It’s time for a pair of exploration type games which have a whole lot of mystery within them. What is really going on and who are the enemies that need to be defeated? These questions will be getting answered as you get deeper into the adventure. The games have a unique atmosphere to them and definitely makes you feel like you’re getting a true indie type experience. That said, clumsy controls do keep the games from being better.

Ico starts off with a kid finding a girl who was captured inside of a castle. He manages to free her but there is no easy way to escape this place. For now he will need to activate a lot of devices and use that to try and find a way out of here. It won’t be easy but he has a lot of tenacity and won’t be backing down. There is also a mysterious queen of evil who seeks to get in your way.

The game has a whole lot of puzzles for you to solve. To help with this, the gameplay itself s really simple. You only have 2-3 controls here. You can swing your sword, jump, and grab onto things. That’s it so then when the puzzles come up you have to figure out a way to solve each instance while only using these 3 abilities. In some ways that makes it rougher on your end when you can’t figure something out because the controls should make it easy.

There was definitely one time where it felt like the game pulled a fast one though. You had to jump off of a pole to the next area but throughout the game you had been jumping normally. Apparently by holding down one of the buttons you would jump longer and farther. I feel like that would be hard to guess and I ended up dying many times in the meanwhile. You also have to be careful about getting too far away from the heroine or she will end up being kidnapped by the shadow creatures which is an instant game over.

Trust me, that’s a rough way to go out. I recommend saving as often as you can although it’s not always the easiest thing. You have to go to one of the benches with the heroine to save. There aren’t a whole lot of them in the game but granted, it’s not like the game is super long. Swinging the sword around is definitely fun and I enjoyed the final boss but I do wish there was more combat. The platforming part of the gameplay could often be way too clunky while at least the fights are straight forward.

The art style works well for the ambiance though. I will give the game some credit there and the soundtrack is also pretty solid. The stakes always feel really high and a good chunk of the climax takes place during a thunderstorm which was handled really well. You could really hear the boom in the background and that’s also when the visuals are at their best. This one isn’t trying to be the big AAA title in terms of visuals but leveraged the style really well.

Then in Shadow of the Colossus we play as a guy who needs to save a girl who is currently in a coma. In order to wake her up, he needs to defeat the 16 Colossus that are scattered around the land. It won’t be easy since he only has a sword. The game is really built around locating the colossus and then taking them down. The combat is all built around balance as you use the sword to hang on until you get to the weak points. You could say this is equal parts exploring puzzles and then combat puzzles.

I was glad to see the action part at the forefront although I will say that the game goes out of its way to make some of these fights extremely painful. When you fall off of the Colossus then you have to climb all the way back up each time which usually revolves around waiting for specific actions to happen. This means you can’t just go in and land a bunch of attacks right away. Then once you’re on the Colossus, part of it seems to be RNG.

There were one or two bosses where I kept getting shaken off but then I’d land again and this time they couldn’t shake me off at all. So I’d stab quickly until I took all of the health down. Like with Ico I’d say that the gameplay can be super clunky which also makes this a bit more difficult than it would be normally. Platforming and quick movements can be tough for any title but I feel like it really stood out here the whole time. This collection’s mistake was really in focusing so hard on realism that it forgot the fun part. Letting the character jump farther and move faster would have automatically helped out quite a bit.

If the games could tighten up the gameplay like when riding the horse or jumping around, it would make a world of difference. The quality of life features/enhancements are what would really turn this into a winning title. The games certainly can’t be called generic or anything like that though and I do see the appeal. If the intrigue can override the gameplay for you then that should be enough for this one to claim victory. I’d be interested in seeing how a modern sequel would fare although I can’t say that I would have super high hopes for it.

Overall, This is definitely a collection that will give you a run for your money. The games aren’t very long or anything like that but at the same time they are difficult. You won’t be just barreling through these. Both games took me longer than the estimated time to complete which is pretty rare since it is usually the other way around. I would have liked to have had more of a story here but at least we do get true endings in each time. These games are more for visual storytelling than a cinematic presence which I understand. Ultimately it ends up being in the middle of the pack for me but if you really like the concepts here then you should have a good time.

Overall 5/10