Trollbabe, perhaps? The horned boy reminded me of the trollbabes, and that girl totally looks like a relationship. Of course, Ico probably wouldn't rise much in scale--unless the players wanted...

Ico is really tough for me to conceptualize as a story game.

But the sort-of sequel (actually, prequel, I think) The Shadow of the Colossus seems perfectly matched up with Beast Hunters.

I'm convinced that puzzle-based RPGs are possible. I'm just not sure how yet. Give me another couple years. Right now I'm still at board games.

Would the story-game Ico be about the puzzles? I'd think it would focus on what makes tabletop rpgs good and not what makes a console video game good. Visual puzzles fall in the video game category, but not the tabletop one. So the Story-Game Ico would have mechanics for the relationship between the Magical Girl character and the Kid With Horns character, but gloss over the platforming. Making it complementary to the video game, rather than recreating or emulating it.

Or not. I don't know. As I said, it's hard for me to get an idea how it could work.

Stuff I think might be important in an Ico RPG:-

Characters that are reliant on each other (in the game the princess points you in the right direction when you get stuck and can open doors, while Ico is the platformer and the fighter)

They don't speak the same language, and have to find other ways to communicate.

Trust as a powerful and variable resource (the game measures how much the princess can rely on Ico, and the more it is, the faster she responds to his calls and the less reluctant she is to attempt crazy jumps)

The setting of the game is a character itself. Maybe the GM's character?

A neat story that ties the two protagonists, their histories, and the location together.

Puzzles as the primary obstacle.

Having said that, I think Andy's right. Ico's probably more of a jumping-off point from which to make a game about the stuff you like in Ico, rather than a story-game in itself. I think the reason it's such a magnificent video game is its absolute mastery of that specific medium.

Matt (nemomeme) loaned Ico to me, but I haven't gotten around to playing it yet. Turns out that I have today off as the last day before my new job, so I'm going to give it a try this morning and come back with my thoughts.

(He also loaned me Shadow of the Colossus, and I concur with Nick on that account :)

Posted By: AndyThing is, ICO is like 98% visual puzzles. Like Infocom games, but for your eyes. I'm not sure there's much of an RPG in there, much less a story-ish game.

You'd have to break it down so much it doesn't look like the game anymore.

This is true, but it looks like he's going more for the ambience than the actual gameplay, anyway. Ico does posit a strange and quiet and mournful world, and it would be interesting to see how that would develop in a game setting.

Way back in Ye Olden Tymes -- okay, it was 1993 -- when X-Wing: Space Combat Simulator came out for the PC, we found the sheer number of keyboard-related controls overwhelming, so we often had someone be the R2 unit, doing all the techie stuff with the keyboard while the pilot used the joystick and fired the weapons. It was fun.

Back to your regularly scheduled thread. Ico is cool, though sometimes frustratingly hard.

Christian, I'm more inclined to see the mood and atmosphere as the "Fruitful Void" that makes everything else meaningful, the same as the relationship between the characters. Gameplay consists entirely of puzzle after puzzle in this moody but basically empty, featureless castle. And the feelings that are evoked through play have to do with isolation and loneliness, particularly because the game play is so simplistic and there are no characters that you can communicate with. And, though play, players invent a kind of fictive relationship between the boy and the girl, not so much based on actual interactions between them during the game, but by inventing subtext and emotional desires in their minds / hearts, yeah? You imagine them is this cute, kinda romantic, but tragic struggle to escape this prison together, despite the fact that they can't really communicate. I suspect making mechanics about relationships or mood or atmosphere would kill this aspect dead, where in the Fruitful Void it's free to emerge and dominate the experience of play.

Wasn't there some game based around developing a primitive language or communicating in grunts, or the like?

So, what if you have one guy who narrates the environment and thinks up the puzzles. However, these are not real puzzles but just puzzle-like scenes that the players are supposed to work with however they see fit. Then, you have the girl's player and the boy's player and each has different means of communication available. These are set before the game, possibly - both could have a list of things to do listed, each with a different code narration/behaviour/gesture/whatever attached. And the players need to use these codes to come to an agreement on how to interact with the puzzle. The narrator would probably know the codes, and he or she would tie everything together, deciding on the effects of this interaction somehow. Then, things would get worse, or things would get better, depending on the achieved understanding and coordination.

Also, the list of actions and codes could grow during the course of play, just for the sake of keeping things interesting. So you might have codes like "Such and such wave of hand means I'm opening a magic door.", "When I stare into the ceiling and go 'la-la-la' it means I'm following the boy." and so on, but after a couple of puzzles you could add, say, "When I yawn, I'm keeping the shadow things away from the boy." or whatever.

Maybe there's some economy that affects the number of moves per scene, or a number of possible attempts to communicate and coordinate actions. Maybe there's some scripting involved, and the narrator executes the scripts step by step, and there are some communication attempts allowed before and during the execution, making it possible to coordinate actions and modify the plans. Or something like that.

Then, you move on to another abstract puzzle-situation and repeat the process. The game would probably end once the players get into perfect synch (e.g. the overall situation turns better and better for a number of consecutive puzzles) or break their relationship completely (e.g. the overall situation turns worse and worse for a number of scenes).

It was reading this essay about Ico by Peter Eliot that made me wonder if Ico could be story gamed. Its a rather long read, but I think it brings up some important points that shows Ico to be more than a puzzle game. In fact from my own observations of playing the game, the puzzles are not so much about something you have to overcome for yourself, but something that you have to overcome for your companion. The puzzles are much easier to solve when you stop asking "how do I get there" and start asking "how do I help her get there".

Bringing the puzzles back to Peter Eliots essay and story gaming, I think that the castle needs to be treated as an adversary and the puzzles need to be viewed as conflicts/attacks made by the castle against Ico, but rather than damage him they impede the only person who can help him escape.

Of particular interest to me in the essay is this:

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.

On the subject of the Fruitful Void, I'm quite fond of the idea that players shouldn't be able to write down any information about their characters personality or relationships and they can't discuss them during play. These things have to be expressed through their characters actions and gestures. Ico can't tell Yorda he's her friend. He has to show her by catching her when she falls or defending her from the denizens of the castle.

I like that idea. Perhaps there could be a list of "Things They Can Do" and each player takes turns picking one thing from the list until every character has 8-10 "Things They Can Do". The only additional rule would be that one a "Thing They Can Do" has been chosen, it can't be picked by another player.

When can I play this game?

The "Things They Can Do" List is phenomenal. All I'd really need to do would be grab five grimtooth traps, figure out two ways of solving them apiece, then condensing that list down into "Things They Can Do." I'm seriously contemplating trying that out tomorrow, as the entirety of the system.