Format: WiiWare
Release: Out now
Publisher: Over The Top Games
Developer: In-house

Icarian drifts onto WiiWare in a delicate flutter of sunlight and feathers, a gentle fable invoking a dustier age, riddled with broken temples and buried beneath layers of burning sand. Rarely has a game spent this kind of effort cultivating such a brittle air: characters are loose-limbed and finely made, the landscapes are elegantly shattered vistas of heroic Greece, and even the handful of cut-scenes are built out of pottery. But beneath the exquisitely fragile presentation lies a surprisingly robust platformer. Like LostWinds before it, Over the Top’s debut is a simple pleasure – and, at around three hours’ duration, a fairly brief one – but the pace is perfect, the presentation is a subtle delight, and the dozen or so levels wring every last drop of creativity from the barest of mechanics.

At the heart of the game is a control scheme that, even more than LostWinds, builds on an understanding of the Wii’s inputs that few other titles possess. Separation is the key, and Icarian takes it one step further, introducing its various elements rather slowly, with protagonist Nyx (a winged nymph, by the looks of it, on a mission to track down Icarus) controlled exclusively by the Nunchuk, while the Remote is left to take care of a variety of magic skills unlocked throughout the course of the adventure.

Nyx’s movement is suitably tight, and her jumps – with five levels of additional after-hop available, along with a languorous controlled glide – allow for an unexpected level of precision, but it’s the drip-feed of magic skills that truly dictate the pace of the narrative. Starting with the ability to interact with the environment by tugging blocks about or toppling walls, and then building to include the control of wispy thermals and a pointer for zapping enemies out of the sky, each new trick drastically changes the game’s agenda without altering the dreamy tone, as Over the Top’s designers effortlessly flow from platformer to spatial puzzle to twitch test, before eventually settling on something which almost approaches a side-scrolling shooter. Multi-tasking is a requirement from an early stage, as many of the game’s set-pieces revolve around your ability to keep Nyx out of trouble with one hand, while the other manipulates the environment around her. It can be a real challenge on occasion, but, for the most part, a surprisingly natural one.

Inevitably, there are rare moments when the game is too clever for its own good. A riff on stealth near the end of the journey overstays its welcome long before the developer has run out of ideas, and the odd boss encounter, while skilfully handled, can feel like a bit of an imposition. Such disappointments are few and far between, however, and for the most part Icarian proceeds with an unflustered sense of poise and confidence.

With various Greek gods making cameo appearances, the design team hasn’t been afraid to invoke the big names on the development side either, their simple platformer recalling Ico in its confident use of ruins and silence, and referencing Metroid and Zelda in the means by which its puzzles and items dictate the minute-to-minute structure. And yet, despite such a lineage, there’s never a moment when Icarian lacks its own identity, and never a moment where homage crosses the line into theft. Unlike Icarus himself, then, Over the Top has tempered its obvious ambition with skill and understanding, and the result is a game that’s refreshingly quick to take flight. [8]