Best Ever
Adventure Game?

The hand-holding is the mechanic. Not a mechanic among others, not one system in a larger architecture, but the mechanical expression of everything the game is about. Ico, a horned boy left to die in a vast and crumbling castle, finds Yorda, a pale girl who speaks a language he doesn’t understand and cannot defend herself against the shadow creatures that emerge to reclaim her. He takes her hand. You press R1. And for the next six hours, that connection—maintained, broken, desperately reestablished—becomes the entire vocabulary of play.

Fumito Ueda’s debut as director proposed a radical subtraction. Where other games of the PlayStation 2 era were adding systems, Ico removed them. There’s no inventory. There are no stats. Combat exists only as interruption, shadow creatures appearing to separate Ico and Yorda, demanding you fight your way back to her before they drag her into darkness. The puzzles involve light and architecture, finding paths through spaces designed to obstruct while somehow remaining beautiful. Everything that could distract from the central relationship has been eliminated.

The castle is the third character. Ueda’s background in animation informs every composition: the way light falls through high windows, the sense of scale that makes Ico and Yorda seem impossibly small against stone walls that have stood for centuries. The environments tell stories the game refuses to explain—who built this place, why it’s abandoned, what the Queen wants with Yorda. Ico trusts players to wonder without demanding answers. The mystery is atmospheric rather than narrative.

The sound design reinforces the isolation. Music appears sparingly; most of the game unfolds in ambient silence, footsteps on stone, wind through broken windows, the chirping of Ico’s calls to Yorda when she’s fallen behind. When the score does emerge—particularly in the final sections, as the stakes clarify—it achieves impact through contrast with all that quiet. Composer Michiru Ōshima understood that restraint would make the emotional peaks feel earned.

Yorda’s AI was revolutionary for 2001 and remains effective: she follows imperfectly, sometimes lagging, sometimes getting stuck, requiring Ico to return and guide her through obstacles she can’t navigate alone. This could be frustrating—escort missions in other games are infamous for companion incompetence—but Ico makes Yorda’s limitations feel characterful rather than mechanical. She’s not a burden; she’s someone who needs help, and helping her is the point.

The game sold poorly at launch, finding its audience through word of mouth and critical championing. It became a reference point for discussions about games as art, cited alongside Shadow of the Colossus (Ueda’s follow-up, set in the same world) and Journey as evidence that the medium could pursue goals beyond power fantasy and score accumulation. The hand-holding mechanic—so simple, so irreducible—became shorthand for what intentional design could achieve.

The ending, when it comes, releases the tension the game has been building across its runtime. Without spoiling: the connection established in the first hour pays off in the final minutes, and what might have been a simple rescue narrative reveals itself as something more reciprocal. Ico has saved Yorda. Yorda has saved Ico. The hand-holding worked in both directions all along.

Ueda’s subsequent games—Shadow of the Colossus, The Last Guardian—expanded his concerns into different configurations, but Ico remains the purest statement. A boy. A girl. A castle that wants to separate them. One button to hold hands. The game asks nothing more than that you maintain the connection, and in asking so little, it achieves something enormous: it makes you care about maintaining it. The shadows come. You fight them back. You find her hand again. You press R1.

That’s the whole game. That’s everything.

Decide for Yourself:

• The PS3 HD remaster, bundled with Shadow of the Colossus, presents both games with improved resolution and frame rate.
• The original PS2 release has acquired collector status, particularly the PAL version with its superior cover art.
• Ueda’s Shadow of the Colossus extends the aesthetic into more aggressive territory—sixteen giants to climb and kill.