I just finished playing Ico for the PS2. I first played this game at Lukas' place in Atlanta when I was passing through on the way out to Los Alamos. I only played a few hours of it and hadn't gotten very far, so when I learned that my friend Sy had a copy here in town, I got him to lend it to me and over the course of this weekend I finished it off.

I've been told it's sort of like Prince of Persia, only with really great sound design and terrible AI on the part of "Yorda" aka mental defect girlfriend. I enjoy these puzzle games a lot, but I wish they would make the puzzle-solving a bit more complicated. The trouble with games like Ico is that there are only a few possible actions you can take. So when there's a problem to be solved, it either involves pulling one of a myriad of identical switches, climbing small ledges, pushing one of the many cubical boxes, or cutting a rope.

The variety of actions availble is lacking, and therefore the puzzles can't get very complex. The game designer's answer to this problem is to just make the {switch|box|rope|ledge} harder to find or farther away, but it hasn't really increased the intellectual involvement of the puzzle.

I'd like to see this game or one like it done where not every switch does something important, where there is more to solving puzzles than finding the mechanisms, and where Yorda can climb down a damn ladder without me saying "bon soir" ad nauseum.

Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed playing this game. But unfortunately it wasn't because the puzzles were challenging. The game reminds me a lot of Myst, where the art direction and sound design are what really sells it.

Next up for the PS2 is Prince of Persia, which I've also only played for a little bit.