Ico

ESRB: Teen - Violence

Awards:
Interactive Achievement Awards - Character or Story Development; Art Direction (2002)

Game Developers Choice Awards - Excellence in Level Design; Excellence in Visual Arts; Game Innovation Spotlight (2002)

Description:
Ico is the story of a boy and girl who need each others help in order to escape a castle. The game's titular character is sentenced to be sacrificed because he was born with horns. He manages to break out of his cell and sets off to free a girl, Yorda, who is held in the same tower.

The game, which is rated Teen for violence, is mostly an action-puzzle game and is noted for its serene, artful design. In his argument for video games as a legitimate artform, Tom Higgins writes in a July, 2008 edition of The Telegraph:

"There's a section in the game when Yorda is torn from your grasp and you are sent tumbling out of her reach. For the first time in a few hours of playing, Yorda isn't there. Little Ico is standing on a long water pipe, rain hammering down on the rusted metal, dark sea thrashing below him as far as the eye can see.

"Never, in any form of entertainment or art, have I felt so alone. This combination of desolate visual beauty and emotional input, invested after hours of direct interactivity with the game's world and characters, is difficult, if not impossible, to recreate outside the medium."

Trailer:

Why the library should carry it: 
Ico creates a good discussion point for kids about friendship and growing up. 

If used within the library, there is also potential to tie the game into the novelization which is set to be released in English in May 2011.