Ico for me. From the moment I played the demo I was in love with that game. It’s amazing how much the game evokes with its wonderful animations and tactile feedback and natural puzzles and beautiful grand architecture. When I first held the girl’s hand in that game, and tried to run, leading her forward, and saw her not keep up with me, and I actually felt her arm as it tugged back (with accompanying controller vibration), it just felt so real in comparison to anything else I’d seen in games. That game evoked a sense of Chivalry in me that I didn’t even know was there. I felt so protective.
The monsters made of ink who I had to beat off with a stick really were perfect monsters for a kid to be fighting. I was just so enamored with these two characters, I played it straight through in one weekend. It was the first time I’d felt this kind of innocent love between characters in a game. And not as told through a movie or a book, but through actual tugs and yells and swings of a stick that I did on a controller. It’s a beautiful thing, and a perfect expression of a how a game can express emotions differently than other media.
SotC was cool to look at, and I did love some of the monster designs. But I spent a lot of time just traversing an empty environment, and I didn’t enjoy that part. Plus I was really annoyed by some of the boss fights, like the underground Worm type, where I would figure out what I had to do, but to actually do it was a pain in the ass. The relationship between the main character and the dead girl evoked no emotions in me whatsoever. I can appreciate what others saw in it when they explain it to me, but I just never connected emotionally with the game like I did with Ico.
Ico, for me, was more than the sum of its parts. All the game mechanics added up to something greater. Whereas, SotC was just game mechanics and boss fights for me that I played through in order to move forward.