Part One: Some Explanation and History

Part Two: The Tale Proper

I. The Beginning
in which we are introduced to the young hero
II. Entombment
in which his predicament is made apparent
III. A Ghostly Beauty
in which he discovers he is not alone
IV. Some Thoughts on the Puzzles
in which the next three chapters are introduced
V. A Magnificent Prison
in which the castle's role is discussed
VI. Reluctant Explorers
in which the pair's quest is defined
VII. Companions
in which the nature of their companionship is defined
VIII. The Mistress of the Keep
in which Ico is forced to make an unpleasant
acquaintance
IX. Reorienting
in which the recent revelation places all in a new light
X. The Gate Once More
in which the children stand on the verge of freedom
XI. The Last Battle
in which the tale concludes
XII. Retrospect
in which we attempt to make sense of it all
XIII. Final Retrospect
in which we must make up our minds

Part Three: Art or No Art?

Part Four: Last Words and Acknowledgments

 Webmaster's Notes: Resources and Technical Information

ICO fans are few in number not because few liked it but because few tried it. But I am glad
that those few have continued to talk about it and kept it from fading. Though neglected it
will never quite be forgotten. The thought is not satisfying but it is at least encouraging.

People often use words to describe ICO which they would not use for any other games,
perhaps even for those games they like better than ICO. Few ICO fans will go so far as to
declare it the best game ever made, but nearly all will agree it is a special experience the
likes of which they have not seen elsewhere and do not expect to see again for a long
while. The word special is to be stressed--not merely unique, not just odd, but special. I do
not want to belabor why it is special; if you agree with me you must already know why,
and if you don't I doubt I will be able to explain it to you. The following was written for all
those (including myself) who enjoyed ICO a great deal but had trouble making sense of it.
I wrote it because on the ICO message board at GameFAQs I saw the same questions
come up again and again. I often answered them but rarely liked my own replies. The
reason was that the questions were always treated out of context. I tried whenever I could
to establish a basic context before replying, and this tended to make my posts rather
lengthy. And after a few weeks the posts would be automatically purged from the board,
forcing me to repeat myself when similar questions were posed later.

I decided therefore to write an annotation of sorts to the story from the beginning to the
end. I posted the first part on the aforementioned board on May 15, 2003 and concluded it
on August 25. In March of the following year I compiled the posts, with substantial
changes made to some places, into a plain text commentary. Both that commentary and
the original message thread are still available in the ICO section of GameFAQs. And now,
over two years after the first posting, the work is available in this pleasing new version
thanks entirely to Clover's effort.

Let me clarify exactly what I am setting out to do. ICO is at once intriguing and confusing
because it insists on holding silence on its own narrative. It shows and suggests enough to
convince us that something big is going on but will not tell us what it is. So I propose an
exercise: I am going to take a walk through the story and point out noteworthy elements
that may help us make sense of what is happening. I will not be a neutral observer; I will
advance my thoughts on what I observe. I of course realize that what is sense to me may
well be nonsense to you. I make no pretense at authority; you are welcome to disagree
with me if you find my reasoning flawed or groundless. Nor do I believe for one moment
ICO cannot be enjoyed without some sort of post-mortem examination. If you think an
exercise of this sort will only spoil its charm, you should dismiss it.

Allow me also to stipulate what this exercise is not. It is not meant to explain what makes
ICO such a fabulous game. I do believe it is wonderful entertainment, but my knowledge
about games, electronic or otherwise, is very shallow and I would not consider it my
business to debate what makes a game better than another. I will leave that question to
real aficionados. My attention is on the story, not the gameplay. Nor am I trying to show
why ICO is a great story. Again I do find the story charming, but I assume you and I are
agreed on that point and need not argue over it. I am not here interested in how good a
story it is. I am only interested in determining what the story is.

As I said these posts were written over three months' time. I have revised them for
compilation, but I have left the journal-like expressions ("Last time I said...," "Today I
should like us to look at...") unchanged. Each segment will be marked with the date on
which it was first posted.
One last thing: when I refer to the game title I will spell it as ICO in capital letters. Ico, on
the other hand, refers to the story's hero.

If you wish afterwards to discuss any part of this exercise, find me at the GameFAQs board
or e-mail me at egmont76@hotmail.com.

PeterEliot

Let us agree on one thing before we begin. As we move along the story I want us to
assume for the talk's sake that we are seeing it unfold for the very first time. That is, I
want us to pretend that this is our first run through the game. In fact let us pretend that
we have not even read the introduction in the manual. In this exercise all our knowledge
about ICO comes from the screen and the screen alone. But if you have not completed the
game yet, be kind to yourself and read no more until you have.

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(First posted 15 May 2003)

So let us talk about the opening sequence. It is long but like the rest of the game it
contains little speech--all seventeen words. The opening still tells us quite a few things.

Because the modern audience is an impatient crowd, opening a story with an unforgettable
sequence or paragraph has become rather important. The storyteller wants to make sure
as far as he can that once the story begins the audience will feel driven to see it to the end
and not get off midway. A stock strategy of ensuring this is to drop the audience in the
middle of the action and leave them to figure out what is happening--to forgo introduction
and begin the story in the middle. Accordingly ICO plunges into the tale without showing
us so much as a title screen.

The narrative opens with a view of a forest--green, lush and warmly lit by the sun, with
birds chirping in the trees. It is a beautiful, pristine landscape. As it happens it is the only
shot in the entire game wholly free of suspense or melancholy. We are shown next a group
of horsemen making their way through the forest. Evidently these are fighting men,
wrapped from head to toes in armors. Their beasts are burdened with traveling articles,
which tells us the men are on a journey of some distance. From their knightly garbs we
may expect a distinctly Medieval flavor in the story that is about to unfold.
Impressive as they are the knights do not command our attention for long. A member of
the party stands out like a lamb amongst wolves: a young boy, seated before one of the
knights. Next to the ironclad frames of the men the boy is tiny, and conspicuously
unarmed. His puny form catches our eyes because his presence in this outfit does not
make sense. He is the only anomaly in an otherwise consistent pattern. Had someone
asked us a moment ago what we were seeing, we should probably have answered "a party
of knights on horseback." Now the answer might be "a little boy in a party of knights on
horseback." The child has completely got our attention. And he keeps it through the
opening. How could he not, when he is the only one in the company who has a face? The
knights are hidden behind iron masks, and barely distinguishable from one another. They
are thoroughly anonymous--faceless, nameless, and as we will soon learn, without
personalities relevant to the tale. They are instruments, not men; their job is to fulfill a
function and make themselves scarce so that the characters that do matter can get on with
the story.

Our curiosity turns to alarm once we have observed the boy, which we can hardly help. He
raises his hands to wipe his brow in the heat of the sun, and we see that the hands are
bound. So he is not here because he wants to be; he is a captive. What is more, he
appears to sport a pair of bullhorns on his head. And these appear to be genuine unlike the
metal horns adorning some of the men's helmets. Who is this boy who looks harmless
enough apart from the oddities poking from his head? And where is he being taken to
against his will?

We find the answer soon enough. The forest path terminates and with it the land. The
ocean stretches before the party, and jutting from the waters is an island of singular
appearance--a colossal column of solid rock. A fortress sits on it half shrouded in the
morning mist. It dwarfs the men and the horses and the trees and everything else in sight.
The screen fades to the title shot. I should like to place the end of the prologue here.

Next part will treat the other half of the opening. In the meantime I hope I have aroused
your interest enough to stay with me the rest of the way. I would also like to mention that
I do not intend to go through every puzzle in the game like I did here. That would make
this a walkthrough and not a very good one.

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(First posted 16 May 2003)

So the knights have brought the horned boy, Ico, to a mysterious offshore fortress. Well,
what is the deal with this fortress? We will not know for a good while but the opening
affords us a number of things to observe about its mystery.
We left Ico and his captors gazing on the castle from a handsome if somewhat run down
stone platform, sporting Greek style colonnades, at the edge of a shoreside cliff. Next we
see that same platform from below. The camera traces the cliff down to the sea, where a
mean-looking wooden dock extends from the shore. The party, now horseless, crosses the
channel to the island on a very small boat. This ought to strike an observant viewer as
being rather odd. To explain let me show you some screen shots I have borrowed from
Vincent Lam's fine fan page.

You should recognize this shot from the title screen. Near the lower right corner is the
portico-like platform we just left behind. Here is another shot of much the same from a
frontal view.

This shot presents the castle as Ico and the knights must have seen it from the cliff. In
both pictures we can plainly see the front gate, flung wide open. Now why would they not
enter through it? Why would they go to the trouble of climbing down the precipice and
braving ocean waves on a tiny boat you would not want for a fishing excursion on the
village lake? We of course know that the bridge is not yet available. But remember that we
are pretending to see all this for the first time without any prior knowledge about ICO.
Imagine, in fact, that you are the boy himself who just saw the castle for the first time in
his life. Would you not be surprised to see an open gate a hundred yards ahead, only to
learn that you are not to enter that way?--that a gate exists but it is useless because there
is no way for you or anybody to get to it? That the knights do not have the option of using
the main entrance and are forced to use a back door (if you will) informs us that they are
treading a territory not their own. They are setting foot on someone else's turf, someone
evidently more powerful than they.

Now if you please, take one more look at the images above. Suppose now that a castle
just like this one actually existed somewhere. What about it would surprise you the most?

If you have an inkling of what it took to erect a castle a thousand years ago, the most
striking thing in these pictures is undoubtedly the geography. People simply did not build a
castle that big on that sort of terrain. For starters the island is hundreds of feet tall. It is so
steep that climbing it on foot would be a task only for daredevils. Imagine now having to
haul many millions of tons of bricks to the top of that island. And there isn't just one
island. There are four. I might have fancied the bricks came from the islands, but another
look at the castle suggests differently. The structure is so humongous that if it was
removed the mass of the islands would shrink by half. It occupies every available square
inch of the islands so that there is hardly any surface that is not built on. The islands could
not have supplied the needed quantity of materials. They do not even have space enough
to allow so massive a construction work. Medieval architects, who had no mechanized
cranes to raise stones to great heights, erected the frame for a castle by first mounting up
an artificial hill much broader than the finished edifice. That would not be a possibility
here.

Now of course this castle is as fictional as the rest of the story. Such a fortress as this does
not exist and could not exist. It is quite silly to speculate how a nonexistent building might
have been built, since it never was built. I am only trying to impress upon you that,
granting for the story's sake that the castle existed, it would have to be a staggering feat
of engineering on the par with the pyramids in terms of labor involved. It would leave us
wondering who in the world built it. That is if human hands could build something like that
at all. But if not human hands then what? Would it be the work of whomever the castle
belongs to? If so that person must be, or must have been, a mighty lord indeed.

Let us move on. I said that the castle stands on four islands. Here let me for a moment
waive my proposal that we use on-screen information only for our exercise. Below is a map
of the castle which shows the layout of the islands.
The islands are arranged in an unnatural symmetry. The tiny strip of land at the bottom is
the shore from which the party sets out on the boat. Directly facing the shore is the main
keep, and to its left and right are the two buildings that house the "keys" for the gate. The
fourth and smallest island is at the top of the map. It is hidden from the view ashore. Later
we will see that this island is the heart of the fortress. It is also where our boat is bound.
The knights sail halfway round the islands and bring their prisoner to the point farthest
from the shore. A cavern opens into the island. Its entrance is marked by rows of immense
stone pillars that appear to be rooted in the seabed, another remarkable feat. Some of the
pillars are on the verge of collapse. Like from the ruinous stone platform atop the cliff we
get a sense that the castle, though majestic, has not been terribly well cared for of late.
The lattice barring the cavern is lowered and we are finally inside the island. The party
stands directly underneath the castle.

"Get the sword," a knight in a pointy mask--it looks ominously like an executioner's cap--
tells another man. The man departs with the order while the rest of the company leave in
the opposite direction. So the knights have not brought "the sword" with them, whatever it
is. It was already here on the island--whatever it is.

Next we see the knight rejoin the company, having secured the sword. Here another detail
ought to strike us as curious, though we only see it briefly. Ico and the men are
presumably still in the bowel of the island. But the space surrounding them is not the
jagged and coarse interior of a natural cavern. They stand inside a vertical circular vault.
And it is gigantic--especially when we consider that it is underground. The island's rocky
core has been hollowed out like a macaroni noodle, yet another example of the awesome
labor that created the castle. Later we will have a far better opportunity to appreciate the
scale of this vault.
The sword is unsheathed before a pair of statues at the center of the vault. An eerie flash
crackles and the statues part to reveal a recess. Inside is a sort of elevator which takes the
party to the crypt above. Now I admit that I did not like this elevator the first time I saw it.
It seemed much too mechanical--much too modern--and seemed out of place in the
ancient setting of the castle. I revised my opinion somewhat after completing the game.
For now the only thing about the elevator I want to note is the switch that controls it. It is
in the form of a glowing character whose meaning escapes us. When thrown off the switch
turns to form a different character, causing the platform to rise. What is that about?

The knights have reached their destination: a rounded chamber reminiscent of an arena.
Rows of stone caskets are arranged round the arena. One of them gapes open. The men
deposit Ico in it and close shut the lid. They bid the child farewell. Their words betray that
they do not enjoy what they do. Then they are gone. Ico is left alone inside the casket. We
see that strange characters are carved on it. They look much like the ones we saw on the
elevator and glow with the same cold blue light. The casket also features two kneeling
figures, their hands outstretched to each other. An arrow points from one to the other as
though a transfer of some sort is taking place. Make of that what you will, but here I stop.
Next time we will look at Ico's first meeting with the princess.

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(First posted 18 May 2003)

Ah, Princess Yorda--that enigmatic, aloof, captivating maiden! Some seem to find the
passivity of her character frustrating and even infuriating, but apart from her alleged flaws
it is rather obvious that any lasting pathos of ICO is to be credited entirely to this soft-
spoken damsel. Without her we should have a good-looking puzzle game. With her
presence we have got a tale that pulls at our heart long after the puzzles have ceased to
amuse. But I am getting ahead of myself. We still have not got Ico out of his prison.
So that hapless boy has been abandoned in the crypt by some diabolical design. The exact
nature of this design we do not yet know, except that it has driven the knights to the
outrageous act of entombing a child alive. (The manual's synopsis explains why, but
remember we are assuming our ignorance and taking things as they come on the screen.)
After the knights leave Ico tries to break out of the stone casket. The masonry beneath is
crumbling, probably from age, and this causes the sarcophagus to topple and burst open.
Out tumbles Ico who promptly knocks himself out.

Next follows a brief sequence that may only be described as a dream or a vision. Ico is
walking along a spiral path inside a tower. A storm rages outside the windows. He is
startled to see something. A dark cage of iron hangs from the ceiling. A mysterious black
substance begins to pool at the bottom of the cage, overflowing to drip. From the pool
emerges a slender figure--so completely black that it seems a shadow come to life. It sits
there limp and unmoving in the cage while the boy watches transfixed. A shadow opens up
behind him and swallows him whole. He awakens from the vision on the chamber floor.
Things are getting stranger by the minute.

The game is finally in our hands. Before we take leave of the crypt we might as well
explore it a bit. The chamber is filled with dozens of sarcophagi like Ico's own. Presumably
each one has been the end of an innocent victim. If we were allowed to peek inside we
might perhaps glimpse the ghastly remnant of the atrocities that took place therein.
Thankfully the game does not go that far. At one end of the crypt is a door of statues just
like the one that the knights had opened with the magic sword, but it is inaccessible. So
Ico leaves through the door at the opposite end. He passes through a nondescript room
adjoining the crypt, and finds himself at the bottom of a very, very tall tower.

The only way out of the tower is, again, a door that requires the magic sword. He does not
have the magic sword. He is doomed. But let us examine this door first, since we will be
seeing a great many of them soon. It is made of four (usually two) identical statues, each
of which contains a smaller statue inside. This latter is in the shape of a crouching horned
child who hugs his knees, head buried despairingly in his arms. It bears an eerie
resemblance to our boy; it is as if he were himself turned into stone and put inside the
door. We are now doubtless that the castle is somehow connected with Ico's horns. With
that thought behind us let us climb the tower. After all there is nowhere else we can go.

The tower begins to look familiar as we near the top. We have seen this place in Ico's
vision. Does it have the cage hanging from the ceiling also? Sure enough, there it is. Does
it likewise have the same black figure within? There we are surprised. Crouching inside the
cage is a young girl of almost blinding pallor. Ico calls out to her but she is unresponsive.
She looks, in a word, miserable. Before lowering her down to freedom, take a careful look
at her posture. It is the mirror image of the horned child inside every statue-door. The only
difference is that she has no horns. Meanwhile the view from the terrace by the cage
confirms the boy's fear--outside, a blue ocean stretches as far as the eyes can trace,
offering no means of escape. If he is to leave the castle his only choice is to find a way
back to the shore whence he came.

And so the two children are introduced to each other, after a fashion. Ico does not know it,
but she is the only friendly soul he will see in the castle. Who knows?--perhaps she is the
only friendly soul he has ever known. It would not surprise us if she is.

I have only a few more things to say on this first meeting. The children speak different
languages and are unable to understand each other. From the boy's bumbling attempt at
self-introduction we finally gather that he has been brought to the castle as a sacrifice, an
evil fate reserved for children with horns. Of the girl's speech all we can discern is that she
speaks the language of the castle. We know this because her speech is spelled in
characters identical to the inscriptions we have seen on the elevator and on the caskets.
The girl must therefore belong to whatever civilization that built the castle. Unlike Ico who
was brought in from the outside, she must be from this place originally. Ico does not know
this yet but we do. And while we are talking about things he does not know, let us go a
little farther. From our second run through the game we understand the girl's speech. Her
first words to her rescuer are: "Who are you? How did you get in here?" What do these
words tell us about her, if anything at all? Well, they tell us that even though she lives at
the castle she is dreadfully uninformed about what goes on in it. She appears to know
nothing about the horned children and the practice of sacrificing them. Keep this in mind
because this ignorance of hers will be important later as we try to understand what she is
about.

The maiden displays touchingly guileless curiosity about her liberator, but the moment is
cut short by the sudden appearance of a hideous demon. This newcomer looks rather like
the entity from Ico's dream; it too is wholly black and rises out of nowhere. It seems to
have one aim in mind: claiming the girl. Ico will not have that, so the liberator becomes
the protector. He decides to get himself and his newfound companion out of this terrible
place. His altruism yields an unexpected benefit: the girl can open the statue-doors. In a
heartbeat she goes from a tagalong to an indispensable ally. Curiously enough she seems
surprised by her own ability. (At least that is what I think; you can observe her open the
door for the first time and judge for yourself.) How does she do this? We will have a fairly
convincing answer eventually, but for now let us concentrate on the obvious. If the magic
sword can open the doors, and the girl can open the doors, then the likeliest explanation is
that the two of them share a certain pertinent property. Let us leave it at that for the time
being.

With the aid of the girl's power Ico leaves the northern island. The pair now faces the main
keep where the bulk of their adventure and toil will take place. The demons lurk
everywhere. They only want the girl, but they will fight Ico if he proves a hindrance. And
that brings this section to a close. To review what we know so far regarding the mysterious
beauty: (1) she seems to have a bearing on the vision Ico had; (2) she has been
imprisoned for some time; (3) she speaks the language of the castle; (4) she is in danger
of being captured by shadowy demons; and (5) she shares the magic sword's ability to
open the statue-doors. To this we may tentatively add: (6) she seems to be rather
ignorant of the goings-on at the castle and (7) she seems at least amenable to the idea of
escape since she cooperates with the boy's lead. To all these we shall return as more
information becomes available.

Next time we will shift our attention to the castle and try to clarify the puzzles' relevance
to the narrative--if they have any.

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(First posted 20 May 2003)

I said at the beginning that gameplay falls outside the scope of this exercise. I think I have
made an unreasonable claim. ICO's story takes some hours to unfold, and we spend the
majority of those hours solving puzzles. If I am to talk about those puzzles at any length I
will after all have to treat gameplay even if I do not call it by that name. (I admit I am not
very comfortable with the term; it is not in any dictionary, and I hesitate to make use of a
word I could not define.) Let me say again that I make no pretense at anything like expert
knowledge about games. Common sense is all I have got to guide myself on the subject.
Please bear with me.

Having played through the game you know that everything I have talked about thus far is
only the introductory stage of the game. We are barely past the opening scenes. Ico and
the girl have only just now met. That is not to say that we have not learned quite a lot of
information already, because we have. But all we really have done so far is watching, not
playing. And a game is supposed to be played. In that sense the game has hardly begun.
For we have only solved the first and the simplest of the puzzles. There are many more
challenging puzzles to come. And the puzzles are the substance of this game, are they
not? Of course they are. If we had no puzzles we should have no game. The puzzles must
therefore be the one absolutely indispensable part of the game. And if they are the one
absolutely indispensable part, they must be the most important part. That is true to logic,
isn't it?

Clearly I do not believe so. I will explain why not. Without a doubt the puzzles are the
most prominent feature of the gameplay. Yet most ICO fans seem convinced that the
puzzles are not its real stock. If you are inclined to disagree, recall some praises you have
heard people say about the game. Are they chiefly about the enjoyableness of the puzzles?
Or are they about something else entirely?

It is a rather obvious question. People mention things like "awe-inspiring visuals,"

"heartwarming tale," "art" and "beauty" and what not. But some would say all these fine
qualities are nonessentials to a game. Pac-Man may lack them, but that does not keep it
from being a classic game. So one could argue ICO is a beautiful tale but an impoverished
game. For there is exactly one way for us to complete the game. And once we have
completed it, the element of challenge is all but gone. Puzzles we know the answers to are
no longer puzzles. No wonder so many deem ICO worth no more than a rental. But we ICO
fans are strange. We insist that ICO is not only competent but positively amazing. Can we
justify that claim?

Now I already said this exercise is not about how good a game ICO is, and I stand by my
word. But I think I do need to say something about how the game works its magic on us if
the next segments are to make any sense to you. (As to how well it works, I will leave to
you to decide.) Recently I exchanged some e-mails with a very devoted fan of ICO. He
loves it so much that he has written a fifty-page essay on it. He surprised me by saying
that he had not played it in months. He said that the experience feels more real when he
seldom plays it. About then I was similarly surprised to hear another veteran say on this
board that she was only then playing through the game for the second time; I know how
she adores it. But I really should not have been surprised. I have myself played the game
to completion just three times. Now we have got a bit of a paradox here. Here we are,
three diehard admirers of the game who confess it to be their all-time favorite--and we
hardly play it at all! A paradox is calling it politely. Either we are lying when we say ICO is
our favorite game, or we have deluded ourselves that we like it more than we actually do.
Isn't that right? No? Well, why not?

At first glance it seems perfectly reasonable that we should spend the most time on the
games we enjoy the most. But it seems to me that people have been conditioned to think
this way ever since they popped their first quarters into an arcade machine long before
video games were a part of the home entertainment system. If you were a good gamer
you got your quarter's worth of time and then some. If not you needed lots of quarters or
you would not be playing very long. An idea took shape that in video gaming you invested
money to be rewarded in time. That idea has stayed through the years. I think that is what
the so-called replay value is about. It stems from the notion that a game's function is first
and foremost to help us pass time. And though we may not have to pop quarters in every
ten minutes anymore, we do have to pay hefty amounts for the system and the software.
Economics cannot help but remain a factor especially given the age bracket most gamers
fall into. But in the end that is all it is: economics. You may very well play through ICO just
once a year. That is a sound financial reason not to purchase the game. It is not a sound
reason to detract from its intrinsic worth. It does not keep ICO from being someone's
fondest and fullest memory of a game.
Speaking of intrinsic worth, let us return to it. I apologize for digressing, but I felt it was
necessary before we could place the puzzles in the proper context. I do not want anyone to
suppose that I think the puzzles unimportant. On the contrary I think they are the muscles
of the game. What I want to emphasize is that these muscles are meant to do two distinct
sets of work. The first and more obvious set is of the conventional sort, which applies to
any puzzles. We solve them because they are fun and because they help us pass time
pleasantly. But is that all the puzzles do in ICO? I must say no. I have already given my
reason: a puzzle is no longer a puzzle once it is solved. And since every task in ICO has
exactly one prescribed solution, it is pointless to go back and try to work it out differently.
By this logic ICO's puzzles ought to lose all capacity to entertain once the game has been
completed. But at least for me that is hardly the case. That I have exhausted all technical
possibilities in the game but my thought continues to dwell on it and be fascinated by it,
tells me that its real strength is not in puzzle solving. Depending on our approach the
experience can retain a great deal of their potency. That is where the second set of work,
the narrative work, comes in.

And that is what I will be back with.

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(First posted 27 May 2003)

It would be a mistake to think ICO is neatly divided between the story and the puzzles--
that the cinematic interludes take care of storytelling while the puzzles pad out the spaces
between. I suppose the puzzles could be enjoyed more or less on their own. But the
narrative would collapse without the puzzles. This is because the puzzles are only parts of
the whole, whereas the narrative is the whole. Now the term narrative can be--ought not
to be, but can be--misleading since it hints at something spoken or written, and ICO is
almost entirely nonverbal outside the interludes. But we have all heard that a picture tells
a thousand words. Where they are sparing in words the scenes and the actions are rich in
other kinds of information.

But a word before we go into that. The next three segments are concerned with everything
between the pair's meeting and the first appearance of the villain. On that note I may have
oversimplified the matter when I so stressed the puzzles in my last ramble, since the
gameplay contains a good many things besides puzzle solving. But for the talk's sake let
us agree that by puzzles we mean everything the children must do in their quest for
freedom, outside the interludes--in other words every action which is left to our control.

Now I cannot take the puzzles apart the way I have done the opening because they do not
have plot elements except one: they show us that the children are progressing from one
part of the castle to the next. Therefore the narrative functions of any one puzzle are much
the same as all the rest. (Does that mean if we have seen one we have seen all? No; there
is such a thing as cumulative effect.) For our purposes it would be pointless to look at each
puzzle in depth. So I am only going to articulate a few statements that apply to all the
puzzles in their narrative capacity. These are:

1. THE CASTLE IS HOSTILE GROUND.

2. THE CHILDREN MUST EXPLORE THE CASTLE.
3. THE CHILDREN ARE NECESSARY COMPANIONS.

I imagine some of you would like to expand these. Someone pointed out after reading the
last section, for instance, that the puzzles help us immerse ourselves in the environment.
He was very right. But since this is more an aesthetic quality than a narrative tool I have
here left it out. I will however mention it briefly when I talk about the second statement.
Let us then look at each of the statements. Today we will consider only the first of the
three.

1. THE CASTLE IS HOSTILE GROUND.

At this time it may be helpful to summarize what we already know on the castle. We know
it is absurdly enormous and must have demanded absurd amount of manpower to put
together. We know it is in disrepair and probably very ancient. We know that parts of it are
operated by mysterious spells. We know that Ico has been brought here to die like others
before him--and this by no accident nor by whim if the caskets and the horned effigies are
any signs. Add to these the awful gloom that haunts every corner of the castle, and the
picture we have is one of decidedly sinister character. The picture is of course blurry since
we have not one solid bit of information about the castle. Yet we begin the game convinced
beyond doubt that the castle is no friendly place. We are right to assume so. That is what
visual storytelling is: getting us to believe certain things without telling us to. We will be
seeing a great deal of that in this tale.

Once the pair starts exploring the castle in earnest we learn that the place is not merely
unfriendly or indifferent; it is hostile. I am not here thinking of the lurking black wraiths,
though they are certainly a part of it. I am thinking of the fortress itself. After all what is
this fortress to the children? For her it is a prison. For him it was very nearly his tomb, and
may still be that if he is not careful. For both it is the chief obstruction that stands in the
way of their object--freedom. It is the cause of their suffering; it represents everything
they must overcome.
People erect buildings in order to domesticate the environment--to make a domain of
comfort and convenience out of an uncomfortable, inconvenient wilderness. But this castle
almost seems to exist to make life miserable. Instead of putting things within easy reach it
hides them from you and makes you work to find them. It makes you circle a building
three times at three different levels just to get to the roof. It is full of high places from
which you could easily fall to your death, made doubly dangerous since the place is falling
apart everywhere. On top of that it will not let you go through a door unless by some
cryptic reason it deems you fit to pass. It would be a nice place to live if you had wings
and could walk through walls--a splendid dwelling for fairies but hardly habitable for
mortals. The set-up smacks of a maze created to confound.

You might say "Well, of course it was created to confound. This is a puzzle game, for crying
out loud." I realize that. I am only saying that the castle's labyrinthine character has
something to contribute to the story as well as to the game. That is, given the story's
premise it makes good sense that the castle should be so full of riddles. What is the story's
premise? Well, a pair of children want to run away from a big, mysterious and frightening
place. And the big, mysterious and frightening place doesn't want to let them get away. It
is determined to block them, to frustrate them and to slow them down. To move through
the castle the children must outwit it-- must meet and prevail against every challenge this
dangerous maze throws at them. But wait a moment here. "Outwitting" the castle almost
sounds as if we were treating it as a person. In fact it very much sounds like the castle has
assumed an adversarial role against the children. And it has. The real antagonist of the
story, the foe Ico and the girl must fight more than any other, is the very prison whose
ground they tread. Every scene in ICO is a silent reminder of that. We are always looking
at the young heroes at a distance so that the castle rises colossal and dominating in all
directions around them--breathing down on them, making them appear in comparison
utterly puny and utterly lost. Now, we may marvel at the castle for its sheer magnificence.
But that is mostly because we are not in Ico's shoes. None of us would in reality enjoy
being trapped inside a deserted citadel in the middle of nowhere. We can afford to be
delighted because for us this is mere entertainment. For him it is a matter of life and
death. When he looks around he does not see the enchantingly beautiful edifice we do. He
sees the bane of his existence which at any moment may prove his doom. There he is
never assured of surviving another hour. Delighted is the last thing he is.
There are many terrors in life, but the terror of being lost is surely the greatest--alongside
its twin, the terror of being alone. The fear the castle arouses is of a subtle and pervasive
sort. It rarely jumps you from behind. Rather it is always before you and around you,
daring you to ignore it. To be sure there is great serenity throughout the castle. But
anyone who has been lost in a quiet, deserted place knows that serenity is no equal of
peace. There is no peace in this place, only desolation. And mute malice. For we sense that
there must be a malicious mind behind the malicious plan. Every painting has a painter
behind it and every book an author. Someone arranged this mystery for a purpose less
than innocent. As yet we do not know who that someone is and what purpose. We do know
that until we have left this castle behind we shall not be relieved of the dread.

Here I stop. I will be back with thoughts on the second statement.

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(First posted 11 June 2003)

2. THE CHILDREN MUST EXPLORE THE CASTLE.

I had to scrap the first draft of this section because while I was mulling over the castle's
role I got too deep into gameplay and lost sight of the narrative. Then I lost the second
draft also when my laptop got stolen along with all the writing in it. More to set my own
thoughts straight in all the rewriting confusion than anything else I should like to begin
with some very basic considerations. I think I set down pretty clearly last time that the
castle is exceedingly important. Very well, it is important. But how precisely is it important
to the story--rather than to the gameplay or the sheer visual artistry?

To answer that I want to consider briefly what a story is. It is a popular mistake to confuse
a "story" with "fiction." The two are not synonymous. For instance if I said "There is water
on the moon" that would be fiction insofar as I made it up, but it would hardly qualify as a
story. On the other hand a biography of Abraham Lincoln would not and ought not to be
fiction, but it would certainly be a story. Similarly when I say "This is a story of my life" I
do not mean "This is a story which I made up about myself." I mean "This is how my life
unfolded and became what it is now." To tell a story therefore means to give an account of
something, whether true or imaginary. The act of giving an account usually requires that
we keep track of three things. These are characters, setting, and conflict.

Characters are a set of actors, who need not be people necessarily, that we see more or
less from the beginning to the conclusion of the story. Setting refers to the sum total of
circumstances under which the characters operate--the times, the places, the conditions.
The last ingredient, conflict, is anything which drives the characters to abandon inactivity
and do one thing or another. Examples of conflict in fiction may include outright fighting or
competition, solving a murder mystery, falling in love, or a Coke bottle dropping out of the
sky. A biography of Lincoln is a story since it has all three ingredients. The gibberish about
there being water on the moon is just that--gibberish.

Let me see how the castle fits into this scheme. I immediately recognize it as the key
element of the setting since it provides the environment for the story. But it is also the
apparent source of the conflict; the children want freedom, and the castle keeps it from
them. And since the castle is the greatest obstacle in the children's quest, it is not a mere
arena in which to confront the enemy: it is the enemy. It thus behaves almost like a
character also, and a crucially important character at that. The puzzles are its means of
keeping the children imprisoned. That is why I said the narrative would collapse without
the puzzles. They are the substance of the main conflict in the story. And a story without
conflict is like pea soup without peas. It is gibberish.
I think I am ready now to take up the second statement, which states that the children
must explore the castle. In place of "explore" we might substitute "deal with" or
"overcome." The children must deal with the castle if they are to be successful. They must
overcome its cunning with their own. But I used "explore" because that word has
implications which the others do not. To explore a place is more than simply to visit it. You
may visit Grand Canyon as a tourist, but until you have invested time and risked bodily
harm to wrestle with its wilderness you cannot say you have explored it. Similarly it would
be ludicrous for someone to boast of having explored the canyon when in fact he has only
dealt with a negligible fraction of its vastness. Claims like that belong to committed folk
whose scope of exploration extends far beyond popular hiking courses. Now the children
must explore the castle in that sense. They must; they have no choice about it. One might
explore some great wonder because he wants to learn, because he is curious, or because
he wants excitement. Our young heroes do not want to learn about the castle, they are not
curious about it, and they are most certainly not looking for excitement. What they want is
to get out of it as fast as they can. They do not want anything to do with this dreadful
place, do not want to stay in it one second longer than they have to. They are on the run
for their lives. Sightseeing is the least of their priorities.

Let us imagine ourselves now in the children's place. Suppose we really were trying to
escape from a ghoul-infested castle. Suppose we just entered a courtyard. We are
surrounded on all sides by beautiful and wondrous sights. Should we take a moment to
explore and enjoy? Not unless we are very dumb. We see an exit in plain view. We should
make a beeline for it. But we cannot. The pathway is blocked. We must find a way around
the obstruction. We have no choice but to explore. That is, we are forced to investigate
places we would rather bypass and fiddle with contraptions we would rather let alone. We
want the quickest shortcut out of here--but what we are offered instead is an endless
string of detours within detours. That is what the puzzles amount to: an elaborate,
grueling succession of detours which will eventually take the children through each and
every area within the castle walls. They could not care less about seeing each and every
area. They want a shortcut direct to the exit and to freedom. There isn't one. If there
were, the children would be happy but the story would lose its conflict. It would lose its
peas--lose its taste and become insipid and uninteresting. The poor youngsters have got to
do things the hard way, and all for our enjoyment's sake. This sentiment is at the heart of
every adventure ever written.

At this point let me bring in a previous poster's comment as I promised I would. I mean
about the puzzles helping us immerse ourselves in the environment. How do you suppose
they do that? Well, I said already that the children want as little to do with their prison as
possible. But the puzzles require that they become intimately acquainted with it whether
they like it or not. Let me use the illustration of Grand Canyon once more. Millions visit
that national park every year. Most of them go no farther than contemplating its majesty
from a safe distance, much like enjoying the ocean from the beach. But if you wanted to
immerse yourself in it, if you truly wanted it to come alive, you would not be satisfied with
that. You would venture into the canyon and put your hands and feet, not just your eyes,
into the experience. You would want to cover as much ground as possible so that you
would be able to appreciate the canyon from on high, from deep below, from the east,
from the west, from within, from the extremities, at dawn, at midday, at sunset. Now this
is just what the puzzles make us do. They make us encounter the castle from all points.
And we have to do this every time we play through the game; we cannot say "Oh, I
already know what that place looks like, so I won't bother to go that way this time." The
game will not allow us to complete it until we have turned the castle inside out.

I spent four years at the university where I graduated not long ago. You would think I am
thoroughly familiar with the campus of my own alma mater. But in truth there are facilities
there I would not be able to give you directions to because I never had the occasions to
make use of them. If you asked me what our business school building looks like inside you
would only get a blank stare from me. In four years I was never in it. I would bet most
people have similar memories. That is, they develop a routine and as a result remain
surprisingly ignorant about some fixtures in their lives. They may only frequent certain
parts of their hometown so that they feel like strangers in a foreign country when they
venture beyond them. Or, when asked the name of the middle school they have driven by
every day for ten years, they may realize with a start that they never learned it. You get
the idea. But the castle is an entirely different story. I have spent only a few hours "inside"
it. Yet its memory is vividness itself. I know it like the back of my hand. How is that? Well,
I have been everywhere in it. I have been to, and have had to contend with, every
chamber, tower, bridge, courtyard and weather-beaten cliff. I left no stone unturned. The
game would not let me proceed otherwise.

And leaving no stone unturned is just what the puzzles are about. They demand that we
experience the castle to the fullest. There is exactly one spot we wish to be, but to get
there we must pass through every other spot in the whole godforsaken fortress. This is
true in our first run through the game and in our seventh. There is never any shortcut.
That we already know the solutions to the puzzles does not shorten the distance we must
cover. In this the castle differs from a typical maze. In most mazes there is one correct
path and ninety-nine false paths. But in ICO there is to begin with a single excruciatingly
long-winded path and no other. In this way solving ICO's puzzles is less like answering
riddles and more like climbing a steep slope or crossing a deep canyon. No one solves the
same crossword puzzle twice for the fun of it. But there is plenty sense in revisiting a
summit one has already conquered, and in fact many climbers do just that.

You may think I am putting you on. Playing a video game is of course quite unlike climbing
a mountain. We do not exert our limbs or risk our lives when we play a video game. It is
Ico rather who exerts his limbs and risks his life. And we imagine that for him the labor
and danger are very much real. We make the same concession whenever we read a book
or watch a film. We know perfectly well that we are ourselves in no danger of falling as we
watch James Stewart hang on for his life in VERTIGO. But we do imagine that the danger is
real for his character, or the scene would lose all suspense. Now if we have seen the film
before, we know how it ends. But while that reduces the suspense greatly it does not
destroy it altogether; we know what happens but we still watch it with interest. Something
similar is at work when I play ICO. The puzzles are at best minimally entertaining now
since I have solved them before. But the impact of watching those two youngsters struggle
against the pitiless environment remains potent. Knowing the answers to the puzzles has
reduced my labor greatly, yes, but it has not reduced Ico's labor nearly as much--for his
labor is physical as well as mental, whereas mine was never more than mental. Though all
is plain and easy for me now, it is not so for the children. Every time we play we put them
through a fiendish ordeal. That is the great illusion the game weaves in our minds--an
illusion I have not seen reproduced nearly as convincingly in any other games. And for me
that is how the game continues to command my attention, if to a somewhat lesser degree,
when the puzzles have ceased to present challenge.

So we now understand why things like realistic lighting, an accurate sense of scale, height
and distance, and complex character animation are crucial in ICO. Aside from giving the
game its pretty looks, their job is to create an illusion that these are real children in a real
place and consequently in a real trouble. Is it silly, I wonder, to sympathize with computer-
generated characters? Perhaps it is. But then it ought to be equally silly to sympathize with
Disney's Bambi or his ill-fated mother; they are also mere pictures after all. The only way
we can put up with animated characters is by imagining--that is, by pretending--that they
are real after their own fashion. ICO is no different. It is an experience which rewards an
imaginative audience.

In summation the puzzles force the children to explore every nook and cranny of the
castle, which is akin to keeping them in constant clash with their archenemy. Do not be
confused by the term archenemy here. Some of you are thinking "Isn't another character
entitled to that role?" By archenemy I mean the enemy the heroes must deal with the
most. Palpatine may rule over the empire, but one doesn't have to know much about STAR
WARS to see that the place of archenemy belongs to Darth Vader. He is only a subordinate
in the grand scheme of things, but he is the pain in the neck the heroes have to deal with
at every turn. That is, he is immediate unlike the emperor who is usually beyond sight and
reach. The castle too is immediate. It is always in your face. It is the presence you cannot
ignore, the hand of the real foe who as yet remains unseen.

I will treat the third and final statement on the puzzles next time.

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(First posted 15 July 2003)

3. THE CHILDREN ARE NECESSARY COMPANIONS.

By that I mean they are companions by necessity. They both want to escape from the
fortress, and neither can do it alone. Each suffers from limitations that make escape an
impossibility. Since their predicament is in the form of a prison--in other words restriction
of movement--their limitations too naturally have to do with mobility. The boy cannot pass
through the idol gates which the girl can open. She cannot negotiate certain terrains which
he can. What is more, she will be captured by the wraiths if left undefended, and he will be
petrified once she has been claimed. Someone on the net said of the situation "If you die,
she dies. If she dies, you die." That about sums up the arrangement. In a biologist's book
this would be called symbiosis, and in a sociologist's, partnership or alliance, but I prefer
to call it simply companionship. After all it is not as if the two of them sat down and
discussed the rotten fix they are in and came to the mutual understanding that since they
seem to complement each other's handicaps they might as well stick together. For them
the symbiotic arrangement is essentially a happy coincidence. (On the storyteller's part it
was of course a deliberate choice.) Ico decides to take the girl with him while he is
ignorant of her ability. They are companions before they become cooperators.

C. S. Lewis, whom I recently began reading and who is fast becoming my favorite author,
wrote a slim wonderful volume on the nature of love titled THE FOUR LOVES. The four
loves are Affection, Friendship, Eros and Charity. The companionship between our
protagonists falls under Friendship by Lewis' estimation. Writing of Friendship he opined
"Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; Friends, side by side, absorbed
in some common interest." He meant that the chief concern of lovers is themselves, that
is, each other--but friends come together when there is something outside of themselves
in which they take a shared interest. Hence lovers are always looking at each other while
friends are side by side looking at, and moving towards, that other thing. In short a
friendship needs to be about something, be it a hobby, a taste in music, a political vision or
a profession.
Therefore Friendship according to Lewis--between true bosom buddies, not just any
"friendly" acquaintances--typically forms when a person looks at another and says "What?
You too? I thought I was the only one." This fully applies to the children. Left to die, Ico
doubtlessly thought himself quite abandoned. In the mysterious girl he has found not only
an age peer but a fellow prisoner. The moment he recognizes her as such the thought of
parting becomes unbearable; it would mean returning to total solitude. And I do not mean
unbearable just for him; it becomes unbearable for us also. We recognize at once that
these two are in a common plight, that they are a match, that they ought to be together.
The need to reclaim the captured girl is not mere male heroism, you see. Certainly there is
a good deal of "rescue the damsel in distress" mentality in play. But that is not the part of
our imagination the game appeals most to. If it were, I doubt very many thoughtful female
players would have enjoyed it. What it really appeals to is our desire to get back to a
friend--the desire to banish the horrible solitude which her absence has imposed upon us.
One more observation, and I have done with this segment. As we make progress and solve
more puzzles, the two children's respective roles become clearly defined. We come to
categorize in our heads the list of things the boy can and cannot do, and likewise for the
girl. But she is a curious creature. In appearance she is elegant and full of natural grace,
but sometimes she acts as if she has not quite got all her wits about herself. It becomes
increasingly evident that her limited prowess is more than a case of feminine frailty. She is
not only weak; she is timid--not only inept; helpless. She seems to be unacquainted with
the very notion of fending for herself. And she continues to demonstrate her ignorance
about the castle which has been mentioned earlier; she makes for the most part no
contribution to clearing paths, leaving it as Ico's burden to figure all out. The castle--
presumably her home--is just as baffling to her as it is to him. Only, he has the facility to
tackle it and she apparently does not. And all the while the curious fact is that she is the
older of the two if looks mean anything. Ico is a little boy and behaves like one. The girl on
the other hand is on her way to womanhood but not half as resourceful as her diminutive
companion. He acts his age. She does not. By all logic she, who is older and has spent
more time inside the castle walls, ought to be the sensible one who figures things out for
them both. Yet Ico has to look after her and lead her by hand as though she were his little
sister in this somewhat lopsided, though indissoluble, partnership. Why?

I am not going to answer that just yet. We need to learn more about the girl before
accounting for her character, and we have not got that far into the story. In the next part
we will look at the first appearance of you-know-who.

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(First posted 24 July 2003; resumed August 5)

What we have got so far along the story are lots of facts and little by way of explanation.
We do not know why Ico almost got sacrificed in the crypt, only that he in fact did. (By
now we know better than to believe the excuse that horned children are ill omens.) We do
not know why the castle is crammed full with puzzles, only that it in fact is. We do not
know why the girl was imprisoned in the cage, only that she in fact was. We do not know
how she can open the gates, only that she in fact can. And we do not know why the ghouls
want her, only that they in fact do. These questions will largely be put off until the climax,
but in today's segment we at last get the first glimpse of an answer.

The children's meandering journey through the ruins of the castle brings them to a great
multi-leveled courtyard. Here a fierce battle ensues. If I recall right the fight must have
gone on for a half-hour in my first run. The creatures come after the pair in such numbers
that we cannot help but wonder if there is something special about this place--something
the enemies want to keep the children away from. We can fight them to the last or we can
save time and effort by running to the idol gate. This is a good place to mention that
opening an idol gate destroys all nearby enemies. An intriguing morsel of information, this.
The demons haunt the castle, but they appear powerless against the magic which operates
that castle and which responds to the girl's presence. There is something at work here that
is far superior to the demons. And the girl has access to it, is able to activate it, is able to
use it--say it however you want. It is strange that she who can wield a power greater than
the demons' is helpless in defending herself against them. One more thing for us to ponder
until we have a clearer picture of the mystery.

As soon as the door is open, the girl rushes in ahead of Ico. It is the first time she has
done anything of the sort. He follows her in and finds a colossal open gate. It is the very
same he saw but could not use in the prologue. Gleeful for a moment, he is dismayed next
to see the doors begin to drag themselves shut. He grabs his companion's hand and runs
for it. She trips, and falls down. When he turns to help her up he is astonished to witness a
dark figure, a woman, materialize behind her. The woman addresses the fallen girl in their
speech. We infer therefore that she too is an inhabitant of the castle. Translated, her first
words are "Come back, Yorda."

The girl's reaction to the stranger is telling. She returns no answer. She looks terribly
dejected--she makes no attempt to pick herself up, and she keeps her face averted. In fact
she has not once glanced back since falling, as one might be expected to if someone
popped out of thin air not three steps behind her. She does not look back because she
knows without looking precisely what has happened. She knows without looking precisely
who stands behind her. It was perhaps inaccurate to say she is dejected. She is resigned.
She has done something she was not supposed to do, and now she has been caught.

Let us take a closer look at the dark stranger who has mortified the poor girl so. Clearly no
ordinary woman, she is regal, austere, and even beautiful and dignified in an icy sort of
way. She is not monstrous like the demons we have seen. Yet she does not strike us as
any less dreadful. If anything she inspires deeper dread. The demons were scary, but this
woman is imposing. The demons were nasty brutes, but she has got something that goes
beyond nasty or brutal blazing in her stern gaze. In some ways she does resemble the
demons. Or rather the demons resemble her, albeit in pale imitation. In place of their
smoky loose flesh she sports a cloak of swirling, crackling black which is indistinguishable
from her flesh and which engulfs all but her face. Instead of crawling out from the ground
she has leapt into form like black flame igniting. She betrays no violence of demeanor as
the creatures did--does not make threatening gestures, does not raise her voice, in fact
does not move a finger through the interview, but simply stands there calm, erect,
immovable, unassailable. She stands in authority--and therefore she is fearsome. No one
understands that better than little children.
And that stranger now turns her attention to Ico. She speaks to him in his own tongue,
rebuking him for dragging "her Yorda" about. She identifies herself as the girl's mother.
She expresses contempt for the horned child who in her eyes has no place beside her
beloved daughter. The words sadden the boy. Why, I am not going to guess. She warns
him to stop his futile effort and to leave the castle, and vanishes as abruptly as when she
appeared.

He runs to the girl. "I have angered her," she murmurs fearfully. The woman's disembodied
voice comes then: "Yorda, why can't you understand? You cannot survive in the outside
world."

And so the children are left by themselves once again, and allowed to continue their quest
for freedom. The word to keep in mind here is allowed. We receive a distinct impression
that the woman has decided to humor the pair for the time being, and just as she
authorized that liberty she is liable to revoke it when she pleases. We are doubtless that
we will be seeing her again.

Now let us consider some immediate implications of this brief, dramatic encounter. There
are many, but the first two will be more than enough for today.

(1) First and foremost it is abundantly plain that this woman who claims to be the girl's
mother is the proprietor of the castle. We should realize that even if we had no manual to
tell us who she is. (For the game itself is quite silent on her exact identity.) We have in our
memory a far superior and more persuasive authority: the stories we read and heard as
children, and the images they conjured into our collective imagination. Thanks to them we
need no more than a glance at the newcomer before we are able to declare, with total
confidence, "That is the villain of the story."

You see, ICO is not just any story but a fairy tale. And the dark woman is not just any
villain either; she is a fairy tale villain. That means she has features which identify her as
such--features which we recognize instantly. Call her the queen, the evil fairy, the
sorceress, the witch, or whatever catches your fancy; it does not really matter; she is all
those things. Some have compared ICO's queen to well-known Disney villains, heedless
that those villains are themselves derived from long-standing traditions. The queen is that
mystic, dark, all-powerful antagonist in our childhood imagination who is evil and who does
evil, and whose overblown counterpart is the "dark lord" in modern fantasy fiction. She is
that someone responsible for the mysterious enchantment which needs to be undone. She
is the queen who poisons Snowdrop; the fairy who puts Briar Rose to a hundred-year
slumber; the ogre who hoards treasure in his castle and enjoys eating little children; the
witch who turns young maidens into songbirds and keeps them caged; the hag who puts
Rapunzel up the tower and doesn't let her out. She is an embodiment of all those classic
images. That is why she feels familiar though we have just met her. We may not know her
per se, but we recognize her place in the story in a heartbeat.

And just what is her place in the story? Let me see now. In some of our best- loved fairy
tales, it is the villains who typically dictate the setting and the conflict. So without them
there would be no adventure, much as there would have been no Second World War
without Hitler. Adventure here is something of a euphemism. Ordeal probably better
describes the sort of things a fairy tale hero goes through. We may therefore define the
queen's breed of fairy tale villain as "the one who is responsible for the hero's ordeal." And
insofar as the hero's ordeal is the substance of the tale, the villain is absolutely pivotal.
Snowdrop's adventure begins only when the queen becomes jealous of her beauty and
tries to have her killed. Cinderella should have had no need of glass slippers had her nasty
stepmother not kept her from attending the ball. And Jack's beanstalk should have led
nowhere without the ogre's castle for it to reach up to.

But this central element of the story, you see, has been thus far missing. And all of us
have been wondering about its absence consciously or unconsciously. All of us have been
asking ourselves "We are up against something big here-- but what the deuce is it?" So
when the queen finally makes her belated entrance we immediately realize "She is the one
behind it all." No further introduction is necessary. (And none is given; when the story has
ended, we will still not know even her name.) We know nothing about the stranger but we
understand what she means to the story. She is the queen. She is the witch, the
enchantress. The castle is hers. She rules over it and always has ruled over it. She is the
children's enemy. They will have to fight her. What is more, they have been fighting her.

This is also why the queen does not get much time on screen. She does not need it. That
is, she does not have to show up a great deal and do many things in order for us to grasp
her character. Her character is more or less complete in our imagination. We have a wealth
of valid ideas about fairy tale villains already established. So all she has to do is show up
once and, with her darkly majestic appearance, announce to us "I am that villain." That is
why in this scene she rears her head just long enough for us to take a good look at her
and promptly disappears, not to be seen again till practically the conclusion of the story.
The point is that we have seen her. And now that we know she exists she automatically
becomes the focal point of everything.
From here on we must reorient our queries around the queen. We no longer ask "Why
were horned children to be sacrificed at the castle?" but rather "Why did the queen want
them sacrificed at her castle?" Similarly not "Why was Yorda put in the cage?" but "Why
did the queen cage her?"; not "Why do the creatures come after her?" but "Why does the
queen send them after her daughter?" The queen has not entered the picture just now,
you see. She has been at its center all along, only she was not visible until now. Hers is
the face behind the hostile presence we have sensed ever since entering the castle.

(2) A fairy tale villain in the queen's particular vein is invariably the most powerful being in
the tale. Not all fairy tale villains are royal or magically endowed; some are fairly humble,
like a scheming maidservant or an abusive stepmother. But regardless of their status with
the rest of the world, the villains always exercise godlike powers over the protagonists.
They are always the ones holding all the cards--thus forcing the hapless heroes to resort to
wit and subterfuge to prevail against overwhelming odds and seemingly invincible foes.
The queen too holds all the cards against the children. Therefore we infer, without being
told, that the castle and its maddening contraptions are her work. The wraiths that come
after Yorda are under her command. She is responsible for Yorda's imprisonment. And if
the pattern means anything the practice of sacrificing horned youths is likely her idea also.
How can I be so sure? Honestly I can't. These are speculations, some more so than others.
But I think them reasonable. A fairy tale villain tends to be responsible for all evil that is
found in the story. This is because the tales, with their small cast of characters, rarely have
room for two villains. They prefer a single diabolical antagonist who represents the sum of
all menace to the heroes. Consider also how the pair is united in a common quest. It
makes excellent sense that they should have a common enemy as well. For these reasons,
among many others, I must assume that the person responsible for Ico's entombment is
one and the same as she put Yorda in the cage. But we will talk more about this later.

(Remainder of this section was posted on 5 August 2003)

(3) The queen commands extraordinary magic. The castle and the legions of demons are
proof enough of her capability. Able to appear and vanish at will, she seems all but free of
bodily limitations. Her impeccable timing in intercepting the pair also suggests she is aware
of all that goes on in her domain. That would explain why opts to humor them for now;
she knows she can surprise them whenever she wants. She may have hidden herself, but
she is still there watching the children's every move. She may even be enjoying it; let the
stubborn lass learn her lesson the hard way if she insists on it!

(4) Suddenly we understand why the girl, Yorda, can do the things she can. She has
inherited her mother's nature and is able, to an extent, to exercise a queenlike power over
the castle. The idol gates are a sort of security doors; like sentries guarding their posts,
they will not let just anybody pass. But in Yorda they recognize something of their mistress
and so make way for her.

We recall however that Yorda is not the only one thus authorized to open the gates. There
is that sword we saw in the opening sequence. If Yorda can open the doors thanks to the
queen's power she inherited, would that mean the sword too wields a power akin to the
queen's? Let us add that to the list of things we must come back to.

(5) Unlike her daughter the queen is fluent in Ico's language. So she is knowledgeable
about the outside world. Perhaps she has, or had, ties with it. If she indeed arranged for
the horned children to be brought to the castle, she certainly should have required, or
coerced in any case, the cooperation of outsiders.

(6) Yorda is a sharp contrast with her mother in this regard. She is just as ignorant about
her companion's language as he is of hers. We may safely guess that he is the first and
only contact she has had with the world beyond the castle walls. And if we had any doubt
that she wants to see that world very badly, the queen's parting words have removed it.
For they say in effect "Not this nonsense about leaving the castle again! How many times
do I have to tell you that you can't survive there?" So it seems the girl has in the past
expressed her desire to leave the islands. I could not say if she wanted freedom because
she was caged or if she was caged because she dared to want freedom. Take your pick; I
do not think it makes much difference in the end.

(7) But let us spend a little time on the queen's parting words since some people have
pointed to them as evidence for a particular--I believe mistaken-- reading of the ending.
What does she mean that Yorda cannot survive outside the castle? She could be saying
one of two things: (1) the girl physically cannot sustain her life in the outside realm like a
fish that has left the waters, or (2) she is too delicate for the travail of leaving home and
looking after herself. In the former she gives a fact; in the latter, an opinion. Facts are
given to inform; opinions, to persuade. Which is the queen doing here, informing or
persuading?

Let us consider her words again: "Yorda, why can't you understand? You cannot survive in
the outside world." Without much affecting their significance we may change the words to
"Haven't I told you already that you cannot survive in the outside world?" That of course
means "I have told you already that you cannot survive in the outside world."

If the words are not beginning to sound familiar, let me put them next to some that
should: "I've told you already you are not going to that crazy party." "We've had this talk
before--you are not driving the van." "Haven't I told you a hundred times not to run with
scissors in your hand?"

Our parents had their reasons when they told us these things. We were not to go to the
crazy party because they feared we might drink or mix with a wrong sort of people. We
were not to be trusted with the van because in their opinion we were not yet very good
with smaller cars. We were not to run with scissors because they thought... actually I
never quite understood why not. But all these admonitions have a common thought
running through them. They all draw from the same unspoken claim: "This is for your own
good." Which means "I know better than you do what is good for you." And what that
really means is "I have your best interest at heart." This is what all parental admonitions
boil down to.

Now when my mother issued me one of her warnings, I believed she had my best interest
at heart even if I did not always agree with her assessment. But if someone kept me in
confinement for years and told me that I wasn't really missing out on anything outside the
prison because I could not survive there anyway--I think I might have some misgivings
about her sincerity. I should think she was trying to secure my compliance.

It appears Yorda herself has reached that very conclusion. She was told more than once
that she could not live outside the castle. She decided to escape anyway. Why? Because
she distrusted her mother's honesty. The queen and the princess are thus divided along a
very simple line: the mother says leaving home is not a viable option for her daughter, and
the daughter does not believe her mother. With excellent reasons.

But that is just half the story. We will probe this subject in greater depth when we get to
the ending.
(8) Now that we know who caged Yorda, we find ourselves wondering afresh why in the
world the poor girl had to suffer that wretched treatment. This being a fairy tale, it could
well be that she was held captive purely for the sake of being a captive--sort of like the
maidens in chivalric lore who apparently have nothing to occupy themselves with except to
get themselves abducted by one man-devouring ogre or another. But that does not sit
right somehow. There must be a reason for her incarceration. Having completed the game
we of course know it already, but supposing that we did not we could still guess it
somewhat.

There are just three reasons for which people keep a person--or a thing, for that matter--
locked up. The first is punishment, as in the case of a convicted felon. The second might
be called containment or quarantine, where someone or something represents a danger
too great to be let loose. Violent lunatics, victims of a contagious disease and, again,
felons are kept confined for this reason. The last is safekeeping; when there is a valuable
which one doesn't wish to let out of his hands, he might opt to lock it up--be it money,
jewelry, livestock, lab rats, hostages or slaves. Therefore Yorda was caged either because
she committed some offense against the queen, or because she was deemed dangerous
enough to warrant confinement, or else because she represented something valuable
which the queen wanted to keep near. Even with the little we know at this point in the
story we need not think long to judge the most plausible scenario.

But while we are on the subject let us spare a moment for that other captive in the story. I
mean the boy himself. He too was imprisoned like many others before him. And unlike with
Yorda the story will not explain why they suffered thus. So with the horned children
speculation is all we have got. We have our three choices: either they were punished for an
offense, or they were deemed dangerous, or else they were wanted for some specific
design. Which makes the most sense to you?

(9) That Yorda is the queen's daughter means of course she shares her mother's nature.
This raises a disturbing implication. Let us recall Ico's mysterious vision early in the story.
In it we saw a black figure emerge inside the suspended cage. Later we found Yorda in
that very setting. And we were a good deal confused. We had expected to find a pitch-
black creature and instead got a little girl who is so pale she all but glows. The discrepancy
was left unsettled in our minds. But now we have seen the queen who is dark as midnight
and able to appear out of nowhere, so much like the creature in the vision. And this
woman is Yorda's mother; that is, she and the girl are alike in some essential way. We can
no longer doubt the vision. The amoeba-like creature must have been Yorda. How and why
the boy dreamed of her is in my opinion unimportant. The vision's significance lies in that
Yorda is something besides an ordinary human. We have suspected this for some time. But
it is now confirmed, and will become crucial later as we try to make sense of the ending.

That wraps up this long chapter, though almost every point made here will be brought up
again later. Next I would like to discuss how this new development changes the way we
look at the story. Then we will finally address the tale's climax and conclusion.

top

(First Posted 8 August 2003; resumed August 10)

The queen's presence now forces us to redefine everything with regard to it. To be sure
nothing much has really changed. The children's condition has neither improved nor
deteriorated on account of the encounter. What they do after her appearance is the same
as what have done prior to it--exploring, path clearing, fighting. What has changed is our
perception of that condition. We will continue to see much the same that we have been
seeing, but we will not look at it the same way. An easy example is the heroine herself.
Thus far in our thoughts she was a pretty but rather strange girl who could do some useful
things and who seemed interested in escaping from the castle. Now she is Yorda, the sole
daughter of the castle's ruler. But this is the most superficial of the shifts. Thanks to the
queen we now have solider grasp on nearly every aspect of the mystery.

Let us begin with the castle. Until now we were lost and we did not know where we were
going. Well, we are still lost but we do know where we are going. We are going to the main
gate. And since the queen has closed it shut, we need to find a way of unlocking it. We
have got ourselves a definite object of aim. Before, we wandered in blind hopes. We
wander with a purpose now.

The way we look at the castle has also shifted. Until now the chief impression we got from
the castle was that it was very, very deserted. Not only that, it was crumbling to pieces
everywhere. It clearly had not been inhabited for a long time. There were some sinister
creatures loitering about, certainly, but we could hardly believe these vile brutes were the
rightful occupants of so magnificent a keep. No, we did not take them for the castle's
original residents. We regarded them as we might house pests--ghostly vermin that had
taken over a fortress built by civilized beings, much as rats flourish in an abandoned
mansion. When we met the queen, however, we learned that the mansion was not in fact
abandoned. The mistress of the house was still living there. The wraiths were not
freeloading pests but rather her servants. But the realization raises a baffling question.
What sort of homeowner would allow her house to fall into such a sorry state? She would
have to be either very lazy, or very incompetent, or else very ill. So it would seem that the
queen, as mighty as she is, has got some deep problems. Her rule must be in decline. The
castle's condition bespeaks her own.

The castle testifies a great deal more about its mistress. In fact it is almost the only thing
that tells us anything about her. Let us backtrack here for a moment and recall what was
said about the castle in earlier sections. I said that the castle was hostile to the children,
and they had to fight and overcome it to proceed through its maze. I concluded that
someone, some evil mind, was behind this evil fortress. Well, we now know who that
someone is. But she has once again hidden herself from our senses--totally. So the only
way for us to sense her is through her work, that is, the castle. In this way the castle, the
only available sign of the witch's presence, becomes equated with the witch herself. That
is, what we say about her may also be said about the castle. She possesses stupendous
powers--well, the castle is stupendous. She is in decline--so is it. She is not willing to let
the pair go free-- neither is it. And if she should die--why then the castle too will die. For
all intents and purposes, the castle is the queen. It deals with the children in her place
when she is not there.

Or let me put it this way. You must be familiar with the memory of "the scary old man
down the street." The scary old man down the street did not mix with other people much.
In fact the scary old man hardly ever set foot outside his house. But there his house stood,
three blocks down from yours--dark in the shades, with weird plants in dense profusion
growing on the lawn, and lights glimmering in the windows till late at night to tell you he
lived there. You didn't like going near that house. Kids said he came out at night to dig up
the bones buried in the backyard. You ran when you had to pass it by and tried not to look
that way. But sometimes accidents would happen. You would hit a ball and it would roll
into the scary old man's garden. You would rather give up the ball, except your pals would
goad you into retrieving it. So you would go, feeling your back moisten as you got nearer
and nearer to the house. Those eye-like windows would seem bigger than usual--the
shadows darker somehow--and would that be a crack in the doorway, a faint sound of
footsteps...? You would grab the ball and bolt out of the garden. You would fancy a hand
behind you, stretching out to grab you. You would not look back until you were safe and
away, only then to let out a relieved breath, glad that the scary old man didn't "get" you.
But all along you had no idea what the scary old man looked like. You had never seen him.
You just knew he lived in that dreadful house of his, with bones in the backyard. The house
was the man. You were just as afraid of it as you were of him.

In a similar way the castle--so humongous, so unignorable, so always in our faces--makes

up for the queen in her apparent absence. It does everything a villain might be expected
to do: threatening, tricking, trapping, and frustrating the heroes at every corner. By
fighting it the children in effect fight the queen. Every obstacle they come across is a
reminder of the enemy responsible for the obstacle. And with each riddle they solve they
have thwarted a piece of her scheme.

Now, this substitution only works because we understand all the while that the queen is
not really absent. The scary old man is very much in the house, just out of sight for the
moment. And it is precisely the fact that he is out of sight that makes him so scary. For
when he is to be seen nowhere we imagine him everywhere. Ico and Yorda are trespassers
in his garden, looking over their shoulders continually to see if that hand they felt was
imaginary. They are captives to the fear that while they cannot see their enemy she can
see them, and is at this very moment watching them. She has jumped them once. She can
jump them again.

When I first played the game I did not know when and where the queen would appear
next. I only knew that she would sooner or later. It was impossible to dismiss her from my
thoughts. It was like the first time I watched JAWS--in that film the shark is invisible for
the most part, but for that very reason the ocean entire comes to represent the creature;
one grows to fear not so much the shark but the very sight of the waters. Thus the queen
remains a fearsome villain though she hardly gets five minutes of screen time prior to the
climax. In a story of lesser merits so little visibility would make her a very poor villain
indeed. In fact games, especially combat-oriented games, are full of weak villains for just
this reason. They tend to withhold the villain from the player lest he should be
disappointed to find no fresh challenge in the all-important "boss fight." And so we find
that the villain often remains veiled until the final moment, with a predictable and self-
frustrating result that he is rendered harmless for the majority of the story.

(Remainder of this section was posted on 19 August 2003.)

We have covered the castle and the queen. I think we have said enough about the wraiths
too. There really is not much to observe about those creatures. Before we knew of the
queen we took them for a sort of demonic termites infesting the deserted fortress. But now
we understand that they are under the queen's control and do her biddings. Yes, I think
that is enough for now.

That leaves the children. Do we perceive them any differently after the queen's
appearance? With Ico the answer is largely no. As to the girl--now she is a different story.
Not only have we learned her name and heritage, but we also understand why she wants
to leave the castle and why she has her ability. But most importantly we now have some
insight into her behaviors. Earlier we touched on her curious and almost total reliance on
the boy and left it unresolved for lack of information. The time has come to resolve it. Why
does she, despite her more adult appearance, prove so utterly helpless?

Before I give my answer I want to impress upon you that ICO is a game, in which the
complexities of the real world are reduced to those predictable patterns we call rules. (And
there is no such a thing as a game without rules.) So when Yorda does not lift a finger to
help Ico drag a crate or make even a token effort of climbing a chain to lessen his burden,
instead of berating her cold indifference we ought to acknowledge that by the game's rules
it is not her job to do those things. If this were a novel or a film, no doubt things would
have been different. For instance the castle as we have it in the game should be perfectly
silly in a novel. It is just too densely packed with puzzles to be convincing. It is somewhat
forgivable here because a game must be allowed its peculiar quirks--granted of course that
the quirks are consistent--if it is to be enjoyable. (Chess may be modeled after a
battlefield, but only the thickest dunderhead would try to justify the "strategy" of having a
rook move diagonally. "After all," he might say, "might it not be a clever idea to surprise
the enemy by having the archers draw their swords?") The castle is therefore full of
puzzles to carry the point across that it is hostile to trespassers. Likewise Yorda is less than
agile to carry the point across that she is unused to exerting herself. To explain why I think
that is a fair assessment I want us to consider her from two perspectives, one entirely
poetic and the other practical.
By a poetic perspective on Yorda I mean nothing particularly grand. I mean the
impressions and feelings she arouses in the beholder. Here ICO fans seem to entertain
fairly uniform sentiments. Asked to describe the princess in a word, they are apt to use
adjectives in the vein of ethereal, ghostly, spectral, otherworldly, elfin, angelic and the like.
All these describe a state of being which is either wholly spiritual or belonging on the fringe
of the physical realm--something more immaterial than substantial, more transparent than
opaque, more fanciful and pliable than realistic or concrete. (I have commented a few
times on the girl's extraordinary pallor. Poets and painters alike have long used pale
complexion for that delicate, impermanent, or altogether incorporeal quality which certain
individuals possess. It is no accident that we tend to imagine ghosts and spirits as
translucent beings in muted tones of gray.) The princess' appearance and demeanor are
intended to exploit these sentiments. I say exploit because the sentiments existed in our
thoughts long before we knew of her; the storyteller fashioned her character in such a way
as to tap them. Do you recall how the queen instantly struck a familiar chord in our
imagination the moment we saw her? She was technically a stranger but at the same time
recognizable--because she fit a type we already knew. Something similar is at work in the
way we look at Yorda. We need then to determine the type--that is, the genre--to which
she belongs.

Yorda's fairylike appeal hails from that class of mythical maidens which includes nymphs,
sirens, elves, sylphs and sprites--supernatural creatures bearing more or less the form of
human damsels, half spirit and half mortal, at once alluring and chaste, mysterious,
capricious, eternally young and carefree. (She even has the pointy ears to show for it!)
Traditions invariably place these enchanting creatures in idyllic settings. We think of fairy
maidens dancing with bees or napping on flower petals, nymphs singing and playing the
harp on the banks of a serene lake, mermaids harvesting pearls in the watery depth. We
never think of them engaging in any sort of practical labor; we never picture them farming
or chopping logs or cooking. These demigoddesses are too noble and too lighthearted for
such mundane--such thoroughly human--activities. The concept rebels against their image.
It rebels against Yorda's image also.

From the moment we met Yorda we had misgivings about her nature. She looked human
but did not quite strike us as human. She seemed to be made of some finer stuff--so
exceedingly delicate as to seem only half corporeal, and at sharp disagreement with the
brute rigid surroundings of stones and bricks and walls. If she were introduced to us as an
elf or a sylph, we should have thought it quite appropriate. Note here that both "elfin" and
"sylphlike" have come to describe just her sort of slim, dainty young woman. Our heroine
however is not merely reminiscent of such magical damsels; she is a supernatural being on
her own right, a bona fide fairy princess in the rank of full-fledged elves and sylphs--those
bewitching otherworldly beauties of folklore, impossibly fair, impossibly delicate, shielded
from the humdrum necessities of life which plague ordinary mortals. The vulgar notion of
manual labor is alien to a being so elevated. That is something people trouble themselves
with. The queen has told Ico that he and Yorda belong apart. Condescending she may be,
but she is right. Her contempt for the boy is as much for his being a lowly common mortal
as for his horns.

Consequently my view of the girl's incompetence at certain tasks is not that she is dim-
witted, but rather that she would have compromised her own image by excelling at those
tasks. We must here keep in mind that she is at times preternaturally graceful and at times
preternaturally clumsy. How do we reconcile the two? Are they even reconcilable? Well, in
my experience a graceful person can prove quite awkward when she is forced to a task she
never would have considered--like say a princess who suddenly found herself having to
take up sewing or housecleaning. But someone oafish to begin with is oafish always.
Elegance can turn sloppy by happenstance. The reverse never occurs.

So here I have the two seemingly opposed portraits of the fairy princess: one showing an
unbecomingly inept adventurer who struggles only half successfully to negotiate some
obstruction, and the other a picture of innocent beauty and grace, where she frolics with
birds on a green sunlit yard by a clear pond and an old windmill, fair and spectral like the
mythic sylph, and betraying no intimation whatever of her fugitive plight. Which is the true
Yorda? Well, both. But which best demonstrates her nature? Most emphatically I say the
latter; this is where she is at home. But we see precious little of that Yorda in the story.
Rather we usually see the girl at her least natural and therefore at her most awkward--
being manhandled and dragged around, climbing ladders, braving death falls with
reluctance, running for her life. I am not surprised that she has come across to some as
less than appealing. Their frustration arises from expecting Yorda to be more like Ico. But I
think the foundational fact in the pair's companionship is precisely that they share nothing
in common aside from their calamity. If on the other hand the frustration is owed to the
technical limitations of the game's artificial intelligence, it is beyond my scope and I have
nothing at all to say on the subject.

That was my musing on the sheer drama of her being. Next I should like to offer a bit
more practical rationale for her demeanor. Before I came to the conclusion articulated
above, I too fancied it chauvinist of the game to represent the heroine thus; not only is
she a damsel in distress, but she is a weakling and, worse, a simpleton who has to rely on
her male companion to do all that requires the least bit of muscle or intelligent thinking.
But even then I did not really hold this against her. There was a regal beauty about her
person which would not permit flat dismissal--a nobility that would not suit a fool. That she
was ignorant was apparent from the start, but I could not believe she was stupid as well.
And that distinction between ignorance and brainlessness cleared much of my own
misunderstanding.

I have heard many speak fondly of Yorda's "innocent, pure" image. Similar praises are
often said about young children because they have not (presumably) yet been corrupted
by the world. That is really a euphemistic way of saying they are ignorant about the world.
Yorda is certainly innocent in that sense, though I think it is one of the less wise
euphemisms popularly used. She is very ignorant about the world, and for the same
reason as young children: she has had little exposure to it. Her behaviors exhibit the
telltale signs of one who was brought up in isolation--brought up caged, if you will--without
much if any opportunity to acquaint herself to the surroundings. Consequently she knows
next to nothing about the castle where she has lived since birth, which hints that she really
is a sort of Rapunzel--shut up alone all her life inside a tower by the old witch, and
forbidden all access to the outside. She acts as though she just stepped out of the prison
cell for the first time in her life. The reality may not have been so simple, but I suspect the
analogy holds more than a grain of truth. I doubt she ever even spoke with anyone but her
brooding mother before the boy came along. She received no more education than might
be given to cattle. Like cattle her purpose was to grow up to be consumed when the time
came. Never until now was she called to apply herself to any endeavor. She is very like a
newborn, awakening just now to the bumps and edges of a world from which she has long
been sheltered.

And with that I am done covering the noteworthy instances in the tale up to the queen's
second appearance. It only remains to get that gate open and greet the climax of the
story. Now you may be surprised to hear that. You may think there is still much to go over.
In a way you are right. A player would take perhaps eight hours or so to play through the
game the first time. The queen is introduced about two hours into the game and does not
show herself again until the last hour or thereabout. Most of the exploration and puzzle
solving takes place between her appearances. But I have nothing to say of this interval
that I have not said already. All the major elements have been introduced. What lies ahead
is essentially repeats of the same cycle: enter an area, clear the path, enter the next area,
clear the path, and so on. There will be no significant advancement in the plot until the
main gate is reopened. Does that mean the narrative is to stagnate until then?

Heavens, no. It just means all the elements are now firmly in place, and it is time for them
to come into full play. There is yet a great deal to enjoy. The really fun part is just
beginning. But we do not have ponder them in tedious words anymore.

Nor does it mean these hours are a mere ploy to protract the story, like inserting
unnecessary events to tell a three-hundred-page tale that needed no more than a
hundred. While talking about the puzzles I said one puzzle serves the same functions as
any other, but I also mentioned a cumulative effect. In other words the many puzzles
strung together yield an effect which no single puzzle could produce. What is that effect?
Half of it was explained earlier: by completing all the puzzles we make a complete tour of
the castle. A single puzzle means only an obstacle to clear, but all the puzzles together
make a journey. And what a journey it is.

The other half concerns the growing bond between the pair. We can understand this
readily. If I got through one perilous venture with another person, I might have found
myself an ally, and perhaps a friend. If I got through twenty with the same person--why,
we should be inseparable.

The real enjoyment of the game lies in accompanying the children on their journey and
watching them forge a bond which I will not try to describe. And we need not take apart
any mystery to find it. We have dug through an awful heap of information, true, but none
of this was strictly necessary for us to see what the story is about. In fact I cannot grasp
the two heroes through reasoning. I know too little about them. I do not know their
histories, their habits and inclinations, their thoughts and reasons. But here is a strange
thought: I know practically nothing about these two, yet I feel that at some level I "know"
them far more intimately than characters from any other games. And some of those
characters have their biographical data contrived down to birth date and favorite food. I
wonder why this is?

The apparent contradiction is resolved once we realize that we are talking about two
different modes of knowing. Ico and Yorda become known to us not by exposition but by
impression. When you learn a thing by impression, the foremost part of your attention is
not on factual details--what counts is how vividly the thing becomes engraved in your
thoughts and fancies. It is a very simple matter. You see a man dive in front of an
oncoming truck to save a child, and you receive an impression that he is brave and
selfless. You watch a couple seated on a bench holding hands, and you receive an
impression that they are fond of each other. You may not hear a word of their
conversation, but your impression leads you to conclude the talk must be genial. In the
same manner, you watch two children fight the rest of the world to escape a fate they have
not deserved, struggling together to make the next hundred steps on their thorny path,
and you receive an impression that--well, you fill in the blank. But that is how these
characters, though largely strangers to us, become alive in our minds and we grow
attached to them. And we need no analysis for that.
Now we must be mindful that impressions can mislead, and that they are poor ground on
which to base dogmatic claims. In fact any statement that begins with the words "______
gives me an impression that..." presumes its own inaccuracy. For instance if I said "That
girl gives me an impression of being more a ghost than a person," I would not be saying
the girl is actually a ghost, or even that she is probably a ghost. I would merely mean "She
looks and behaves as if she were a ghost and not a person." An impression makes no
stronger a claim of truth than that. I should like you to remember this whenever you hear
me speak of my impressions.

So next time we will find the pair at the main gate.

top

(First Posted 10 August 2003)

So they have done it. They have unleashed both keys to the gate, turning the castle inside
out in the process, and now they stand before the gate. It only remains for Yorda to open
it.

It seems some people are confused as to how this gate works. I think that detail is
unimportant. We only need to understand that it operates the same way all the other
magic doors at the castle operate. Since this is the main entrance, however, it is double
bolted just as our own front doors have multiple locks while the doors inside only have
one. It must be unlocked in order to respond to the girl's magic; like an electric security
door it has to be switched on before it will accept the password.

Opening the immense gate saps Yorda's strength. She sinks to her feet exhausted. Ico
tends to her in concern. A little more, she breathes. Almost there. Just a little more.

A bridge of stone extends from the castle, connecting to the bluff ashore. The mystery of
the unusable gate which we observed in the prologue is at last answered. The existence of
the bridge also lets me guess that the castle used to be in communication with the land,
which agrees with my suspicion that the queen has or had ties with the outside world. Why
then did she withdraw the bridge and isolate her realm?
The green shore stretches before them. At the other end of the bridge Ico can see the
portico he had visited earlier in the knights' custody. He takes Yorda's hand and leads her
between the gateposts. For the first time the princess breathes the air beyond the castle
walls. But her first steps outside the prison are shaky. She barely keeps herself upright.
Slowly, cautiously, the children make their way across the narrow bridge. There are no
safety rails, and the sea is a long way down.

With no warning a globe atop a gatepost, the same they had used to unlock the gate,
flashes white. A streak of bolt springs from it, striking the girl with deadly accuracy. She
collapses upon the bridge. Ico is knocked away from the impact and nearly rolls off to the
sea. The bridge splits--it begins to retract. The pair is left separated at each end, she on
the castle side and he on the shore side.

Ico scrambles to his feet. At the other side, the princess moves weakly to the edge. For a
moment the children gaze upon each other helplessly. The gap is fast widening. Then the
boy makes a decision. He will rather rejoin his companion than return ashore without her.
Darting to the edge he throws himself over the chasm.

He falls short by a step--the princess reaches out, and grasps his hand. He dangles a
thousand feet above the waters. Desperately he claws at the stone with the free hand. The
girl strains to bring him up. Her drained strength is already at the limit holding onto his
weight. More than once her thin arm nearly gives out. Then displaying a grit we should
hardly have expected from her, she almost hauls him onto the bridge--

But a shadow grows behind her. Bit by bit it devours her form, crawling up her limbs,
turning her black as soot. The shadow rises and takes the form of the queen. It is the last
thing the boy sees before he falls. "Thank you," the princess whispers. Then she is
enveloped in darkness.
 top

(First Posted 20 August 2003)

A storm rages under the dark and livid heaven. The sun has long since retired into the
night. Blurry in the rain and lit by lightning, the castle has shed its old serenity and stands
in unmitigated gloom. Before, it could look handsome. It is only monstrous now.

The boy awakens, wet and probably less than warm, on one of the great cages hanging off
the cliff under the front gate. It appears that he, falling off the bridge when it was almost
fully withdrawn, dropped down to the cage. (If you will, go to the first picture link in the
chapter titled Entombment. You can see the cages under the gate.) What will he do now?
His comrade is gone, reclaimed by the witch. Heaven knows what has become of her. He is
friendless, weaponless, clueless--as he was at the beginning. What is left now, but to
resume what he has been doing all along, to try and get himself out of the castle? For the
queen has made it clear she has no interest in him. She has got her daughter back. She
will not interfere if he escapes alone. Indeed did she not order him to leave? But what he
does next goes against the advice of common wisdom. Let us take another look at the
castle's map.
Where Ico regains consciousness is the southern tip of the central isle, which directly faces
the shore he has been trying thus far to reach. Where he heads next is the northernmost
isle at the top of the map--the farthest point from the shore. This is where he first met
Yorda and also where he was entombed. Now what is this child thinking, backtracking
through the whole island, undoing the progress he has made, to return to the very place
he has risked his life all this time to get away from?
All of a sudden the adventure has taken on a new attitude. We thought freedom was the
aim of this quest. But if that is true the boy is not helping himself by running back into the
prison. Now we realize escape is not the object of the game. There has all along been
another, less apparent object which commands greater priority. That object is the bond
between the two children. Escape is agreeable only so long as it coincides with this. But
now that one of the companions has been taken away--well, freedom will just have to be
put on hold until she is recovered and the companionship restored. So back he must go.

Here some of you may raise a sensible objection. You may say "Eliot is exaggerating Ico's
valor. He does not go back because he wants to, but rather because the path inevitably
leads him that way. The puzzles he solves force him back to the northern isle. He has no
choice to go elsewhere."

That is not true. The ones who have no choice are we. Ico has a choice. Or rather he had a
choice--and made it. Consider for instance the murderously steep bluff he tackles to reach
the northern isle. Now if he could do that, by common sense he should also be able to
climb down to the shore and escape alone. Then you may say "Actually he couldn't, since
the only available footpath along the cliff leads back to the prearranged destination." And
why do you think the footpath is prearranged? It is put there by the storyteller to prevent
us, the gamers, from taking Ico somewhere he does not want to go. It is there to ensure
that we do not ruin the story by having him do something he would never do of his own
will, such as abandoning Yorda to save his own hide. But the assumption all the while is
that he could--if he wished, which he does not--have applied the same effort to saving
himself instead of rescuing his friend. He is not, as we are, groping in the dark for just any
exit. He is on a search. We of course do not learn this until he reaches his destination.
Only then do we realize "So that's what he was trying to do. He was trying to get back to
the tower where he met the girl."

In this linear adventure we are as much spectators as we are players. Our control over
Ico's actions is limited to having him do more or less what he has already decided he will
do. We "play as Ico"--that is, we are expected to behave as he would, and we are
accordingly penalized when we go against that expectation. We can have him do what he
wants well, or we can have him do it incompetently. But we cannot have him not do it at
all. In other words we can either have him succeed at his aim, or we can have him fail--but
we cannot alter the aim itself. And his aim is to rescue Yorda. On our part we can let him
do exactly that or else refuse by quitting the game. That is all the choice we have. The
script says "Either you let him do what he will, or the story does not progress beyond this
point."
Let me repeat that ICO is a linear tale. That means it is entirely scripted. We are allowed to
control the protagonist so long as we do not deviate from the script; when we do deviate,
the story either halts until we get back on the track or it ends altogether with the boy's
death. The storyteller has already decided how this tale is to end. Consequently he so set
up the puzzles and the paths that we will play out the climax the way he wants it played
out. We have no choice but to return to the northern isle. But that is only because Ico
himself has chosen to do so.

Make no mistake about it: he still wants to escape. But not unless he has his friend with
him. By now he knows this cannot be done without first confronting the queen. Twice
already she has frustrated them when they were only steps away from freedom. What is
more, she could have done so anytime she wished. There is not a spot in the castle hidden
from her eyes, not a spot beyond her reach. As long as the queen is there rescuing Yorda
is a lost cause. How much confidence does this boy have in his chances against her? Either
he knows full well he is running to his doom, or--more likely--he gives no thought at all to
the odds of success. Which is more heroic, I could not say.
Back he goes, into the shadowy underside of the castle which he had glimpsed earlier with
Yorda, through the enormous water engines busy at some mysterious work, tracing the
deadly slopes of the cliff, until he finds the northern tower rising in the storm like a ghost
mansion. He enters the isle and finds himself in the subterranean vault--astonishingly
immense!--where the knights had brought him before. He has come a full circle round the
stronghold. At the bottom of the vault is the very first idol gate he saw, the same that the
knights had opened with the magic blade. Outside, he finds the dock by which he had
arrived at the castle. A path leads away from the dock to an altar of stone by the cavern's
exit. A familiar object sits on it. The magic sword is at last found.

Ico can go anywhere in the castle now; he no longer requires Yorda's help to escape. Of
course the game is so arranged that this will not be permitted. But what I said three
paragraphs above applies fully here. In fact if he wanted to leave alone he does not even
have to bother with the sword. He can simply take the boat out of the cavern. We know
the lattice can be lowered; we saw the knights do it. Again the only reason we cannot
lower the lattice or push the boat into the water is not that these actions are inherently
undoable but that they contradict the script. It is not that Ico cannot do them but that he
will not. This becomes easier to understand if you pretend that instead of playing a game
you are watching a film or reading a book.
Now that he has the sword, let us take a good look at it; we couldn't before because it was
kept sheathed. Intricate characters are carved on the blade. We have seen these
characters before--on the elevator which he is now about to ride, on the casket in which he
almost met his doom, and in the speech of the princess and the queen. No doubt about it:
the sword is an artifact of the castle. It must have been placed at the cavern to allow the
knights, and others like them, to carry out their terrible duty. But placed by whom? By the
queen, I should think; for who else should have the authority to grant entry to the castle?

Armed with the queen's sword, the boy opens the gate and enters the crypt. Everything is
the way he left it--the grim multitude of caskets, one of them overturned--except for a
dark congregation of wraiths at the apse of the chamber. They dance about an unmoving
figure like savages celebrating a kill. It is the princess. She has been turned into stone,
arrested at the precise moment of the boy's fall, her hand still outstretched for his.

He charges at the gathering. The wraiths scatter, hissing at the intruder. He hacks at them
unopposed. The sword's power is remarkable. It strikes down the foe with a single blow.
And no wonder. It is a sword forged with the queen's own magic--drawing from the same
power which operates the castle entire. The wraiths are helpless against their mistress'
sorcery, just as they were whenever Yorda opened one of the gates.

Not long into the fight we notice something odd. Some of the caskets on the wall are
glowing for no apparent reason. We have Ico examine them, but we can detect nothing
otherwise special about them. The fight continues meanwhile, and more and more caskets
begin to glow. At some point a chilling realization grips us. Every destroyed enemy causes
a sarcophagus to lit up. We take a harder look at the demons Ico has been massacring. We
note they are uniformly small, just about our hero's size. Then we observe in horror that
each sports on its head horns like his.

Now if you were at all like me, you halted the assault at this point and debated whether
you should continue what you had been doing. And I am certain that is how the storyteller
envisioned Ico reacting. A game was never so successful in immersing the player into the
protagonist's mind.

But destroy them he must; else he cannot proceed. One by one he cuts down the specters
of the previous sacrifices whose rank he had come perilously close to joining. Now, many
have drawn interesting inferences from this revelation such as: Ico is not so much killing
the wraiths--since they are already dead--as freeing their enslaved souls; the wraiths do
not seem as hostile here as the others we have seen; and the other wraiths were likely
also humans in life. I will not comment further on these speculations though I find some of
them appealing. I do not know enough to support or reject them. I point them out
however so you can consider them on your own.

When the dreadful task is complete, the stairs before the final idol gate is lowered, making
the last chamber of the castle accessible. I do not want to speculate exactly how the
destruction of the specters triggers this. Like many other aspects of the game, to me it
seems to make more dramatic sense than strictly logical sense. For all I know it may be
the queen is inviting the boy. We know she was watching the whole time.

The final chamber is one of the castle's grandest and certainly its gloomiest. It is a
Medieval great hall where the monarch met with the public and received guests. It is hard
to describe its melancholy. There is not so much as a lit candle to allay the somber blue
that pervades all. A lofty throne, solitary and unoccupied, sits under a soaring dome. Thick
dust like fog shrouds the floor. The boy's own echoing footfalls alone relieve the utter
silence. We can almost smell the cold stale air. It is the portrait of a bygone glory, of a
dynasty in decay. For me this was the most intensely poetic moment in the story. It
inspired a feeling akin to reverence. It made me afraid to disturb the deathlike calm. It
made me slow down Ico's steps; it felt wrong to run in that space.

He approaches the throne. Nothing happens. The hall is quite deserted. He moves back
towards the exit. A voice stops him short then. When he turns the queen is leaning into
the throne, legs imperially crossed, looking eminently at home.

He demands to know what has been done to the girl. The witch replies he is too late to do
anything and at last reveals her design. She is aging. She means to grant herself another
life by seizing her daughter's body. Warning him that Yorda will be no more upon
awakening, she tells him to give up the sword--it is hers after all--and leave. She is a
pragmatic tyrant, it seems; she would spare violence where unnecessary. Three times now
she has given him chances to turn back: first at the main gate when she ordered him thus,
then on the bridge where she split the pair with mechanical precision, thinking no doubt
that the boy would take the hint and stay on his side of the gap, and finally now. Again we
are forced to assume that theoretically Ico could have escaped on his own. I do believe,
though I cannot prove, that the queen would have spared him had he taken her offer.
Somehow the thought makes her more formidable, not less.

Of course Ico, the bullheaded little hero he is, does not listen. He runs headlong at the
throne, sword raised. He loses a horn for his trouble. The queen decides the child will not
be diplomatic. The fight begins for real. She unleashes deadly petrification spell, which
seems to be her favorite. (Next to transformation it is perhaps the form of enchantment
most prominent in Western lore.) As long as he holds the sword he is safe. Apparently the
only thing that can withstand the queen's magic is a weapon endowed with that magic.
Slashing at the barrier cocooning the enemy, he plunges the sword into her heart. The
queen sinks back into the throne, mortally wounded.

With her last strained breaths she tells her diminutive conqueror that her her death
notwithstanding Yorda will never be able to leave the castle. Then she vanishes, never to
reappear--in an invisible burst so forceful it flings the boy across the hall. His remaining
horn snaps off. For the third time in two days he passes out.

Out in the crypt the caskets flash once again. They release mysterious white bolts--
reminiscent of opening an idol gate--which converge on Yorda. The petrification is undone.
But the Yorda that awakens is not the girl familiar to us. It is the dark figure we saw in
Ico's vision. She examines her own hand curiously. Heaven knows what sort of a face she
is making. She gazes meaningfully next at the open entrance to the great hall. She seems
to divine instinctively what must have happened while she was unconscious.

An ominous tremor has seized the castle and will not subside. The walls begin to crumble
around Ico's prone form. Yorda enters, her body crackling with black something, and
looking more like her mother than ever before. Kneeling by the boy she touches a broken
stump of his horn, a certain tenderness in her touch. She sees the sword embedded in the
empty throne. She realizes what he has done. The chamber is meanwhile rapidly coming
apart. There is only one thing left to do now. He has saved her. She will save him. With
surprising ease she takes her companion into her arms. If I were to hazard a guess I
should say she is indeed stronger than before. Timid uncertainty no longer marks her
action. She has assumed what used to be his work. Casting a last lingering look at the
queen's hall, she steps onto the elevator and descends to the cavern. The water has risen,
and the boat is already afloat--or is it the isle that is beginning to submerge? She places
him in the boat and releases it to the waves. So much she has braved to see the outside
world, yet she chooses not to accompany him. For she now understands she is not like
him. She does not belong in his world any more than he belongs in hers. Let him go back.
She will stay. She bids him farewell.

The castle succumbs to decay it has so long resisted. First to cave are the parts which
were already in ruins. Then the rest follows. With the queen no more it cannot hold itself
together; as a river is doomed that has been severed from the source, the castle dies with
its mistress. The very islands sink into the ocean. Not a brick, nor a pebble, remains of her
dominion--once mighty, ruinous of recent, and having come so very near reviving itself.

All is swept away clean.

.
.
.
.
.
.
.

The blinding sun awakens the boy. He rises, and looks about in a daze. Things had not
quite looked like this when he lost consciousness. He is in a boat, washed ashore. The
beach is foreign to him. What in the world has happened? He jumps overboard onto the
sand. A spell of dizziness causes him to plop down. He has forgotten about the nasty
wounds dappling his head in crimson. They must throb quite painfully.

The hornless Ico walks along the beach. No doubt he is trying to reconcile, with little
success, the current situation with his last conscious memory. The queen is dead. He slew
her. But what of the castle? What of the princess? The sea is clear and unending, and
offers no sight of the fortress.

He trudges onward. Once again he is friendless, weaponless, clueless--all that ordeal

behind him and still an exile. He is as alone and lost as ever. Some things never change.
But a moment. There is something ahead--on the sand, by the breaking waves. He keeps
walking. It is beginning to look familiar. It is the girl. She lies on her side, still as a corpse.
The water laps at her feet. He runs. He stands before her now.

No glad smile touches his lips, no happy relief in his eyes. He is afraid. She is so still. She
cannot have survived the sea. He dares not touch her. She cannot be dead--

But look: her fingers, they curl. Slowly her eyes blink open to the light. Squinting ever so
slightly she takes in the beach, then the boy. She opens her mouth--

FIN

top

(First Posted 22 August 2003)

Well, the story has ended. But are we the wiser for it? Do we care that we should be the
wiser? It would be perfectly all right, you know, to forgo the dissection and leave the
ending the wonderful thing it is. But if you would like further clarification of the mystery,
let us take a step back and try to grasp the larger picture. What began as one small child's
nightmare has blossomed into the monumental finale of a reign, of an era. Through his
trials we witnessed the last hours in the ancient history of the castle. We know nothing of
its inception, nothing of its prime. We only know how it fell. Our task--grasping the larger
picture I mean--is therefore akin to reading the final chapter of a novel and divining what
preceded it, akin to attending the deathbed of a stranger and from it reconstructing his
life. Now this is a risky thing to do. We delude ourselves if we think we can produce
anything like an accurate history. We must restrain our fancies within the scope of the
clues at hand. The moment we overstep it, we have abandoned criticism in favor of fan
fiction. Then we will be judging one another's theories based not on whose is more faithful
but on whose is more entertaining. I should be quite satisfied if I could arrive at a contour,
not a full portrait.

As we continue please remember: I do not claim that the following must be the case. I
only submit that there are clues which point to it and none that I can perceive which
contradict it. You are welcome to reject anything you find unconvincing.

I begin with the queen, who is the point of origin for all events in the story and the root to
which all limbs and branches are to be traced. Just what sort of being is she? She is
supposedly near death from age, yet she looks perfectly youthful. That is enough to make
me suspect her extreme age. (Here I should like to remind you of the connection made
earlier between Yorda and the mythical fairylike maidens, whose appearance invariably
belies their age.) She is likely as old as the castle. She built it and maintained it, with
increasingly inadequate care as her strength waned, so that upon her death the fortress
came unglued. Is she human? I think that an inappropriate question for this particular
genre of fiction. Folklore and fairy tales are full of characters who are human in every
regard except their possession of certain powers which no human beings could conceivably
possess. Sometimes those characters are placed in a race of their own. Sometimes we just
call them wizards or witches or sorceresses and be done with it. Here I am more
comfortable with the latter.

The queen's disappearance at death does tease my fancies a fair bit. Both she and her
daughter give me consistent impressions that they are half spirit--that they have only a
thin tie with the physical realm. They have that ghostly quality about them which makes
me fancy that if I were to try and touch them my hands might pass clean through their
flesh. The queen does appear and vanish like a specter, and in Ico's vision Yorda does rise
out of a black pool like some mysterious primordial substance taking on a shape. There is
something quite pliable and fluid about their nature. The same is true of the wraiths,
whose case is a bit simpler since I am fairly certain they are already dead. Like her
underlings the queen, instead of leaving behind a corpse, disbands upon death. I could not
say if she was always this way, or if this shows that she has too long been clinging to life
by unnatural means. In any case she decided to abandon her failing body and take over
her daughter's.

And just how did Yorda come to be? Somehow the idea of the queen procreating like a
normal female seems absurd, especially when I consider she has long lived in total
seclusion and does not have much of a body left. She may have brought the girl directly
into existence by magical means, which would give her enough ground to call her a
daughter. Ico might even have taken a glimpse of the past and witnessed her birth, when
he dreamed her emerging into form inside the cage. Who knows?--since the children's
caskets seem to bear on her climactic transformation, perhaps the purpose of sacrifice was
to enable her creation; which, if true, would explain why the queen is willing to let Ico off--
she no longer needs the children now that she has Yorda. But now I am guessing much too
far beyond what I can reasonably defend. This particular line of guessing, at any rate, has
less affinity with fairy tales and more with science fiction. In fairy tales we find a great
many instances of a damsel held captive by a witch or some such malignant being without
the slightest indication as to how they came under such circumstances. Whenever there is
an enchanted castle there is an ogre or a witch who occupies it, or a princess in need of
rescue, or a prince who wants his deforming enchantment lifted; we are rarely told where
the prince or the princess comes from, what has happened to the kingdoms where they
are supposedly royalty, how a hag hunchbacked from old age has a rosy-cheeked maiden
for a daughter, or why a towering giant kidnaps a human damsel not tall enough to reach
his knees for a wife. It may be as simple as that. ICO is just the sort of nostalgic
adventure that can get away with such formulaic set-ups. It is endearing precisely because
it is old and familiar, if not completely reasonable. But if you are a type who abhors all
things hackneyed, I imagine ICO will not long stay in your thoughts no matter how highly
you think of its artistry.

The castle is the next. The term castle is obsolete today and is no longer used in
nonhistorical contexts except, as a joke, to mean a very large or grand house. But the
Medieval castle was less a house or a mansion and more a fortified downtown. And just as
the downtown is the heart of a city, a castle implied a broader territory spread around it of
which it was the center. That is why we never find two castles of this type in proximity to
each other--it would be like having two city halls side by side. To be the lord of a castle
therefore was much more than to own a fine home; it meant one was the chief authority in
that region. An easy example may be found in the story of PUSS IN BOOTS where the cat
ingeniously convinces the king that the miller's son is a great lord. The cat visits each of
the fields belonging to a wealthy ogre and threatens the local farmers, the ogre's vassals,
to tell the king that the land belongs to a fictional marquis. It then calls on the ogre at his
castle, removes him by a trick, and declares the miller's son the ruling marquis of the
region with no one to contest his claim of lordship. The cat's deception would have been
short-lived had it not secured first the land surrounding the castle.

Let me explain why I brought up all that. The synopsis in the manual tells me that horned
children are sacrificed because they are believed to be ill omens. But as I watched the
opening sequence I found myself frowning, and thinking something was amiss. The manual
suggested that Ico was to be disposed of much as garbage is put out, but it was at once
clear to me that this boy was not being disposed of in that sense. He was being
deposited--that is, stored for safekeeping. What was more, it was perfectly apparent that
the knights were themselves nonresidents at the castle, and that they were following a
prescribed procedure: they were to take the boy to the offshore fortress, sail round to the
northern isle, enter it via the latticed cavern, reach the upper level by means of the sword
and the elevator, and entomb the victim in a crypt prepared just for this purpose--prepared
by the queen, I later learned. So it was not the villagers' idea to abandon the children at
the castle. It was rather the queen's will that they be brought there. And now the question
I must ask is, how could she get the outsiders to comply with this abomination? How
indeed, unless she was in a position to exercise power over them? So she made a demand
on them, and they obeyed because they feared her. And they feared her because they
knew crossing her meant consequences. ("This is for the good of the village," the men tell
their prisoner.) Now, I am not at all suggesting that the queen is the monarch of whichever
kingdom Ico lives in. I am not even suggesting that she is a landed feudal lord like the
ogre the cat tricked. I am only saying that she could not have done what she did without
the compliance of the outsiders, and the fact that they did her bidding for generation after
generation makes it impossible to doubt that her influence extends beyond the castle. I
think it no accident that she is fluent in Ico's speech when her daughter is not.

But what of the pretext of a horned child bringing ill fortune? I see a few possibilities there.
It may be that the queen outright lied to Ico's countrymen. Or it may be that the myth
began among the countrymen and took roots over the years. For all the queen requires is
the obeisance of the town leaders; the rest of the populace need not be enlightened, and
in fact convenience would advise that they be kept in the dark. It is not unthinkable that
no one besides the queen, not even the horsemen who deliver Ico, knows the true purpose
of the practice. We must here realize that the sacrificing has been going on for many,
many generations, if the number of caskets in the crypt is any clue. For all that time the
queen has lived in seclusion, unseen by mortal eyes. For all that time none have dared to
set foot on the isles except to bring a sacrifice every now and then. (That is of course a
guess, but I believe a reasonable one. The queen does not seem much fond of human
company and still less of trespassers.) Consequently the men now only have secondhand
knowledge about the queen. Likely all they know is that a mysterious enchanted castle
stands by the sea, fabled to be ruled by a powerful wizard whom no one now living has
seen, and their ancestors have been making sacrifices of horned youngsters there since
too long ago to remember, and they must keep at it if they are not to incur the wizard's
wrath.
So it seems that the queen, despite her current policy of total isolation, once had enough
of a presence in the world that she was able to impose her awful scheme on people. There
was likely also some traffic between the castle and the shore, or else that stupendous
bridge and the elaborate mechanism which operates it should not have been necessary.
But one day she decided to cut off the castle from the land. She withdrew the bridge,
retired into the dark impenetrable depth of the fortress, and in all probability did not speak
with another outsider in person until Ico came along. She became a hermit. But why? I
feel certain it was because she was growing decrepit. To explain I should like you to
consider the following synopses. You may already be familiar with some if not all of them:

(1) Miss Havisham is deserted by her lover on her wedding day. Realizing that he had been
after her fortune all along, she shuts herself up in the manor house and renounces the
world forever. She stops all the clocks in the house, keeps the curtains drawn at all time,
leaves the wedding table untouched for decades so that cobwebs grow thick on the cake,
and refuses to wear anything but her wedding gown which is now yellow and in tatters.
Until her death she does not take a step beyond the gate of her own home. (Charles
Dickens; GREAT EXPECTATIONS)

(2) Roderick Usher is the last living member of an illustrious but cursed lineage. In the
insufferable melancholy of his crumbling, once grand family villa he goes slowly mad
contemplating the bygone glory of his progenitors and the inevitable end that awaits him.
Upon his violent death the house caves in, sealing the doom of the family. (Edgar Allen
Poe; THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER)

(3) At his ancient castle in Transylvania where he has ruled for centuries, Dracula plots to
restore his waning empire by relocating to a new home, London, where preys are
abundant. Failing in his design and pursued by foes, he retreats to Transylvania only to be
caught and destroyed at the doorstep of his old home. (Bram Stoker; DRACULA)

(4) Thomas Sutpen is a self-made man obsessed with the dream of creating a personal
dynasty in the Deep South. He buys a hundred square miles of land, names it Sutpen's
Hundred, and builds himself a splendid mansion through brute will and tenacity. His blind
obsession drives him to isolation from the community, tears his family apart, causes his
son to murder his daughter's suitor, and finally leads to his own murder at the hands of a
tenant farmer. His mansion stands for years as a ghostly remnant of his legacy and is at
last torched by the remaining Sutpens who themselves perish in the blaze. (William
Faulkner; ABSALOM, ABSALOM!)
(5) From his humble country beginning Charles Foster Kane goes on to dominate the
newspaper business and to epitomize success. He erects an artificial mountain for his
home Xanadu, the world's largest private residence. Success however corrupts his heart,
causing his loved ones to leave him one by one. He dies alone in the palatial solitude of
Xanadu. The film opens and closes with a dark, ominous shot of the mansion and its steel
fence, sporting a "NO TRESSPASSING" sign. (Orson Welles; CITIZEN KANE)

Now it will be noted that the above scenarios share a remarkable uniformity of tone,
theme, and circumstance that is very much echoed in our game. They involve a person of
prestige or influence who grows estranged from the world (owing this estrangement
usually to the very qualities which had made his success), shuts himself up in a private
refuge, and there endures a lonely decline and eventual death. This refuge takes the form
of a splendid dwelling equal to the greatness of the occupant. As the occupant decays in
self-imposed exile the dwelling also decays, reflecting his condition. It comes to represent
the man himself and all that is striking about him--a hulking shadow of the past grandeur
and vitality, reeking with intense gloom, haunted by that bleak oppressive air of decay and
ruin, and arousing in the beholder an eerie dread akin to what one might feel in a deserted
cemetery or in the presence of a corpse. (Note also that all four of the written tales are
first-person narratives. Compare the narrators' respective descriptions of, and reactions to,
Miss Havisham's manor house, Usher's villa, Dracula's castle and Sutpen's mansion, and
you will find the same uneasy dread dominating them all.) You probably know other stories
that feature similar scenarios and sentiments--a picturesque but unnervingly somber
house, mansion or castle occupied by a mysterious recluse who never shows himself
outside his abode and thus becomes the center of fearful speculations, gossips, even
legends. Mrs. Bates and "her" motel is a well known example, along with a host of ghost
house stories. In fact "the scary old man down the street" we looked at in chapter IX is a
playground variation of this very idea. The idea is not merely popular; it is pervasive, for
its innate appeal to human imagination.

This image of a grim, alienated recluse brooding inside a prison of his own making is one
of those classic motifs which appear time and again in fiction. The pairing of isolation and
decay especially is prominent in classic romance tales. (I am using the term romance as a
literary genre; GREAT EXPECTATIONS, THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER and DRACULA
are all romances.) Each of the aforementioned characters ends up a hermit, unsociable in
the extreme and wary of contact with outsiders. Each erects a formidable personal
sanctuary to barricade himself against the world. Each meets his end in that very
sanctuary, and this death invariably marks the tale's climax. The sanctuary becomes a
symbol of its master, sharing his fortune and fate--and in the cases of Miss Havisham,
Usher and Sutpen the houses are destroyed following their deaths to signify their complete
ruin. All these we find to be true in ICO. In popular adventure films, too, the staple pattern
of climax is to have the villain defeated and his lair blown up shortly thereafter. The
pattern has been so abused that now it is more or less obligatory. ICO, I think, is a rare
example of the classic motif executed faithfully and with admirable taste. That motif allows
me to draw valuable inferences regarding the queen which are not strictly provided in the
story itself.

This then is the queen as I envision her: a fearsome sorceress whose reputation once
carried far beyond the walls of her castle; whose vigor declined after a long and iron-fisted
reign; who then cut off the castle from the rest of the world and sequestered herself; who
abided many generations in the stale safety of her ruinous shelter, seeking to revive her
powers; and who just might have attempted to regain her old influence once she was
restored to youth. For if what I saw is her dominion in a state of severe decline, what
might it once have been like when she was at the height of her rule? And here I recall the
desolate majesty of her throne room--a portrait of a fallen dynasty, I called it. I recall too
the immensely stirring sequence of the isles' destruction, how they caved into the ocean in
an almost dignified manner like a wounded behemoth laying itself to rest. It was
magnificent visual poetry. The images cried out that something monumental was dying
here. And it had almost cheated death--was on the verge of renewal when it was dealt the
fatal blow. But what if it had succeeded? What if the boy had not gone back after his
friend, had not stopped the queen? Young and strong once more, would she have been
content to leave the wreckage of her dominion the way it is? Or would she have, like any
sensible despot with the means, turned her attention to rebuilding what she had lost? By
ridding the world of the queen Ico may have saved more than Yorda's life and his own. He
may have protected from her tyranny the very neighbors who surrendered him to that
tyrant. Imagine the astonishment of the next party of delegates that will come only to find
the castle gone as though it had never been there! That is what I fancy at any rate, and
again you are welcome to dismiss it if you find it groundless.

Finally, we come to the horned children. This is the very first mystery we encountered in
the story. It is also the riddle that is least explained. I am afraid I will not be of much help
on this one. I could not say even now exactly why the queen wants them, let alone why
they are born with their anomaly. Let me list what I do feel fairly sure about.

1. That the queen indeed requires the horned children for some design is certain. I hope
this will not be disputed after all we have looked at.

2. That the children are an essential part of that design also is certain. Hence the elaborate
arrangement spanning decades if not centuries, and a special crypt prepared adjacent to
the queen's own throne room.

3. It seems more than likely that this design is none other than the scheme to prolong her
life.

And that, believe it or not, is all. The manner in which she intends to exploit the children is
lost to me among a myriad of possibilities and suspicions which can be neither confirmed
nor debunked. Most people, myself included, believe that some sort of essence or energy
is involved which the queen needs and which only the horned children may yield. Very
well, they yield something like that. But how is it used? Why do they have it? How does
Yorda figure into this? And how is her transformation at the end related to their caskets?
Before you propose your take on it, and I am sure you are itching to, let me assure you
that no matter how thorough and obvious you think your theory is, I can suggest an
equally plausible alternative which, if believed, will undermine yours. We will in fact not be
exchanging theories at all. We will only be pitting one chain of assumptions against
another. And one thing about assumptions is that they are perfectly useless in arguments
unless the argument is understood to be hypothetical from the outset. Now, hypothetical
arguments are often very useful, and even indispensable, in real life. There is always a
chance that the hypotheses will be verified or falsified by factual discoveries. But in fiction
they lead to mess and rarely, if ever, any resolution. There are innumerable possibilities
and no reliable means of testing and eliminating false ones, which is how we deduce truth
in real life. The only person who can put the matter to the rest is the storyteller, and he
has quite deliberately chosen to whet our curiosity without satisfying it. I am sorry, but it
will have to stay unsatisfied.

As I said earlier a contour, not a full portrait, is all I can aim at. I can only hope to
determine the subject's rough size, shape, and pose. If anyone speaks of the shade of her
hair or the mole on her cheek, you can bet he is not reasoning; he is inventing. For well
over a year now I have seen dozens of people on this board contribute their own intricate
variants of the mystery, none of which ever seemed to convince anybody else. This is a
predictable situation. Whenever a thing seems out of place, our natural inclination is to
imagine a scenario that will fit the oddity. This cannot and must not be avoided; we must
do it if we are to reason. Problems arise however when we let inventiveness get the better
of observation. That is, we might first observe a set of evidences and form a conclusion, A.
Then when A is challenged by a conflicting claim we might introduce a modifying provision,
B, which would allow us to override the objection and maintain A, albeit in a revised form.
And when B is in turn found less than fully illuminating we simply come up with another
modifying provision, C, that will fill the gap in B's logic--and so on and on, compounding
one revision on top of another, so that by the time we get to H or K we are left with a
conclusion that looks nothing like the evidences we started with. And I have seen this
happen so many times it is not funny. The aggravating cycle might unfold like this:

Jack: I think all the black wraiths were formerly humans, just like the horned children.
They must be the ghosts of people slain by the queen.

Bill: Not necessarily, when you look deeper into it. The queen took the children because
they needed some unique essence of theirs. Why would she kill ordinary people also?

Jack: Maybe she didn't kill them for their essence. She probably had them turned into
wraiths so she could control them as slaves.

Bill: But what would she need slaves for? The wraiths are pathetically weak compared to
their master. What could they do that she herself couldn't?

Jack: Quite possibly she had them build the castle, which must have required incredible
labor. Because they are spirits, they must be able to work without rest, sleep or food. One
spirit could probably do five men's work, and that for centuries.

Bill: I am not convinced. I am thinking rather that the wraiths are simply her creations.
They probably somewhat resemble the children's ghosts because they all depend upon the
same magic. I observe that the horned children's ghosts look much the same as they did
in life. But the other wraiths are in the shapes of all kinds of beasts. These obviously can't
have been people.

Jack: So she took animals and turned them into wraiths--again so she could work them as
slaves. And by the way some of them do look like men.

Bill: You know about any animals that are horned, winged, and two-legged? You know
about any goat-sized spiders for that matter?

Jack: Well, maybe animals like that exist in Ico's world. It isn't the same universe as ours,
you know.

Bill: But these wraiths are intelligent. They use teamwork and strategies to separate the
kids and abduct the girl. They can't be animals. You can train animals, but you could
hardly send them on a mission to bring back a prisoner, now could you?

Jack: The queen may have equipped them with a sort of quasi-intelligence so as to make
them more useful underlings. Besides, given that these are fantasy creatures you cannot
overrule the possibility that they were intelligent to begin with, just like the dragons and
satyrs of our own myth...

This conversation will never end, so let us take leave of it at this point. By now you are
thinking one of four things: (1) Jack is right; (2) Bill is right; (3) neither knows what he is
talking about and you are ready to offer your own theory; or (4) the discussion took off on
a sensible observation, but it quickly got out of hand. If the last of these is your choice, I
am with you. But if you went for any of the rest I must encourage you to reconsider your
entire approach to the story. Jack's very first observation, the one that began the debate,
was valid enough a theory; it came direct from the clues that are presented to all of us.
But everything that came afterwards was no theories at all but scenarios. Both Jack and
Bill could probably write thoughtful fan fiction scripts. But as expositors they have failed
utterly. What looks like progress of reasoning here is not progress but regress--a steady
departure from the clues at hand, and increasing incorporation of elements foreign to the
original subject. Jack and Bill think they are moving from the murky to the concrete, from
the shallow to the deep, but what they have in fact done is take a concrete observation
and sprout a host of murky speculations that will never be settled. They got deep, all
right--so deep that they have lost themselves in the depth. I doubt they will ever
resurface.

What then, you may ask, is the point of this whole exercise? Does not what I said above
apply to all the arguments in this talk? As a matter of fact they do, though I hope to a
lesser degree. I bring my own assumptions to my writing. I have offered scenarios of my
own. But now you know why I accompanied those scenarios with disclaimers. In the end
you must decide which riddles offer reasonably definite answers and which were never
meant to be answered. I believe the horned children and the scheme surrounding their evil
fate fall into this latter class. It is no use trying to arrive at a complete answer; if you
somehow reach one, you and no one else will believe it.

Where ambiguity is the intended effect it will not help us to be specific. Let us not criticize
a work in pastel for lacking clean lines. The fuzziness is its charm. You can put it under the
microscope all you want and look for the precise, detailed sketch underneath, but you will
not find it. The artist did not put it there. He was working with loose strokes from the
beginning. And it is a mark of a competent draughtsman to be able to draw loosely and
retain control and balance. At first glance the picture seems spare and disorderly. A closer
inspection reveals that every stroke, every smudge is there for a reason. ICO may be
cryptic, but it is eminently coherent.
Allow me then to paint, with very broad strokes, the larger picture of the tale as I
understand it. The queen, having shut herself inside her castle when she grew old and
frail, conceived a plan to restore herself to youth. She would usurp the body of a younger
person who shared her nature. Her daughter was to provide the body, so she had the girl
caged to prevent her escape. She also required additional ingredients for the plan. She
found them in the horned children and had them brought to the castle to give up their
lives. When she was very close to fulfilling her goal, one of the children escaped and, to
her ire, freed the princess. They became partners on the run and friends besides. But the
queen easily reclaimed her daughter and got rid of the boy. She no longer needed him, for
she was on the brink of resurrection. She did not expect him to return for the girl. But
return he did, and in a duel she was vanquished by the very victim she had intended to
exploit. With the sorceress gone the enchantment over her domain dissolved, and all that
owed its existence to her began to crumble. The princess, realizing her cursed nature,
decided to send her brave rescuer back to his realm and share the castle's doom. Soon the
very islands disappeared into the sea, forever erasing the queen's legacy from the world.
But then something happened which none could have anticipated, not even the queen.
When all that she had inherited from her mother had been washed away, a part of the girl
remained. She awakened a free and pure creature, no longer under the burden of an
enchanted destiny.

The talk got much longer than I had planned. I have just one task remaining, and that is
to dispel some fans' suspicion that the pair's reunion takes place after death. I will have to
write another segment after all.

top

(First Posted 25 August 2003)

I first heard of it on this board a few months after I began frequenting it, almost two years
ago. I do not remember my exact reaction, nor do I recall the person who introduced me
to the theory, but I think I was for the most part amused. His idea was that Ico and Yorda
both die at the castle, and the reunion is a sort of their heavenly reward. The sun-washed
beach is the afterlife, and the two children we see in the final scene are really the souls of
the deceased. I did not say anything at the time. Apart from its juvenile perspective on
heaven--it is a place you go to meet your old loved ones, and it will look exactly like this
world or however you want it to look--the interpretation seemed to me in such vast
disagreement with the flavor of the tale that I was sure no one would take it seriously. A
while later I was surprised when I heard it again from another poster. Then I was aghast to
see it spread like an epidemic particularly among those folk who seemed to value their
mature and hard-nosed approach to life and literature. Apparently this was the enlightened
reading of ICO--the sophisticated interpretation which, though admittedly somewhat
depressing, a discerning intellect would not be afraid to adopt for fear of having his happy
fragile illusions shattered. On several occasions I voiced the unreasonableness of that
view. But there was not much I could do in a few measly paragraphs. I could not properly
address the part without first taking the whole into the account. The matter became one of
my prime motives for this exercise.

If you have read this far, you are used to my rambles. I am going to ramble a bit more. If
you happen to subscribe to the afterlife interpretation you will probably want to refute me.
I welcome your criticism, but I ask you first to read every word that follows. Should you
challenge my points, I will assume you have considered those points and are intimately
familiar with them.

Now, you know what I think happens in the ending. I think the two heroes, both pawns in
the queen's plot, overcome the fate the witch has imposed on them. Thus he loses his
horns (a symbolic event if I ever saw one) and she her enchantment. Each has willingly
accepted death for the other's sake, and both are granted life. It is a thoroughgoing old-
fashioned happy ending. The trademark of old-fashioned happy endings is in their moral
emphasis; for the final reward one must be not only clever or hardworking but virtuous, an
idea which has all but faded from modern fiction. This quaint notion is apt to suffer a proud
dismissal from those who have "grown past" such "simplistic" and "primitive" outlooks and
can no longer be satisfied with them. I have heard many complain that the ending makes
things too easy. What they are likely saying is "I don't like this old cliche. I want something
more complex and subtle, something not quite so ready-made, something that will make
me think." I believe they are going about it the wrong way, but if something to think about
is what they want--well, they shall have it.

Let me clarify at once that my rejection of the theory is not owed to any disbelief in life
after death. If my open admiration for the writings of C. S. Lewis has not given me away, I
am a Christian and assured believer in the existence of real heaven--not the romanticized
heaven full of clouds and winged creatures in white robes, but the final concrete realization
of the divine in man--and also, much as I dislike to dwell on the thought, in real hell. The
reason I called the theory's image of heaven "juvenile" is not that I deem afterlife an
immature notion, but rather that the theory looks at heaven as a kindergartener might--
that is, she pictures it as a replica of this world from which all the bad and unpleasant
things have been subtracted; whereas the great religious traditions, Christian or otherwise,
that earned any degree of credential with discerning believers have consistently
maintained that in heaven problems have not merely vanished but have been dealt with,
solved, and conquered. The sort of afterlife which the theory hints at could only have been
conceived by a writer who never gave serious thought to the subject and resorted to it as a
convenient high note on which to end his story. The theory, it seems to me, claims to do
away with the shallow cliche of a happy ending by substituting an interpretation which is
equally shallow, a good deal less competent and vastly more pretentious. Allow me now to
elaborate.

If I have read the argument correctly, people's main gripe about the ending is Yorda's
survival. Suppose Ico awakened at the beach alone, and the story concluded there? No one
would have come up with the afterlife theory then. No one would have had a problem with
him alone surviving. It was only when they learned that Yorda too lives that some decided
it was too much to believe. Yorda had to be dead. And if she were dead, then naturally he
also was dead, for of course they would not otherwise be able to meet on the same plane
of existence. Hence this was not a real beach but a manifestation of the spiritual realm.
Thus the theory took shape.

So technically I do not have to explain how Yorda survived. All I have to show is that Ico is
not dead, and the afterlife theory is rebutted. The glaring clue that he is still very much in
this world is of course his horns, or what is left of them. After the heroic battle he is a
rather piteous sight, with stumps stained in crimson where there used to be horns. And if I
were to read a bit deeper, I should think he tumbles onto the sand because he is not
feeling all that well after his injury; normally he is such a nimble boy. My opponent may
then say that since that is how he was at death, that is how he looks in afterlife as well. So
I suppose in his vision of heaven people who were decapitated in life would still be walking
around headless; burn victims would spend eternity in bandages like Egyptian mummies;
and the unfortunate souls who were blown to smithereens on some battlefield would, alas,
be consigned to roam the heavenly atmosphere as a million dust particles. My, just what
sort of heaven is this?

Moreover, if the boy we are seeing is the boy at the precise moment of his death, bloody
wounds and all, how is it that the girl has been restored to her old self? I am told that
since she could not have undone her transformation on her own, she must no longer be
alive. But then she ought to look now exactly as she did at the moment of her death: black
as ebony. So what is going on here? Did God decree that the boy keep his battle wounds
but the girl be given back her pristine flesh? And then I am sure someone will come up
with a work of fan fiction which will, in some convoluted way, settle the discrepancy--and
we are right back to Jack and Bill's neverending discourse into the unknowable. You are
not dragging me there.

I am further intrigued by an implication of the claim above, which I doubt many supporters
of the theory have considered. They say "We don't see how Yorda has returned to her
human form, except by assuming she is now dead." I think what they are trying to say is
"Death has purified her of the enchantment, thus leaving her soul in her original state."
But hold your thought for a moment. If her human form were her original state to begin
with, would it be so hard to imagine her reverting to that form without suffering so
cataclysmic an event as death?--that a tainted thing might be made pure again once the
impurities melted away? My opponents should beware the double-edged nature of their
own claim. They say they cannot imagine Yorda simply changing back to her old form. Yet
their theory rides on the very supposition that her transformed state is not a natural
condition. Clearly something has undone the spell. Why they insist death must be that
something, I cannot fathom.

Let me then look into some evidences the theory points to and see if they are reasonable.

(1) "Yorda will never be able to leave this castle even if you take my life."

So the queen says a moment before her death. We have a name for this sort of
statements. They are called taunts. "So you think you've beaten me, eh? Just you see."
There is hardly an adventure tale that does not have a variation of this line uttered by the
villain. It usually indicates a sore loser. Does that mean she is flat out lying? Not
necessarily, though it does make her highly suspect of self-deception. She may well believe
it. But please consider the following chain of logic:

-The beaten queen declares that Yorda cannot leave the castle.
-The castle sinks, presumably killing Yorda.
-I see Yorda washed ashore, alive and well.
-But the queen said this could not happen.
-Therefore Yorda must really be dead.
-Therefore that is not Yorda I am looking at; it is her ghost.

I don't care how grandly they phrase their theory. In the end it comes down to "We must
be seeing things." And their ground for this stupendous claim? The dying taunt of the
enemy! They have decided that the villain's last brag is so trustworthy that it is reason
enough to doubt--override--their own eyes.

(2) "Yorda is too weak to have swum ashore."

Let us recall how we find her on the beach. She looks, if I may put it bluntly, like a
drowning victim. In fact we suspect her dead at first, and if his grim expression is any sign
Ico does too. The storyteller is here deliberately exploiting our knowledge of the girl's
frailty to lure us into fearing her dead--with the intent of reversing that expectation, that
is, of surprising us. By refusing to allow that she has somehow survived at the sea, one is
refusing to be surprised the way the storyteller wants him to be surprised. That is entirely
his loss; he must go along with the story if he plans on enjoying it.

(3) "Yorda could not have returned to her human form."

We touched on this already. For some obscure reason the theory's supporters are
convinced that her transformation could not be undone this side of the Jordan, though
their view presupposes that her natural form is that of a human. But before anyone can set
down what cannot happen, he must have a good idea of what can. If one does not know
how A turned into B, how would he preclude the possibility of B turning back into A? And of
course we must not forget that B has, in fact, turned back into A; we saw it with our eyes.

We do not know how and why things occur the way they do in this tale. We must be able
to trust that we are being shown a consistent reality. Without that faith the entire
experience, not just the ending, is suspect.

(4) "Sending Ico away, Yorda stays behind because she knows she cannot leave the castle,
just as the queen said."

This is sheer nonsense. If the girl had known that she could not leave the castle, what on
earth has she been doing all this time with Ico, braving a hundred deaths for freedom? Her
reason for staying is rather simple when you think about it. Up until now she has tried very
hard to escape to the outside world. But look at her now. She is a monster. She has no
future in the human realm. Consequently she decides to send the boy back where he
belongs and herself to stay where she belongs. Would you have acted very different?

(5) "The bolt that strikes Yorda down on the bridge is a mechanism designed to prevent
her exit."

This is a bit cleverer but makes no better sense than the last. The bolt comes from a globe
fixed atop a gatepost. This is the same contraption the children use to open the gate. If it
has been programmed to "zap" Yorda should she try to run, why does it allow her to open
the gate in the first place? And why would it wait until she is almost halfway across?--had
she been hit only a second later, she would have made it to the shore side of the bridge. I
think it is pretty clear. The gate opens in obedience to Yorda's command. It strikes her
down in obedience to the queen's.

(6) "The queen must still have made some magical provision that renders it impossible for
Yorda to step outside the isles."

This is the biggest speculation yet, and naturally the most unfounded. I think it extremely
unlikely. The queen's own behavior testifies to that. She first keeps her daughter caged.
Then after the girl breaks free she shows up twice in person, both times at the main gate,
and foils her flight. Then she has her turned into stone, blocking all future attempts at
escape. These actions do not match her claim that Yorda can never leave the castle. She
acts very much like one who knows full well that the girl could leave if she tried hard
enough. You would not leash your dog if you thought it could never run away.

In light of all the above I am inclined to think the queen's last words mean that Yorda, the
special creature she is, belongs in the castle and is unfit for a life outside. In other words:
"If you fancy she can now live as one of your kind just because I am gone, you are
mistaken." And that, I suppose, would be reasonable enough a thing to say. In fact Yorda
agrees. That is why she stays. Her metamorphosis has convinced her that she has no place
after all in Ico's world, which it has been until now her dream to see.

But then, I may be asked, why would the queen say such a thing at all? Why utter a final
word so overladen with meaning unless it is true? Surely the storyteller meant to
accomplish something by betraying that kind of information at the climactic moment? Why,
yes, as a matter of fact he did mean to accomplish something. He meant to get us to
expect Yorda's doom. That is, he wanted us to fear for the girl--and fear the very worst.

We must here remember that the game has gone to a great trouble to establish a bond
between Ico--that is, us--and his fair companion. That is why it constantly threatened us
with her capture. Its principal drama hinges on getting us to grow attached to the girl, and
then taking her away. Everything that comes before the pair's separation is meant to train
us to be averse to parting with her. And everything that comes after is meant to have us
seek, and fervently look forward to, reunion. That relentless anticipation is what makes
Ico's lonely quest in the storm so gripping. And the storyteller does not want the anxiety to
let up until the very end. He wants the moment of reunion, towards which his entire
narrative has been building, to overwhelm us--wants our hopeful tension to break with
such unexpected swiftness that we will be left stunned. And we could not be stunned
unless we first gave up the girl as lost. For this reason it becomes necessary to drop clues
that she may not be able to make it out after all. Else we would grow complacent once the
villain is gone, and that is the last thing he wants. We must be made fearful that all is not
yet well, and we must see that fear come true. Yorda must perish in our imagination,
however briefly--a deliberate downward plunge in order that the ascent to come will be the
more glorious. Those who charge that the ending is a shameless copout--a sort of
emotional candy--to gratify the dejected audience rather miss the point. Their dejection
was set up to be overturned from the beginning; indeed they were only dejected for that
purpose. Therefore we cannot recast the ending without turning the story into something
decidedly out of its intended character. The theory commits what seems to me the worst
mistake that could be committed in making sense of ICO: it spoils the one moment for
which the preceding ten hours have been preparing.

Before we move on, let me answer the charge that the ending is a copout. Copout means
the failure to face some difficulty squarely--cowardly evasion. The theory's supporters
claim that ICO's happy ending contradicts its tragic climax. In their opinion Ico and Yorda
are dead, and to insist otherwise because it is depressing is cowardliness. They offer the
afterlife theory as a manlier alternative.

Let us see if their remedy holds up under scrutiny. Imagine yourself as the screenwriter
working on ICO's script. You have just written up to Ico's victory against the queen. You
now need a suitable conclusion to the tale. You find yourself in a dilemma. "I have decided
that the children are to die at the castle," you say to yourself, "but that will be too much
for the audience to handle. I need a gentler exit for my two little heroes. But I cannot in all
honestly have them walk into the sunset, either--that will undermine the tragic character
of the story. What kind of compromise can I afford here? I've got it--I will have them
reunite in afterlife. This way they remain dead, preserving the tragedy, and the audience
gets a spoonful of sugar to swallow with the bitter medicine. Wait, I can make this even
better: I will portray the reunion in such a way that the absolute majority of the audience
will not realize they are looking at an afterlife. Most of them will blithely assume the
children's survival. In fact many will come away thinking they have just seen the greatest
happy ending to grace a video game! They are happy, and I am happy."

If any writer thus reasons to wrap up his story, I have no respect for that writer. It is a rule
of thumb among students of fiction that the other-world is permissible as a setting only
when it is an express element of the work's premise--as in Dante's INFERNO where the
narrator takes a tour of hell, or Bunyan's PILGRIM'S PROGRESS where the hero sets out on
a journey to reach the Celestial City, or C. S. Lewis' THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS whose main
character is a devil. But to place the first nineteen chapters of your story in this world and
switch to the other for the remaining one chapter, and this only to soften the tragedy of
the nineteen chapters that already came, and that with deliberate ambiguity so as to grant
yourself the benefit of doubt--that is inexcusable. If a writer ever succumbed to a copout,
this is it.

And what about the charge that the ending is sentimental? I will not deny it; it is
sentimental. But then the whole story is. One could hardly blame a sentimental tale for
having a sentimental finale. If he does not like that type of stories he should keep away
from them. But ICO's sentimentality is of the sincerest sort. There is nothing artful or
cheap about it. You have felt this yourself. The pleasure you received from the ending was
not an abstract satisfaction at seeing the hero and the heroine finally back together. It was
an honest and heartfelt joy at finding a friend you feared lost.

But there is another accusation made against the sentimentality of the ending. Some
people find it, as I heard someone say on this board, "too syrupy sweet." And this I must
deny.

Syrupy sweetness is excessive sweetness. ICO's sentimentality is most emphatically not

excessive. I have not seen many adventures so thoroughly understated. Reflect upon the
fact that neither of the children is shown smiling even once. The dreariest and most ill-
humored of stories rarely go so far to rid themselves of mirth. ICO's appeal is precisely
that ability to convey rich emotions without flaunting them. Recall the first time you saw
the ending. You found the girl, prone on the sand, and at first you were not quite sure
what to make of it. Then you saw her awaken, and you knew she was alive. Your heart
swelled. You were happy, you were relieved, you were full of anticipation--and then you
stared stone still at the screen as it went blank with her whisper-soft utterance, leaving an
unadorned FIN gazing back at you. It might have been a while before you moved. You
were in a state of nearly reverential shock. And what was the shock? The shock at seeing
the girl alive? That was certainly half of it. The other half was owed to the abruptness of it
all. You were floored that the story ended where it did--at that exact moment when a
lesser tale might have gone into a dramatic reunion scene. The sweet part of the ending
had lasted all of five seconds. You were not even shown the children's reaction to the
happy discovery. And you found that this did not at all take away from the ending's impact.
Rather it augmented it manifold. Its restraint, you see, is the very thing that makes the
ending great. If there is sweetness here it is not indulged in; it takes place in our
imagination once the curtain has closed.

I now come to the most important part of this segment. I ask for your careful attention. If
you forget everything else remember what is about to follow.

We have seen that the argument in support of the afterlife theory is in every way
questionable. As the debate goes on, my opponent will eventually find himself left only
with this in defense of his view: "Well, of course I can't prove they are dead. But then you
can't prove they are alive either. Nothing can be proven in a story this vague. But the story
is richer, makes deeper sense, when you look at it my way." And that is what it boils down
to. Every defender of the theory I have come across is convinced that his is the superior
conclusion--that the story improves with his understanding of the ending in place. Let me
say it up front: it does not.

Going back through the previous sections of the story, I find that the theory, assumed to
be correct, wreaks havoc with their dramatic flow. That the story spends its entirety in
preparation for the ending, building momentum towards that final moment, I have already
discussed. But even putting that aside, I find myself asked to accept a number of absurd
scenarios--scenarios which are not strictly impossible, but which make so little sense that I
cannot imagine a writer as competent as the one who penned ICO's script would go with
them. If I were to believe the theory, I should have to conclude that the storyteller had Ico
lose his friend, backtrack through the core of the isles, brave the elements and climb the
cliff, return to his original prison, annihilate his horned brethren, and finally duel the queen
and bury her own sword in her heart all in a quest to save his precious companion--only to
have him promptly dashed against a wall and die. And what of Yorda? Am I to say that she
goes to the trouble of taking the boy in her arms, fleeing the crumbling great hall,
operating the elevator to descend to the cavern, finding a boat of which she had no prior
knowledge, putting him inside alone and sending him out to the ocean in the nick of time
all so she can spare a corpse from the impending destruction of the castle? As if she does
not take the unconscious boy out of the tower, knowing it is about to fall, in order to save
his life and repay her debt! Certainly both scenarios are conceivable. But which makes a
story worth listening to? Which is infinitely lame? And if anyone is about to say "Maybe he
is alive at the time but dies out at the sea" or "Maybe she isn't aware of his death"--well,
would that be any less lame? Let us not be thick here. If they were both to die at the
castle, the proper thing would be to have them die together. A farewell scene of this sort is
appropriate only when one of the parties is expected to die while the other is expected to
live. If ICO is a tragedy, it is no more than a third-rate tragedy.

Let me offer a more levelheaded rationale as to why the afterlife theory cannot help but
ruin the tale. Once I again I ask for your close attention. Thus far we have examined the
ending in one exclusive category: happy ending. But there is another class of ending that it
belongs to, to which no one seems to pay any attention. ICO has what is commonly called
a surprise ending, which we may loosely define as the literary technique of closing a story
with some crucial or profoundly affecting revelation.

Why is that important? The reason becomes apparent when we dig into the nature of
surprise endings. As noted earlier, surprise involves a reversal of expectation--i.e., you
thought such and such were the case, only to be shown that you could not have been
further from the truth. A surprise ending therefore requires that the audience be first led
to form a false picture of the reality so as to set them up for the revelation to come; hence
the queen's repeated claim that Yorda can never leave the castle, and the girl's voluntary
acceptance of death. Now it is the nature of every surprise ending that without it the story
cannot make proper sense. It is that last piece of puzzle which places all that came before
it in the correct light. Consider for instance O. Henry's THE GIFT OF THE MAGI, a short
story about a poverty-stricken young couple which features one of the most beloved
surprise endings in all of fiction. In it Della, desperate to buy a suitable Christmas gift for
her husband Jim, resorts to selling the only thing of value she possesses--her beautiful
long hair. With the money she buys a gold chain for Jim's prized pocket watch, an old
family heirloom. The story ends with the bittersweet revelation that Jim's gift for her is a
set of jewel-studded hair combs she has long coveted. He has sold his watch to buy it.

A story of this sort places such an emphasis on the closing scene that it is hopeless to
assess its character--its theme--until it has quite ended. If, for instance, your copy of
ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN or THE ILIAD is missing the last page, you can still
get out of those books most everything they have to offer. But if you were forced to forgo
the ending of THE GIFT OF THE MAGI or Poe's THE BLACK CAT or Maupassant's THE
NECKLACE you would be left with a crippled and incoherent tale. You would be left in want
of the most vital part of the story, and your understanding of it must remain fundamentally
flawed. Imagine not watching the final sequence of CITIZEN KANE or THE USUAL
SUSPECTS. Would it not be all rather pointless? And that is just what a surprise ending is:
the point of the story, compressed into a single moment of revelation. So it is that every
surprise ending carries the same message at core: "This is what the story is about. Forget
what you have seen, heard, and supposed thus far--this is the real deal." ICO is no
exception. The surprise arrives at the precise instant we accept that a girl who should be
dead is alive. It evaporates when we presume all this is taking place in afterlife. For of
course there can be no surprise or revelation in realizing that a dead girl is still technically
dead. Likewise there can be no point in showing her twitch her fingers, blink open her eyes
squinting at the light, and issue an utterance in her dear old voice at the final moment of
the story, unless one means to convey that she who ought to have died has miraculously
survived.

But that is not all.

It seems clear to me that those who subscribe to the afterlife theory adopted that view in
retrospect. That is, they too assumed the children's survival the first time they saw the
ending. It was only when they mulled over it afterwards that they decided that is not the
case after all. In other words they decided their initial grasp of the ending was faulty and
invalid. I am afraid this has fatal implications for their claim. Let me clarify.

Recall to your mind any story that ends on a thrilling "shocker"--say THE USUAL SUSPECTS
or THE SIXTH SENSE. Could these films be watched a second time and still be enjoyed?
Yes, they could. (If they could not, the blame is on the the shallowness of the stories or
the shallowness of the audience.) But will that second viewing be nearly as jolting and
powerful as the first? No, of course not. And any writer competent enough to pull off a
surprise ending knows that. He knows his ending will work its magic just once. That is why
he must make absolutely certain that the audience will get the surprise at once. He cannot
afford to allow misinterpretation. He has but this one chance to make the audience fall out
of their chairs. He has to deliver the punch, and all of it, the very instant he unveils the
surprise. If the audience has to mull over the ending to grasp it, the ending has failed. It
has lost the element of surprise. For surprise, as you know, is an instantaneous event. And
it cannot be reproduced; you can never be surprised twice by a thing. Thus by its nature a
surprise ending does not expect multiple readings. It operates on the principle that it will
not be given a second chance.

Do you see what this means? A surprise ending that leaves the audience scratching their
heads, one that has to be interpreted in hindsight, one that has to be seen more than once
to communicate itself to the audience, is a fiasco--just as a joke has failed if the listeners
have to think long and hard about it before laughing, or worse, if it has to be repeated to
get the laugh out of them. And yet this is just what the theory's proponents imply about
ICO's ending. What is more, they believe they have enhanced the ending!

Just about one hundred percent of the players perceive--correctly--that Ico and Yorda have
survived upon viewing the ending for the first time. A few of them change their minds in
hindsight. Now if these few were right, that would mean that ICO's conclusion lends itself
to faulty interpretation in one hundred percent of its viewers. It would mean it is a one
hundred percent failure as a surprise ending. It would mean nobody understood the ending
right away. It would mean the screenwriter put together a surprise ending so unintelligible
that only a few would be able to fathom it, and none immediately.

Therefore by arguing for the afterlife theory I should be automatically arguing that ICO's
ending is a disastrous denouement to an otherwise lovely tale. I should be accusing the
storyteller of the worst error a writer could commit when he is trying to deliver an ending
of this sort. Here then is my last plea to those who take that stance. It is one thing to say
that an event occurred though you cannot explain how it did. It is quite another to insist
that it must not have occurred at all because you cannot account for it. Now if you believe
the girl's survival is inconsistent with the rest of the story, you would have been a great
deal more sensible to say that the ending is badly written, rather than that it does not
happen the way it so plainly does. You are entitled to criticize any flaws you perceive. But,
please, let us not go into the nonsense about improving the ending with a fresh
interpretation. It has not left that option open to us.

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And with that I am done. I hope I have in some way added to your enjoyment of the
game. If you came to this exercise thinking that ICO, despite its rich atmosphere, is rather
thin in story, and I have helped you change that opinion, I should deem the exercise a
success and be most content. I wish however to warn you against the opposite error. That
is, I don't want you to get the idea--not from me anyhow--that this unassuming fairy tale
is a masterpiece of Shakespearian proportions. Throughout the exercise I have invoked
great works of literature to illustrate some aspects of the game, but the comparisons were
to show how ICO draws from similar principles, and never to suggest that its merits rival
those masterworks'. For its medium ICO is very unique, very sophisticated, and I wish
there were more games like it. I have not seen a video game tell a story so skillfully and
seamlessly. Thus ICO's brilliance as a work of fiction is, to a fair extent, comparative--it
shines because the other games are so dull. I have scrutinized it as I have never
scrutinized another game because it is the only game I know that even warrants that sort
of treatment. Before ICO, I had seen stories in games that were entertaining as diversions,
but they never made me want to study what made them entertaining. They did not have
enough for a study, unless one meant to study bad storytelling.

Now, just about every person who is deep into gaming seems to believe that video game is
as competent an art form as any. If he is a fan of ICO, he may point to it as his proof.
Some people who share a similar view have even paid me compliments along the line of
"I'm glad someone is finally treating video games with respect they deserve" or "It's great
that you take your games so seriously." I am not and I do not. My regard for ICO is a very
poor indicator of my opinions on video games in general. I think most video games, even
those that boast beautiful visuals and grand epic themes, are severely awkward as art
works--lacking any kind of unifying mandate apart from their all-important pursuit of "fun,"
which seems to me no more artistic than baseball or poker. I have often heard video
games validated as art in words like these: "Video gaming is art because any creative
human activities can find artistic expression. Why should games be any different?" And
that is right of course. But I wonder if we are asking the right question to begin with. By
the most generous definition of art we are almost constantly surrounded by art and doing
things with artistic implications. Even a silly doodle scribbled in a notebook during a boring
lecture counts as art. But surely we knew this already? Surely the question we ought to be
considering is not "Is it art?" but rather "Is it good art?"

Let me recast the question in a different mold. None will deny that poetry is an art, and a
much respected art. But is there such a thing as bad poetry? Of course there is. In fact an
enormous portion of it is unreadable. So when we declare poetry an art form we are not
really paying poetry as a whole any compliment. Like most creations art can be wonderful
or terrible or merely mediocre.

And that is my problem with all this heated debate over whether video games constitute
an art form. People speak as if they were bestowing some great honor upon games by
calling them art. But art is a value-neutral term. When we say "This pottery is a work of
art" we are not praising the pottery; we are stating a fact. The pottery may be a sublime
work of art, or it may be an execrable work of art. Of course, should we be moved to
exclaim "My goodness, this pottery is a work of art!" then we most certainly are praising it.
But that is only because we are all along meaning to say it is a good work of art. We have
merely left "good" unspoken--unspoken but clearly implied by the tone and the context.

The game industry has not produced many--if any--sublime works of art or it would not be
struggling so much for respectability. Literature and music are better received as art forms
because those fields have produced across centuries numberless masterworks whose
enduring beauty and relevance have been tested and proven; works which allow the
audience into the profoundest depth of the human genius. Until video games do the same,
and I am not sure it will happen, the genre will continue to suffer the stigma of low-grade
entertainment.

Look at popular comics for instance: it has been around for a century and has been far
more successful than video games in cultivating its distinct brand of artistic integrity, but it
fares only slightly better in finding acceptance as a meaningful art form. Recent popular
comic artists have tried to improve its reputation by a number of tactics--rendering
superhero comics in classic media like oil and pastel (some examples of which are quite
skilled), injecting philosophical and social commentary into the drama, waiving two-
dimensional heroes and villains in favor of rounded characters, shifting from flagrant
optimism to increasingly dark and "mature" outlooks, and so on. All these have made
popular comics more interesting, but where earning greater artistic validation for the genre
is concerned they were more or less doomed to failure from the beginning. A tragic,
complex, philosophical, photorealistically rendered BATMAN is still BATMAN--the exploits of
a handsome young billionaire who protects the streets of Gotham by nightly donning a
skintight bulletproof outfit, a cape and a mask with fake horns so he can go about
manually beating up criminals. If there is a difference, it is that this reinvented BATMAN
expects the kind of respect which the series' own nature denies, so that where it was
merely silly before it is now pretentious. I often perceive the same pretentiousness when a
gamer declares his pet title artistic or profound--as if grand pantheistic talks about a
planet's life force saves it from being a role-playing game whose goal is to equip your
characters for better combat moves, as if cramming a game full of religious and
metaphysical allusions makes up for its being similarly crammed full of giant fighting
robots and fetching sex symbols, as if turning the story into a treatise on some
philosophical theme excuses the poor storytelling.

Some people may object that the flaws listed above do not really fall under the criteria of
the so-called gaming art. Gaming art, I have been told by some, is about the
ingeniousness of gameplay. I could not understand what this gameplay was and tried
looking it up. None of the dictionaries I owned had the word. So I gave up on defining
gameplay, but from what I have learned since it has to do with the cleverness, depth, and
enjoyableness of the rules that make up the game. Superior gameplay makes the fun more
enduring and rewards the skills of the player. Just a few weeks ago I saw a footage of
someone completing a whole SUPER MARIO game in a matter of minutes. He did not make
a single mistake. He blazed through the levels like a tiny 2-D god, killing all the enemies
and getting all the points and making all the jumps at exactly the right times and not
slipping or getting hit even once. It was like seeing a Karate master who so clearly saw
through the opponent's moves that he was impermeable to them. It was impressive. So
that's what those SUPER MARIO fans were always telling me about, I thought. (I had
played the game myself and knew how hard it was.) I wondered if this might be what they
mean by gaming art, and if this sort of gameplay indeed has artistic merits.

To explain the answer I came to, I want us to consider an illustration that may at first
seem odd. I want us to consider ballet and gymnastics. Both words call to the mind the
image of petite graceful young ladies in form-fitting attires. Both disciplines use the human
body as the vehicle of their ideals. Both a ballerina and a gymnast spend year after year in
rigorous training to achieve the utmost grace and efficiency of movement. Both must
possess passion and commitment as well as talent in prodigious degrees if they are to
succeed. We call ballet an art and categorize gymnastics under athletics. Now would you
not say this is a most unfair distinction? What doe the gymnast lack against the ballerina
that she is labeled an athlete but not an artist? Does she lack training, competence, zeal,
even beauty? No; she uses the same medium for her skills and works just as hard if not
harder. In fact if you are at all like me you probably find gymnastics much more
spectacular than ballet. So why the distinction?

The reason is in the nature of the disciplines. Ballet pursues beauty, while gymnastics aims
at nimbleness. Physical agility of course contains an element of beauty. Naturally some
gymnastic competitions include artistic dimension as a part of the evaluation criteria. But
every gymnast understands that her work is first about pushing the body to the limits of
agility and second about expressing beauty. Consequently we say, and rightly, that the
gymnast demonstrates and the ballerina performs. A gymnastic demonstration can and
should have an artistic aspect, but that is not where its focus lies.

If by gaming art we mean no more than a very clever and efficient way of yielding
pleasure, a kind of mental gymnastics as demonstrated by the SUPER MARIO expert--well,
that may or may not be art, but one thing is for sure: if it is art, it is a kind of art that will
be taken seriously by none save its own devotees. Any art in SUPER MARIO or TETRIS, or
even in go or chess, is doomed to enjoy no recognition outside their circles of fans,
however global those circles may be. For it is the mark of the great arts to be relevant to
some essential aspect of what it means to be human. That is why they always find a broad
audience to acknowledge, even if they do not fully appreciate, their value. I appreciate ICO
because, much more than any video games I know, I find it full of that worthwhile and
pleasurable relevance which I have found in good literature, music and paintings. But a
gamer who praises the art of ICO, or the art of any other titles for that matter, ought to
remember that superior art of similar kinds abounds outside the field of gaming. Else he
may risk the nearsightedness of a child who thinks himself a fine poet because he is versed
in nursery rhymes.

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If you wish to discuss any points I have raised here, come to the ICO message board at
GameFAQs (www.gamefaqs.com).

Kindly inform me of any technical errors you find in this text.

I would like to thank everyone at the message board for supporting this project of mine
since the original thread began in May 2003. Thanks especially to those who enlivened,
and who are still enlivening, the ongoing thread by sharing their own perspectives.

Vincent Lam ("ICO") has my special thanks for creating ICO Flash, the best ICO fan page
on the Net. I have borrowed a number of images from the site. You can see it at
[http://hk.geocities.com/icofan/].

Clover, the webmaster, has volunteered valuable time to make this version of the
annotation possible. I am very grateful for her service, which I am sure was less for me
and more for the game she loves. Everything other than the bare text is her work, so if
you enjoyed this piece at all, do take the trouble to thank her.

I will not list here the books I mentioned throughout the exercise since I provided their
titles and authors when I referred to them. They are all well-known classics, and I trust
you will have no difficulty at all finding them if you are interested.

Finally I thank you for staying with me through the talk.

So long.

Eliot
August 2005

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All of the written text is by PeterEliot; the only thing I have done is convert the document
to HTML and add some pictures.

Screens 1-9, 12, the map and the top image all come from ICO Flash.
Screens 10, 11 and 13-20 were all screencapped by me using the videos available at ICO.

All other images were provided by PeterEliot who in turn got them from numerous sources
such as IGN, Gamespot, Gamer's Hell and ICO Flash.

The entire document was coded by hand in Notepad; the screencaps were not altered
except to crop, resize and add a border.

If you notice any problems code or image-wise with the document, please e-mail me.

Clover