Remastered for the PS3 by Bluepoint Games

Published by Sony Computer Entertaintment

Rated “T” for Teen. Contains blood and violence.

Fumito Uedo is the kind of video game creator whose work could be added to a gallery as installation art. His tales seem archetypal, a boy rescuing a princess from a tower, but they capture every moment with such a distinct, visual emotion that you’re left feeling that you’ll never see their like again. With The Last Guardian due for release next year Sony has rightly decided to remaster his first two games, Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, upgrading them to High Definition and 3D while packaging them both with new bonus content. The extras aren’t important, the chance for those who missed these games to find them is.

ICO

In a faraway land rests a castle, silent in unknown purpose. Birds playfully chirp in the sunbeams that fill its long-abandoned courtyards, to the point that it’s hard to think why anyone might avoid the place. The locals do. They have a fear for the castle spanning generations and have linked it to an odd phenomenon within their community. Every now-and-then, a boy reaches a certain age and grows horns. The solution they’ve come up with is to simply sacrifice the boy to the castle. They lock him, kicking-and-screaming, inside a casket within its silent halls and that seems to appease everyone. Well, everyone except the boy.

The castle begins to shows its age when the latest sacrifice, Ico, manages to break out of his casket. He roams the halls looking for escape, but instead finds a gossamer-clad girl name Yorda, trapped alone in the angriest of cages. He immediately feels for the girl and sets out to free them both.

The castle is filled with puzzle rooms so large you have to run around them just to get a sense of their mechanism. There are handholds, stairwells, swing ropes and leaping platforms that keep important levers, switches, and pressure plates out of reach. We’ve seen this kind of gameplay many times now and done just as well, but the twist is that Ico must stay close to Yorda to keep her safe. If she’s left alone for too long, shadow monsters emerge from the walls with out-stretched arms, eager to carry her away.

Ico can do battle with the monsters, but as awkwardly as you’d expect a boy with just a piece of wood to do. When they overwhelm them, they carry Yorda off into an oily portal, sucking her down into oblivion. If he can get close to her in time, Ico can reach into the tar-like substance and pull her out alive, but to fight the monsters again.

His best solution is to simply hold her hand at all times, guiding her through the very climbs and leaps he has to make to solve each room. When she has to jump a gap, she depends on Ico to grab her in mid-air and pull her up over each ledge. It’s this sight of the two holding hands throughout that becomes indelible and will stay with you for years.

ICO is a beautiful game, but it will try those with short-attention spans as it’s filled with a poetic sense of quiet and more puzzles than fights. The last few hours of the game have to been done without a save and only the most committed players will get through that. For those who fall in love with it, ICO is game you’ll never let go of.

Shadow of the Colossus

It takes a great deal of effort to bring down a colossus, beings so large they don’t wear clothing so much as have their own architecture. They loom ten stories high and move with the weight of mountains. Every step is slow and purposeful, a ground-shaking rumble of animated rock that to most creatures in its path marks a near-death experience.

Wander is a hero whose task is to hunt down and kill all of the Colossi in the land, which is a shame for as far as I can tell they’re not hurting anyone. It’s a deal he’s made with gods called the Dorim in order to bring back the life of a beautiful young maiden. She was unfairly sacrificed by her own people and Wander is willing to take any risk to undo that wrong.

Normally the gods would simply tell him that what’s done is done, but he possesses the only sword that can hurt the colossi, an obstacle to their own needs, and so they are willing to break the rules. Perhaps they are being opportunistic, but more than likely they sense the hand of fate in Wander’s arrival.

Every fight in the game is epic in scale. You have to travel large tracts of land on horseback just to find a colossus and then work out a way to climb their massive bodies to attack them. Some have handholds on their feet or tails, others trigger points that can only be reached by bow-and-arrow. You’ll often have to use the landscape itself to reach them and then, clambering over their arms, chest, and legs as they try to fling you to oblivion, locate hidden weak spots to leverage the sword. Each new Colossus is larger and more exhausting to battle than the last, giving every win a strong sense of accomplishment.

Creating a game that is made up of Boss Fights and Boss Fights alone is a brilliant idea and certainly one that’s been copied since, but what makes Shadow of the Colossus indelible is the design of its colossi. There’s a faerie tale presence to each. They have character and little details that suggest a story behind them that allow them to live on in your imagination.

The Remaster

Both games were designed for the PS2 and that hasn’t changed with the PS3 remastering. The colour palette, animated effects, and physics remain the same, but have sharper details across a larger screen. I don’t have a 3D television to test the added mode, but both games have such a strong sense of space across a large scale that you could see them lending an interesting 3D experience even if they weren’t designed with it in mind.

There are five featurettes included. The most valuable of which are a frank discussion Uedo and his partners have about battling for their original ideas with their business partners and the concept videos they used to win those creative fights.

A decade later and it’s those battles that make this collection worth having. Across the entire PlayStation library, ICO and Shadow of the Colossus stand-out for their ability to deliver original ideas with an emotional weight.