter has untitled smaller chapters within it. The third chapter is where the novel really diverges from the game and it is also the longest chapter messing up the pacing of the book. The motivations of the characters also seem completely different then in the game but if you really enjoyed your time playing ICO then this will add a different take that I think fans would really enjoy. If you have never played ICO before then it would be best to stay away from the novel until you have at least played it a little, even though both are totally different. In the author’s closing comments she warns the reader not to use this book as a steady guide since the puzzles are completely different.
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