Design by Subtraction: What Fumito Ueda Teaches Game Designers About Restraint

Fumito Ueda became one of the most influential game designers alive by doing something that runs against almost every instinct the game industry has: he took things away. His approach, known as design by subtraction, didn’t emerge from a marketing strategy or a design theory framework. It grew out of a fine-arts graduate’s instinct to remove whatever didn’t serve a single, specific feeling—and it produced three of the most quietly radical games of the past twenty-five years: Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, and The Last Guardian.

If you design games, write about games, or study how mechanics create emotion, Ueda’s work matters because it demonstrates a counterintuitive truth: fewer elements, chosen with discipline, can produce more depth than a feature list ever will. This article breaks down what design by subtraction actually means in practice, where the philosophy came from, and how you can apply its principles without turning your project into an empty shell. It draws on Ueda’s own Developer interviews from 2002 and 2011 reveal insights into how Ueda’s design by subtraction has influenced modern game directors., his 2005 CONTINUE magazine interview, published development accounts, and the documented influence his work has had on studios from thatgamecompany to Playdead.

Who Is Fumito Ueda?

Fumito Ueda was born on April 19, 1970, in Tatsuno City, Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan—a rural town he described as “really quite a rural place,” a couple of cities over from Himeji. He graduated from the Osaka University of Arts in 1993, where he majored in abstract art. By his own admission, he wasn’t a serious student. He chose abstract art because, as he joked, “representational, realistic art took more time” but with abstract art “you can always just slap something together two days before the deadline.”

After graduating, he sold his motorcycle to buy a Commodore Amiga and taught himself 3D CG using LightWave 3D. He found part-time work at a Kansai television CG studio, then joined the game developer WARP, where he worked as an animator on Enemy Zero (1996) for the Sega Saturn. He left WARP after a year and a half, driven by the desire to direct his own project rather than execute someone else’s scripts.

In 1997, Ueda joined Sony Computer Entertainment (now Sony Interactive Entertainment). He was given his own development unit—Team Ico—despite having minimal game design experience. The studio had little track record developing games in-house, mostly assisting third-party developers, so Ueda’s relative inexperience was less of a liability than it might have been elsewhere. He spent the next fourteen years at Sony, directing Ico (2001) and Shadow of the Colossus (2005) for the PlayStation 2, and beginning what would become The Last Guardian (2016).

In December 2011, Ueda left Sony, though he remained under contract to finish The Last Guardian. Around mid-2014, he formed an independent studio, genDESIGN, composed of former Team Ico members, to complete the game alongside Sony’s Japan Studio. genDESIGN handled creative content—character design, animation, level design, narrative—while Japan Studio handled technical development. The studio’s stated mission, according to Ueda, is to “challenge creative limits and the possibilities of what games can be.” genDESIGN is currently developing Gen Atlas, an upcoming action-adventure game published by Epic Games Publishing.

What Is Design by Subtraction?

Design by subtraction is the practice of building a game by starting with a core emotional experience and removing every element that does not serve it. Ueda himself coined the term through his work on Ico, and it has since escaped his games to become general design vocabulary for protecting a core experience by cutting features. The Wikipedia entry on Fumito Ueda describes his distinctive style as “design by subtraction,” characterized by “sparse landscapes, oversaturated lighting and minimalist story.”

Ueda’s own account of the method is disarmingly practical. In a 2002 developer interview, he said: “Whether it was the girl’s animation or the details of the map, I didn’t hold back on removing and subtracting elements as needed. If something felt unfinished or lacking, then I’d remove it.” In a 2005 interview with CONTINUE magazine, he described Ico as “a game with no tutorial, no gauges… in many senses, it’s a game defined by what is not there.”

The most famous illustration of this principle comes from Ueda’s 2004 GDC talk on the game design methods of Ico, where he described noticing a chair in a castle screenshot that didn’t look good. He laid out two honest options: fix it or cut it. He cut the chair. The doctrine underneath is severe: every element in the work is either actively serving the core emotion or actively diluting it. There is no neutral furniture.

But cutting is not the goal in itself. As one close reading of Ueda’s philosophy puts it, “Removing elements does not make you Ueda. What he cut, and what he was trying to leave behind on the other side of that cutting, is where the person lives.” The point is to make every element earn its place—not to strip the game bare. Design by subtraction presupposes not only minimalism but also coherence: every remaining element must be necessary, and there must be harmony between them.

Ueda’s motive for this approach runs deeper than aesthetics. He has repeatedly expressed concern about why people stop playing video games. “No one ‘graduates’ from movies, nor do they stop listening to music as they get older. For some reason though, they stop playing video games. Why was that, I wondered?” This concern drove him to make games that don’t feel like games, so that people who don’t play games might play them. He also wanted games to stand on par with other entertainment media. “I want to see video games standing on par with other mediums of entertainment—not be subsumed by them,” he said. “That is to say, I want games to do things that only video games can do.”

The Three Pillars of Design by Subtraction

Across Ueda’s three games, the method rests on three consistent pillars:

• A single core emotion as the spec. The girl’s hand. The sorrow of the kill. The creature’s trust. That emotion becomes the specification, and the production process becomes a long interrogation of everything else—does this system, this HUD element, this chair, sharpen the feeling or blur it?
• Coherence over completeness. Every element must be necessary, and there must be harmony between them—a harmony that must be beautiful in form but also fun in execution. Elements that interfere with immersion are removed, not merely simplified. The Wikipedia article on Ico notes that the team employed a “subtracting design” approach to “reduce gameplay elements that interfered with the game’s setting and story in order to create immersion.”
• Delegation to the player. What Ueda cuts, he delegates to the player’s imagination and emotion. He makes you keep gripping the girl’s hand on the collapsing bridge, turns victory sour with sad music, makes you care about a creature whose language you cannot understand.

Principle 1: Be Ruthless About What Deserves to Be in the Game

The first lesson of design by subtraction is the most uncomfortable one: you have to be willing to cut things you’ve already built. Not things you’re planning to build—things that are already in the game, that took time and effort, that might even work on their own terms. Ueda’s standard is simple and unforgiving: if something feels unfinished or lacking, remove it. If an element is not good enough, fix it or cut it—shipping it as-is was never on the list.

During the development of Ico, this meant removing the HUD, the life gauge, the stats, most of the combat, and even a chair that didn’t look right in a castle screenshot. The team originally planned to have enemies with unique strengths and weaknesses but eventually refined the game down to a single enemy type. They removed invisible walls that would normally prevent the player’s character from falling off, and when they really needed those walls, they made them look convincing. They hated objects that were “very unnaturally placed in levels just for the sake of level design,” so they removed those too.

Ueda was prepared to go further than anyone expected. He told colleagues that Ico was “a game defined by what is not there,” and when people suggested adding an icon above Yorda’s head so the player could know how she was feeling, or questioned the merit of the hand-holding system, he held his ground. Even after release, he was tormented by doubt—but the doubt cut in the opposite direction you might expect. He wondered whether there should have been a life gauge, whether there should have been more than one enemy. No one on the team was there to reassure him he’d made the right calls.

The key insight here is that Ueda’s ruthlessness isn’t about minimalism as an aesthetic. It’s about protecting a core experience. “In Shadow of the Colossus my idea was to eliminate, to the best of my ability, anything that didn’t have meaning or wasn’t necessary,” he said. The chair is the rule: when an element is not good enough, fix it or cut it. Software grows chairs constantly—features too weak to defend and too familiar to delete, and every one dilutes the product’s single feeling.

For your own work, the practical takeaway is to ask yourself which elements don’t allow the core experience to shine. This isn’t a one-time audit. It’s a continuous interrogation that runs through production. Ueda’s process was iterative: he would look at a scene, decide something was lacking, and remove it—or stay up all night fixing it himself. The standard isn’t “is this good?” but “does this serve the feeling?”

There’s also a team-management dimension to this principle. Ueda’s partner, producer Kenji Kaido, described the dynamic: “When Ueda creates a game, it’s very obvious that his logic is different from your typical developer. He doesn’t begin with a story or world, he just suddenly starts crafting his vision, gradually shaping it into its final form.” Kaido’s role was to ask questions like “Maybe the game should be a little more game-like here?”—but, as he admitted, “he never listens anyway.” Convincing a team that subtraction is the right approach, especially when it means throwing away work, remains what Ueda calls “the biggest problem” even today.

What Ueda Actually Removed

A partial inventory of what was cut from Ico alone:

• The HUD and all on-screen interface elements
• The life gauge—replaced by making Yorda the very life of the protagonist
• Enemy variety—refined from multiple enemy types with unique strengths and weaknesses to a single enemy type
• Tutorials and gauges
• Invisible walls—removed or made to look convincing when necessary
• Objects placed unnaturally “just for the sake of level design”
• A chair in a castle screenshot that didn’t look good

What remained was light, architecture, and the grip of one hand in another. The industry noticed what was left, not what was removed.

Principle 2: Get More Out of Less Gameplay

The second lesson follows from the first: if you’ve committed to removing elements, you need to get more depth out of the ones you keep. Ueda has said, “I like to simplify controls and gameplay elements as much as possible.” He doesn’t personally like complicated games. “If there are too many stats and numbers, I lose interest right away,” he told CONTINUE magazine in 2005. He wanted gameplay to be simple if it was going to reach non-gamers.

Shadow of the Colossus is the clearest demonstration of this principle. The game gives you a remarkably small set of verbs: move, jump, climb, stab, shoot, ride. That’s essentially it. Yet those few mechanics create radically different challenges across sixteen colossi, each requiring distinct strategies, approaches, and emotional responses. The game’s core action—clinging to a massive, moving creature while finding its weak points—is a single mechanic stretched across an entire game without ever feeling repetitive.

Ueda described the technical achievement behind this: the key to the action was a technology the team called “organic collision deformation”—animating the surface of the colossus’s body so that as it moves, its hide distorts and extends, making the “levels” constantly evolving. The situation is always changing, so progression on each enemy’s body remains challenging. A small set of mechanics, combined with technically sophisticated animation, produces emergent depth.

This is the classic depth versus complexity debate in game design, and Ueda’s work is a case study in how to resolve it. Complexity is how many different systems or mechanics a game has—how complicated it is. Depth is what you can do with those mechanics: the number of emergent, experientially different possibilities or meaningful choices that come out of one ruleset. The goal is to maximize depth while minimizing complexity. You use complexity to “buy” depth, like you’d use money to buy food.

Ueda’s approach is to start with a single core mechanic and invest everything in making it as expressive as possible. For Ico, that was the hand-holding mechanic. For Shadow of the Colossus, it was riding a horse and battling and climbing atop huge enemies. For The Last Guardian, it was the relationship between a boy and a giant beast. As Ueda explained: “Those mechanics were of primary importance, and things like what kind of world the game takes place in, how big that world is, or what clothes the characters wear, all take a backseat to the functionality and consistency of the game mechanics.”

In a 2025 interview with Eurogamer, Ueda pushed this idea further, arguing that “the age of gameplay mechanics has already passed” and that it would be better to “give already existing game mechanics more definition” rather than constantly inventing new ones. “Even if the mechanics are not new, you can focus on the feel and art,” he said. “Whether you like it or not, it’s better to sharpen the existing mechanics.”

The practical takeaway: before adding another mechanic, ask what you can get out of the ones you already have. This isn’t an argument against complexity per se—it’s an argument against complexity that doesn’t buy depth. Every mechanic you add increases both depth and complexity, but they likely add differing amounts of each. If your rules require a flowchart, it might be time to start over.

The Hand-Holding Mechanic: A Case Study in Depth from Simplicity

The hand-holding mechanic in Ico is perhaps the single best example of Ueda’s ability to generate depth from a minimal system. Mapped to the R1 shoulder button on the PS2’s DualShock 2, it’s the same button you use to call and beckon Yorda. But the moment she is next to you, you instantly take hold of her hand.

What makes this mechanic deep rather than simple is everything it carries. It’s the only tangible basis of Ico and Yorda’s companionship, because Yorda’s dialogue is presented in an untranslated fictional language. It’s a voluntary action that requires you to keep the button held down—something that, as one analysis notes, even The Last Guardian doesn’t require. It simulates the physical act of holding a hand through the controller’s rumble feature, vibrating in regular, soothing intervals when Ico holds Yorda’s hand and drags her through the environment.

The mechanic also creates the game’s emotional architecture. Ueda explained the collapsing bridge scene: “By having the bridge collapse and Yorda hanging suspended, I wanted to convey a message to players: ‘Please keep holding my hand, whatever comes ahead.'” The decision to break grip—to let go and proceed without her, even briefly—is genuinely uncomfortable. No game before or since has made holding a button feel like an act of care.

Neil Druckmann, creative director of The Last of Us, has publicly described the bridge scene as one of the most emotional moments he’s experienced in a game. “She’s never done that at any other point in the game,” he said of the moment Yorda reaches out to grab Ico. Speaking to BAFTA, Druckmann said: “I think I’ve been chasing that feeling with every game I’ve made ever since.”

Principle 3: Design for a Feeling, Not for Completeness

The third lesson is the one most designers find hardest to internalize: you don’t need to fill the world just because you can. Ueda’s approach begins where most design documents end—with a single feeling the finished work must produce. The girl’s hand. The sorrow of the kill. The creature’s trust. That emotion becomes the spec, and everything else is measured against it.

When asked about the European feeling of Shadow of the Colossus, Ueda said his goal was aesthetic: “In terms of aesthetics, I really just tried to convey a sense of beauty.” The Forbidden Lands don’t need to be packed with NPCs, lore, buildings, and environmental detail to feel like a world. They feel like a world precisely because they’re empty. The vast, silent, desolate landscape becomes rich with atmosphere, tension, and solemnity in its very sparseness.

Ueda’s approach to world-building is counterintuitive. He doesn’t begin from story or world. His partner Kenji Kaido testified: “He doesn’t begin with a story or world, he just suddenly starts crafting his vision, gradually shaping it into its final form.” Ueda himself said: “I’ve never made anything according to a traditional game design planning document. But strong visual images do come to me.” For Ico, the image was a boy holding hands with a girl taller than him. For Shadow of the Colossus, it was a boy sitting astride a horse in a vast open grassland.

The world serves the feeling, not the other way around. Ueda’s process for building the world of Ico was granular and intuitive: “I don’t really think consciously about the world as a whole; it’s more like I go one by one through the background items, and ask if each part has that special ‘sizzle’ to it.” He might look at a picture and think “This is lacking in green tones,” then add trees. Or decide an area is too open and add more blocks. Or notice too many straight lines and add curves.

This approach extends to storytelling. Ueda has said he’s not very motivated by the stories of video games and rarely has the “I want to see what happens next” feeling from a story itself. He prefers giving the player some information at the beginning—”this is how things might be”—and then letting them play and discover everything else for themselves. He doesn’t think movie-style narratives, where “the truth” is gradually revealed as you reach the end, are right for video games.

For Shadow of the Colossus, this meant a story with almost no dialogue. Ueda has said the deeper theme beneath the game’s layers is cruelty—the cruelty of killing the colossi, the violence of it. He wanted to present his own take on cruelty, which he sees as something video games seem to require as a means of expression. The famous scene where sad music plays after defeating a colossus—where a triumphant fanfare would be expected—was initially met with laughter from the development staff. But Ueda resolved to carry the idea through, and after release, he asked players if they felt anything uncomfortable about that scene. They said no.

For The Last Guardian, the feeling was trust. Ueda was surprised when players of Shadow of the Colossus reported a stronger emotional connection between Wander and his horse Agro than between Wander and Mono, the girl he seeks to revive. This inspired him to make the relationship between a human and a creature the central concept of his next game. The Wikipedia article on The Last Guardian notes that Ueda “was surprised and inspired to find players felt a stronger connection between Wander and his horse Agro” and that this led him to make “the relationship between a human and a creature the central concept for his next game.”

Ueda described Trico’s design as “deliberately unbalanced because looking strange was important,” and the team wanted to avoid making the animal cute, focusing instead on realistic-looking behavior. He explained: “To convey the mystique possessed by animals, I made a point of not letting players know for certain what Trico was thinking or feeling, as it can’t use words for communication. I also avoided turning it into a ‘sidekick’ that is simply there to be useful, but portrayed it as a living being with some uncontrollable aspect to it.”

The practical takeaway: decide what you want the player to feel, then make the world serve that feeling. You don’t need to fill the world just because you can. The question isn’t “what else should we add?” but “what does this world need to make the player feel what I want them to feel?”

The Depth Versus Complexity Debate

Ueda’s work sits squarely at the center of one of game design’s most persistent debates: the relationship between depth and complexity. Understanding this debate is essential for applying design by subtraction without reducing your game to emptiness.

Complexity is how many different systems or mechanics a game has—essentially, how complicated it is. Depth is what you can do with those mechanics: the amount of possible outcomes, the choices the player has, the potential strategies and decisions in gameplay. You use complexity to “buy” depth, like you’d use money to buy food. The goal is to minimize complexity and maximize depth.

Depth and complexity are related in an asymmetrical way. Greater depth requires more complexity, but more complexity doesn’t require greater depth. You can have a game that is deep but not complex, complex but not deep, both, or neither. The danger is that eventually, all the mechanics that get added into a game overcome the depth, and you end up with something that is more complex but less engaging and fun.

Ueda’s games resolve this tension by betting everything on a small number of mechanics and investing heavily in making them expressive. The hand-holding mechanic in Ico is a single button press that carries emotional weight, narrative function, and gameplay challenge. The climbing mechanic in Shadow of the Colossus is a single system that produces sixteen distinct encounters. The relationship with Trico in The Last Guardian is a single dynamic that generates the entire game’s emotional and mechanical structure.

This is what Ueda means when he says it would be better to “give already existing game mechanics more definition.” Definition means sharpening—making the existing mechanics more expressive, more responsive, more emotionally resonant—rather than adding new ones. It’s the difference between adding a crafting system to your action game and making your existing combat system deeper through better animation, more enemy variety, and tighter feedback.

As one game design analysis puts it: “If an idea requires complexity to make it work, then it might not be the right idea. If your rules require a flowchart, it might be time to start over.” Ueda’s career is evidence that this isn’t just theory. Three games in twenty years, each built around a single core mechanic, each more influential than most games with feature lists ten times as long.

The Japanese Aesthetic Tradition: Sesshū and Bashō

Ueda’s design by subtraction didn’t emerge from a vacuum. It connects to a Japanese aesthetic tradition that predates video games by centuries—one that values negative space, restraint, and the power of what is left unsaid.

Consider Sesshū Tōyō (1420–1506), the Zen monk and painter whose ink landscapes use emptiness in the background to emphasize simplicity and spiritual depth. His most celebrated landscape paintings derive as much from the space that is left untouched—the “dragon’s veins” of a painting—as from what is painted and visible. The work appears incomplete, still in the act of formation, and the dramatic negative spaces created by mists allow the various forms to dissolve and blend into one another. This negativity invites the viewer into the painting to actively complete it.

Or consider Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694), the seminal figure in Japanese literature whose haiku distills complex emotions and observations into concise, powerful moments. His poetry embodies the Zen ideal of minimalism—achieving depth through brevity. The haiku’s structure, consisting of three lines with a 5-7-5 syllable pattern, mirrors the Zen approach to achieving depth through brevity. By focusing on a single image or moment, Bashō avoids the clutter of excessive language and elaboration, allowing the essence of the moment to shine through.

The parallel to Ueda’s work is striking. Ico is a game with no tutorial, no gauges—a game defined by what is not there. Shadow of the Colossus is a game with no enemies in its vast open world, no side quests, no dialogue—a game whose emptiness becomes rich with atmosphere. The Last Guardian is a game with no exposition, no quest log, no map—a game where the relationship between a boy and a beast is the entire substance.

In each case, what is removed creates space for the player’s imagination and emotion, just as Sesshū’s mists create space for the viewer’s eye and Bashō’s brevity creates space for the reader’s mind. Ueda cuts the life gauge, the dialogue, the icon above the head, the explicit story—and into the space left behind, he invites the player’s imagination and emotion. What Ueda calls “a game defined by what is not there” sounds, as one analyst put it, like “a game that turns the player’s brain into a stage,” much like the atmospheric design found in Dark Souls.

Ueda himself has acknowledged the connection, if obliquely. He has said he was “not so much interested in making ordinary games” and that his aesthetic emerged from his art school background, where he encountered modern and abstract art and began “thinking about art in terms of ideas, rather than depictions.” His games carry the DNA of a tradition that values what is left out as much as what is put in.

This doesn’t mean design by subtraction is uniquely Japanese or that it requires an Eastern aesthetic sensibility. But understanding the tradition Ueda works within helps explain why his approach feels so different from the additive, feature-driven design philosophy that dominates much of the industry. He is the steward of a tradition older than games—negative space and restraint, in an industry going overboard and over budget.

Ueda’s Influence on Modern Game Design

Ueda’s influence extends far beyond his three games. Ico‘s emotional directness became what one analysis calls “the founding document for every game since that chose feeling over features.” The emotional-minimalist school—games that trust atmosphere over instruction—descends from Ico‘s example, and many of their creators cite Ico directly. The Wikipedia article on Ico’s legacy documents how designers like Eiji Aonuma, Hideo Kojima, and Jenova Chen have all cited Ico as an influence on their work.

Journey and thatgamecompany

Jenova Chen and thatgamecompany’s Journey (2012) is perhaps the most famous descendant of Ueda’s approach. The game’s aesthetic roots, as one critic noted, “are sunk deeply into the work of another artistically-motivated developer under Sony’s patronage, namely Fumito Ueda’s Team Ico.” Journey proves that “a tale told through the struggles and reliefs of a player with a controller can be just as powerful as that relayed through the spoken or written word.” It uses silence as a tool—”one that Team Ico once knew well how to wield; think of the echoing spaces between Ico’s grand and strange structures, or of the emptiness that blows across Shadow of the Colossus’ epic prairies.”

Thatgamecompany’s approach embodies the same principles: no handholding, no text-heavy tutorials, no HUD, clear audio and visual cues, and simple controls. The studio’s minimalist design philosophy—across flOw, Flower, and Journey—echoes Ueda’s conviction that restraint is a design tool, not a limitation.

Playdead: Limbo and Inside

Playdead’s Limbo (2010) and Inside (2016) channel Team Ico’s sensibilities into a darker, more oppressive register. Inside shares with Limbo a somber, minimally colored format, placing players in the role of a young boy thrust into a mysterious, perilous environment. Multiple critics and players have identified Inside as heavily influenced by Ueda’s work, with its “thick surrealistic atmosphere and minimalistic presentation” hearkening back to Ico in particular.

Playdead’s technical approach also mirrors Ueda’s. At GDC 2016, the studio’s graphics specialists detailed how they achieved high visual fidelity within the strict simplistic aesthetic of Inside—”Low Complexity, High Fidelity.” The title of their presentation could serve as a summary of design by subtraction: achieve more with less.

The Broader Lineage

Beyond these named examples, Ueda’s influence is visible across a broad spectrum of games that prioritize atmosphere, emotional resonance, and mechanical restraint over feature density. Games like Rime, Jusant, and numerous indie titles have been identified by players and critics as channeling Team Ico’s sensibilities. The shared characteristics include a strong sense of place, thick atmosphere, striking visuals, minimalist soundscapes with convincing ambient noise, and a willingness to trust the player to observe, experiment, and draw conclusions without explicit guidance.

The 2018 PS4 remake of Shadow of the Colossus by Bluepoint Games demonstrated the enduring power of Ueda’s original design. The remake received “universal acclaim” with a Metacritic score of 91/100, with reviewers calling it “one of the best remakes of all time” and a “melancholy masterpiece.” Its launch week sales were 73% higher than the original PS2 release, topping the UK sales chart. A game built on subtraction—no enemies in the open world, no side quests, no dialogue—outperformed the original commercially two decades later.

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Documented Practitioner Perspectives

Neil Druckmann on Ico’s Bridge Scene

Neil Druckmann, creative director of The Last of Us and co-president of Naughty Dog, has publicly described a scene from Ico as one of the most emotional moments he’s experienced in any game. Speaking about the bridge scene near the end of Ico, where Yorda reaches out to grab Ico at the last second, Druckmann told BAFTA about his experiences as a game director, highlighting the influence of Ueda’s work.: “She’s never done that at any other point in the game. I think I’ve been chasing that feeling with every game I’ve made ever since.” The hand-holding mechanic, he explained, made him care about Yorda “like no other game character beforehand,” and the twist where she reaches out to save Ico—reversing the dynamic established throughout the game—was “a truly inspirational moment.”

Keiichiro Toyama on Ueda’s Conviction

Keiichiro Toyama, director of Silent Hill and Siren, worked on the same floor as Ueda at Sony Computer Entertainment and has spoken about their differences as designers. “Your nerve and composure is amazing,” Toyama told Ueda in a public conversation. “When my team comes to me and says ‘I think this part would be better this way,’ I tend to be swayed by their words. But your conviction never wavers.” Toyama also noted what he sees as the core quality of Ueda’s games: “They aren’t about exploring all the facets of a gameplay or rule system, but rather about the way your feelings change as you experience the actual game. You go extremely deep on that, and I think it makes you a rare and valuable game creator.”

Ueda on Agro: The Accidental Bond

Ueda has been candid about the fact that the emotional bond between players and Agro, the horse in Shadow of the Colossus, exceeded his intentions. “When I was creating Agro, I didn’t think people would end up feeling that way about her,” he said. “In this scene, for instance, you need Agro to win the fight, and there aren’t many Colossi that require that. In the context of that scene, there’s no communication as such between Agro and Wander, but the player has spent so much time adventuring with Agro by now that I think one’s imagination fills in the gaps and the player has really come to love the horse.” This accidental emotional bond became the foundation for The Last Guardian, where the relationship between a human and a creature was made the central, conscious design goal.

Cory Barlog on the Power of Simplicity

Cory Barlog, creative director of God of War (2018), has described how Ueda’s games opened his eyes as a writer and director. In a PlayStation Blog feature on Ueda’s narrative worlds, Barlog said: “Both Ico and Shadow of the Colossus opened my eyes as a writer and director, teaching me the power of simplicity. How there is a time for moments to just slow down and experience something.” He added: “They showed me a new way to tell stories, to create true moments of character and to connect with people in order get to the heart of what you are really trying to say, with little to no dialogue.”

Key Takeaways

• Design by subtraction starts with a single core emotion and treats it as the spec—every element is measured against whether it sharpens or blurs that feeling.
• The chair rule is the practical test: if an element isn’t good enough, fix it or cut it. Shipping it as-is was never an option. This applies to features, HUD elements, mechanics, and even furniture.
• Depth and complexity are not the same thing. Ueda’s games demonstrate that a small set of mechanics, invested in heavily, can produce more emergent depth than a long feature list.
• What you remove creates space for the player’s imagination. Ueda delegates to the player what he cuts from the game—turning scarcity into richness.
• Ueda’s approach connects to a Japanese aesthetic tradition of negative space and restraint, from Sesshū’s ink landscapes to Bashō’s haiku—traditions that value what is left out as much as what is put in.
• The influence is measurable: games from Journey to Inside descend from Ico‘s example, and the 2018 remake of Shadow of the Colossus outperformed the original commercially, proving that subtraction-based design ages well.

Conclusion

Fumito Ueda’s design by subtraction is not a formula. It’s a discipline—a continuous interrogation of every element against a single emotional target. The three principles outlined here—be ruthless about what deserves to be in the game, get more out of less gameplay, and design for a feeling rather than for completeness—are not steps to follow in order. They’re habits of thought that, applied consistently, produce games where everything serves the core experience and nothing dilutes it.

The evidence is in the work. Three games in twenty years. No HUD in Ico. No enemies in Shadow of the Colossus‘s open world. No exposition in The Last Guardian. Each game more influential than the last, each aging better than the feature-heavy titles that surrounded them. The 2018 remake of Shadow of the Colossus topped the UK charts and outsold the original—twenty years after the design was finalized.

If you take one thing from Ueda’s approach, take the chair. The next time you look at your game and something doesn’t feel right, don’t ask whether it’s good enough to ship. Ask whether it serves the feeling, a question central to Ueda’s design philosophy and the approach seen in Dark Souls. If it doesn’t, you have two options. Fix it or cut it. There is no third option.

If you want to study design by subtraction in its purest form, start with Ico. Then play Shadow of the Colossus and pay attention to what isn’t there. The emptiness is the design.

Fumito Ueda Design by Subraction Quizz

FAQ  Minimalist video game design: fumito ueda design by substracion

What is design by subtraction in game design?

Design by subtraction is a game design philosophy associated with Fumito Ueda that involves starting with a core emotional experience and removing every element that does not serve it, similar to the minimalist approach seen in Dark Souls. It’s not about minimalism as an aesthetic but about protecting a core experience by cutting features, interface elements, and content that dilute the intended feeling. Ueda described Ico as “a game defined by what is not there”—no tutorial, no gauges, no HUD.

Which games did Fumito Ueda direct?

Fumito Ueda directed three games: Ico (2001) for PlayStation 2, Shadow of the Colossus (2005) for PlayStation 2, and The Last Guardian (2016) for PlayStation 4. He directed the first two as part of Team Ico at Sony Computer Entertainment’s Japan Studio, and the third through his independent studio genDESIGN, formed in 2014, in collaboration with Japan Studio. He is currently directing Gen Atlas, an upcoming title published by Epic Games Publishing.

How does design by subtraction differ from minimalism?

Minimalism is an aesthetic choice—making things look simple. Design by subtraction is a process: starting with a core emotion and interrogating every element against it. The result may look minimalist, but the method is about coherence and emotional focus, not visual simplicity. As one analysis notes, design by subtraction presupposes not only minimalism but also coherentism—every remaining element must be necessary and in harmony with the others. Ueda himself has said that if the market were full of minimalist games, he would probably create games with excessive decoration.

What is the chair story from Ueda’s GDC talk?

During a 2004 GDC presentation, Ueda described noticing a chair in a castle screenshot for Ico that didn’t look good. He laid out two options: fix it or cut it. He cut the chair. The anecdote illustrates the core principle of design by subtraction: every element is either actively serving the core emotion or actively diluting it. There is no neutral furniture.

How did Ico influence other game developers?

Ico‘s emotional directness and minimalist design became what one analysis calls “the founding document for every game since that chose feeling over features.” Games directly influenced by Ueda’s work include thatgamecompany’s Journey, Playdead’s Limbo and Inside, and numerous indie titles. Neil Druckmann of Naughty Dog has cited Ico‘s bridge scene as a formative influence on his approach to emotional game design.

Did Fumito Ueda say the age of game mechanics is over?

In a 2025 interview, Ueda said “the age of gameplay mechanics has already passed” and argued that it would be better to “give already existing game mechanics more definition” rather than constantly inventing new ones. He clarified: “Even if the mechanics are not new, you can focus on the feel and art. Whether you like it or not, it’s better to sharpen the existing mechanics.” This is consistent with his long-standing design philosophy of getting more depth from fewer, more refined mechanics.

What is “fumito ueda design by substracion” and how does it relate to minimalist video game design?

“fumito ueda design by substracion” refers to the design philosophy associated with Fumito Ueda, emphasizing reduction, clarity, and emotional resonance by stripping away nonessential elements. This approach mirrors minimalist principles like those of Dieter Rams, treating game systems and UI as sculpture where every piece reinforces the core experience rather than cluttering it, producing coherent, often puzzle- or exploration-driven gaming experiences akin to Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, and The Last Guardian.

How does Ueda’s approach compare to mainstream AAA games and other genres like action-adventure or puzzle?

Ueda’s auteur-driven style contrasts with many AAA games that prioritize spectacle and broad mechanics. While AAA titles, Ubisoft or Nintendo franchises like Assassin’s Creed, Zelda, or Prince of Persia, often layer systems and content, design by subtraction focuses on a few refined mechanics—sometimes leaning puzzle or escort dynamics—creating a more focused emotional arc. The result can feel invincible in its clarity, even if it lacks the bloat of some AAA releases.

Which game design elements are typically “stripped away” in this minimalist, video game-focused approach?

Commonly removed elements include excessive UI, redundant mechanics, and filler content. The UI is reduced to essentials, narrative flashbacks are used sparingly, and combat or traversal mechanics are distilled so that every interaction matters. This reinforces core themes and can make the game feel more like another world or a living sculpture, emphasizing atmosphere over complex genre-blending features.

Can design by subtraction work for different game types, such as puzzle-heavy titles, action or even robot/stealth themes?

Yes. Design by subtraction can apply across genres—puzzle games benefit from pared-back interfaces and coherent challenge design; action or stealth games can heighten tension by focusing on a few reliable systems rather than many layered mechanics; even games featuring robots or escort objectives can use minimalism to amplify emotional stakes and player empathy. The key is prioritizing what makes the experience unique and removing anything that distracts from it.

Which designers or influences align with Ueda’s philosophy, and how has this approach been seen at events like E3?

Designers influenced by Ueda’s ethos include auteur creators who value coherence and form, and industrial designers like Dieter Rams are often cited for cross-disciplinary inspiration. At showcases like E3, minimalist or artful presentations stand out against spectacle-driven announcements by AAA studios. The influence appears when teams emphasize refined mechanics, stripped-down UI, and sculptural world design rather than overwhelming players with features—often prompting comparisons to classics like Zelda or Another World and sparking discussion about the role of flash and flashback in modern gaming.

Matthew Dogherby( Game Developer & Business Development Director )

Game Developer | Designer | Creative Storyteller

Matt Dogherby is a passionate game developer and designer based in Brisbane, Australia. With a career spanning over 15 years, Matt combines technical skill with a deep love for storytelling to create games that captivate and inspire. His unique perspective is shaped by the laid-back energy of Brisbane and his lifelong connection to the ocean, where he often trades coding sessions for surf sessions.