Ico - On this day

In addition to having a specific sense of humor and a different imagination, people in Japan are also great emotional. It was on their sentimentality that the idea for a game called Ico arose, an adventure about a boy and a girl who communicate by holding hands.

Designer Fumito Ueda was inspired by games that used directed footage and resembled movies insofar as they did not have accentuated interfaces, etc., and in 1998 he embarked on a project called Ico.

The game was originally in development for the original PlayStation, but after two years it was noticed that the vision of the game did not match the hardware capabilities of that console. The project could have been canceled at the time, but the team decided to move it to the PlayStation 2. Although it required more work, a year later the project came to life as one of the acclaimed exclusives for the PS2 console.

Ico finally tells the story of a horned boy who is trapped in a castle where he finds Yorda, a girl with whom he cannot communicate in words, but very quickly recognizes that she is in danger. The game was designed on the principle of minimalism - it had no dialogue, a diverse lineup of enemies, different types of attacks, etc. The goal was a minimal focus and the minimal number of elements in the environment and gameplay to focus the player on the only task - escape from the castle.

Due to its specificity, Ico became a favorite of reviewers, and years later, due to its unique design, it became the inspiration for many other games. For example, the creator of the Souls series found his inspiration in Ico. Today, Ico admits that 20 years ago, he managed to extract an emotional reaction from the players using the specifics of his media.

Ico received two spiritual heirs: Shadow of the Colossus and The Last Guardian. In 2011, he received an HD remaster for the PlayStation 3, which showed that the game is not very old, and he managed to change the experience of the original by adding options for translating Jordan's speech and the ability to play in pairs.