On December 6, 2001, a video game was released that contributed more than many of his colleagues to making the history of the videogame medium: we are obviously referring to ICO, a title signed by Fumito Ueda is that it has paved the way for different products with the same intimate soul. On the occasion of its twentieth birthday, let’s try to understand why this video game is so important.
ICO twenty years later: Fumito Ueda’s masterpiece
ICO could be seen as a rather classic fairytale in its construction, which in its simplicity, however, manages to talk about many themes and also with a certain narrative impact. In the game we find only three characters: the first is ICO, who gives his name to the title as the protagonist and is a boy destined to be sacrificed because of the horns on his head.
The second character is Yorda, a mysterious girl who speaks in a language unknown to us and whom we will have to help escape from the castle in which we are prisoners. Finally, the third character is the Queen of Shadows, the one who controls the castle and its elusive inhabitants who will hunt down the main duo.
The fulcrum of the title, as can already be seen from these few lines, is based on concept of freedom, that the two protagonists do not seem destined to obtain. In fact, their fate is that of imprisonment, in ICO because of its horns, a real curse that he cannot get rid of, and in Yorda because of his mother, the queen, who generated her only to take possession of her body. .
But ICO is much more than just a reflection on freedom, as the Queen of Shadows’ castle represents, in a sense, a place of confinement for the sovereign herself, whose only goal seems to be to remain locked up in that place voluntarily, to preserve her life as long as possible. A clear sign of how easy it is to distort our sense of reality by living in complete solitude.
It is no coincidence that the cover of the game is an explicit reference to the works of Giorgio de Chirico, with its aesthetics of metaphysics, in which the architectures completely dominate the protagonists.
A tomb and a prison
For ICO, therefore, the castle is nothing more than one tomb, for Yorda it is one prison real. The two glimpse a faint hope only thanks to their meeting, which could make it possible to escape to the outside of the fortress, in a living and vibrant world, not delimited by high walls raised by the Queen, a rather explicit metaphor of her own nature.
The castle is therefore an emblem of the stillness to which the outside world acts as a counterpoint, that is the place where our duo wants to go. It is precisely their meeting that also gave the two the strength to move, freeing themselves from the stagnation of their condition. However it is with the encounter with the different that something new is born, and ICO, in its simplicity, explains just that.
ICO still remains one of the most exquisitely gaming experiences today authorial that they ever arrived on our consoles and it is no coincidence that twenty years later we still talk about them with affection and passion. This despite a not exactly brilliant launch in terms of copies sold.
Fortunately this was not enough to stop Ueda, who gave us a few years later Shadow of the Colossus, another unique product in the gaming landscape that reflects on the limits of human selfishness. Many years later, after a troubled development to say the least, it also arrived The Last Guardian, which merges the themes present in the two previous games to create something new, a bit like the meeting between ICO and Yorda.