ICO joins the list of games I ought to have played ages ago and am only now seeing why everyone was mad about them.

Short, charming, and only slightly maddening – platform style jumping with the PS2 analog stick is something I’ve not had occasion to learn how to do before, and the bit of the game that got lifted straight out of Castle of Cagliostro was bloody nasty hard as a result.

I’m looking forward to Shadow of the Colossus now. That doesn’t mean it’s next off the stack, of course, we’ll see what happens.

Game mechanics-wise, it’s an interesting process going from Tomb Raider Legend to Beyond Good and Evil to ICO. They’re honestly all find-the-switch-pull-the-box kind of games, just trussed up with different stories and styles, but they differ wildly in how much the designers took the seatbelts off – it’s really very difficult to fall to your death in BG&E, for instance, but it’s the normal course of affairs in ICO, and Tomb Raider is more of a “you CAN die here, but we’re going to give you lots of chances to save yourself” game.