You’re riding your horse through a barren landscape, one oddly devoid of life.
Unsettlingly so.
A haze covers everything, muting all colors and hindering your ability to see things clearly.
This world is not our own. Moreover, it’s dreamlike … it doesn’t feel entirely real.
You’ve been directed to this task, of riding your horse to an unclear destination, by a thundering voice from the sky, speaking a language you don’t recognize (but which has still conveniently been translated for you so that you might understand at a most basic level).
Everything here is foreign.
The voice instructed you to slay a number of giants in order that you might save your female companion.
She was quite very clearly deceased when you examined her, but you’re unwilling to accept that. An option to save her has been presented. You’ve been given direction, and this is more comforting than having to slog through the fog with no sense of where to go.
You encounter a cliff, which necessitates leaving your horse behind, and you scale that cliff.
Up ahead, you see the outline of a structure within another cliff wall. Perhaps it is scalable as well?
As you venture closer, you are in awe as this structure begins to rearrange itself and come to life, towering above you into the sky: a colossus lumbering toward you, intent on clubbing you to death with its giant weapon.
You are in awe because this is completely foreign to anything you’ve experienced before in your life.
I outline the above scenario, cribbed directly from the opening moments of “Shadow of the Colossus,” because I think it’s worth understanding upfront that this game when it debuted was unlike anything else that had come before. And to date, some 20 years later, we still haven’t seen the game’s formula recreated in quite the same way either.
Its impact on the gaming industry stretches far and wide, as elements present here have inspired developers for two decades now. Trying to recapture those senses of awe and scale has been a favorite pastime of the industry ever since people first laid eyes on this spectacle of a game.
But despite its influence, is there another experience quite like this one anywhere else in video games?
I’d argue no.
And that, more than anything else, is why it’s considered one of the best games of all time.
Shadow of the Colossus at a glance:
Genre: Action-adventure
Released: 2005
Platform: PlayStation 2
GamesRadar’s No. 10 “best game ever”
Now, I would like to acknowledge here that it’s okay to be disappointed by a thing that other people adore.
Plenty of people didn’t click with this sucker when it was released, for plenty of valid reasons. (I myself came to it very late, almost exactly 20 years after its launch.)
And it’s only natural. Games offer differing experiences to different people. What scratches an itch for one person, might be more like an annoying mosquito for another.
Tastes differ.
That all having been said, I like to approach this list of retro gaming essentials in this way: These are the games I recommend everyone try to experience. I can’t guarantee every one of these games will click with every single person. But what I can tell you is that they all affected me in a positive manner, and that they have a high probability of connecting with you too.
Again, no guarantees. There’s at least a very good chance these games will connect – but no certainty.
And with most of the games on the list, I’m good with that, knowing that some games just won’t mesh with people, and maybe they won’t have a good time, and their time will have been wasted, and …
That’s okay.
No game can bat 1.000.
Shadow of the Colossus is a little different, in that I believe this:
Independent of this game connecting with you or not, I still think it’s worth playing.
In other words, the experience has value even if you don’t personally like it.*
* Off the top of my head, I can list probably a half dozen or so games like this. Everyone should play Pong, for example, and also Tetris, not because you’ll 100% fall in love with either game, but rather because each game is an important experience to have had. With the former, there’s value in understanding how video games got their start, and with the latter, playing the closest thing to video game perfection you’ll find anywhere, well that’s a no-brainer too. They each have significant individual merit, as well as a cultural relevance that extends beyond the medium itself. I can’t envision a scenario in which a person could ever have regret over having engaged with either.
Part of the reason for this “it has value whether you like it or not” phenomenon in this particular case is Shadow of the Colossus’ uniqueness mentioned earlier. You’re just not going to play another game like this anywhere else.
Put simply: It’s weird.
So, trying it on for size is sort of inherently necessary for one to decide if they like this sort of game or not.
But I also think it’s the nature of that uniqueness that truly makes this game a must-play and a worthy use of one’s time (actual lasting enjoyment be damned).
And that uniqueness is primarily tied into its sense of art.
Perhaps more than any other video game, Shadow of the Colossus IS art, expressing a theme or statement through a language that is decipherable and affecting.
The game is more like a painting hanging in a museum or a great piece of symphonic music than not, an expression of motifs and emotion.
Now truly, many games with any sort of depth in storytelling and characterization can make similar claims, and I wouldn’t argue with a person who would want to do so. In my own list, I would point to such lovely adventures as “Chrono Cross,” “The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time,” or “Final Fantasy VII” as being deep enough in story and character development as to make a significant lasting emotional impression on an audience.
But where I think Shadow of Colossus differs in part from those above examples is in managing to tell its story through mood and pacing, as opposed to via character and plot.
Large stretches of barren, atmospheric landscape leave gamers alone with their thoughts as they traverse the misty, moody land toward their next objective. These pauses in the action provide an opportunity to reflect on previous actions and think through potential outcomes.
What have I just done?
What does all of this mean?
Where is all of this headed?
Crafted by the developers at Sony who had also designed the game “Ico,” Shadow of the Colossus landed on the PlayStation 2 in the fall of 2005, and while it wasn’t universally acclaimed, it was certainly well received, and it has since come to be recognized as one of the more impressive achievements on the console and in gaming in general.
Director Fumito Ueda circled around themes of death and grieving, endeavoring to build an adventure within the spirit of The Legend of Zelda, featuring an adventurer in a vast, grand location, trying to reason out solutions to pressing puzzles. Indeed, the game even shares an aesthetic in style and tone with “The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess” (In another medium, it also resembles “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy.). Color and joy have been drained from the premises, replaced by darkness, but fortunately, not all hope is lost.
In Zelda, those aforementioned challenges often came in the form of its labyrinth-like dungeons (or sometimes within the dynamics of determining which human interactions mattered most). Here, said puzzles were sometimes realized in the occasional tricky navigation of confusing terrain (your sword would glow brightly as an indicator of what direction you should go, but that system could get cryptic at times). More often, the riddles of the game presented themselves in trying to determine how to take down the behemoths you encountered over the course of a play-through.
Each creature would present an area on its body your adventurer could cling to, in addition to an area that glowed brightly, indicating a weak spot you could plunge your sword into to inflict damage. How you could reach said weak spot(s) and what areas you could cling to varied from critter to critter, hence the puzzling aspects to each battle.
Many of these creatures would tower over you, and most wouldn’t idly let you pick them off – they were actively trying to harm you. On top of that, if you could manage to mount them, they would often try to shake you off. An endurance meter would let you know how much longer you could hang on, and this mechanic often worked beautifully, as the creatures would only shake for a certain period of time, and if you could find sure footing, you could rest for a moment to regain your endurance before grabbing back on.
This cat-and-mouse approach to scaling the collosi would play out gradually, and depending on the complexity involved, could take several minutes or quite a bit longer than that to complete. The action was kept tense with some properly epic scoring, which ratcheted up in intensity as you made progress in the fight. In conjunction with the razor’s edge nature of these actions — you’re not always going to succeed right away — succeeding vs. failing ends up feeling like a REALLY big deal (the word “harrowing” comes to mind).
Regardless, eventually you’d reach a monster’s weak area, plunge your sword in, and be greeted by a strange black spray coming out of the creature from the inflicted wound. This would repeat each time you damaged it until you could complete the kill.
Once felled, a beast would spray more of this off-putting black mist material directly at your character, infusing them into your body via tentacle or worm-like looking streams of whatever this mystery material is. This would cause your character to pass out, only to awaken back in the weird temple you started the game in, surrounded by shadows, looking down on you, expectant.
If all of this sounds a little gruesome and hard-hearted, well, yeah, it is.
This idea of cruelty as a means of expression is a major motif in the game.
Your character is wounded by grief, and his outlet is the death of other creatures. The morality of these choices is always kind of bubbling under the surface, like that black goo. And you’re left to consider your actions only as you’re moving on toward the next slaughter.
Will their deaths save your companion? Or does it even matter?
The game is basically one big, long boss rush. Fight a boss. Gather yourself (briefly), and then fight another boss. And another. Until you’ve reached the end of the game.
Of course, you can take as much time as you like to wade in whatever feelings you might have from all of this death and destruction. And that is where the big, open world comes in handy (and why the design of this game is so lauded).
Since there’s not much to do here, and not much to interact with, you’re left feeling alone. The idea that this is a foreign land is reinforced over the course of the story, but also through the gameplay. The place is weird, and lonely. You can see where it might have inspired the big open world games that would come along later, but it’s a uniquely unsettling place.
The world here is empty, and you’re left feeling empty having not found peace or healing in the harm you’ve inflicted on others.
As I said earlier, mood and pacing. The two go hand-in-hand here, and they fit the themes of grief, violence, cruelty, and desperation perfectly.
“Am I supposed to be doing this?” your mind inevitably bounces toward as you physically bounce about in your horse’s saddle, gazing at the horizon for clues as to your next destination.
Contrast this with the quick, mindless violence you see in other games. You’re meant to think nothing of carjacking some innocent in “Grand Theft Auto III,” or of killing a demon charging your first-person view in “Doom.”
Death doesn’t have a chance to sink in, as some new jump scare or distraction is always only moments away.
Shadow of the Colossus makes you bathe in the violence. There’s no escaping it. As though the violence itself was a giant pool of that black goo, and you’ve waded/swam through half of it already.
In front of you stretches still more goo and violence.
But you’ve travelled this far, haven’t you?
Let’s go a little further, I suppose.
So what makes it worth playing today?
Similar to the first PlayStation 2 game I included in this countdown, “Katamari Damacy,” Colossus came about toward the end of the system’s life cycle, and as a result, it’s an example of a developer trying to do something way more interesting than was typical industry-wide.
In both cases, gamers were gifted a special adventure, and as I mused before with Katamari, I wonder if I would have ended up taking time off from gaming if I had clocked either in a significant way.
If you’re playing the sort of games that had never hit the market before, boredom isn’t quite as large a problem, methinks.
“Shadow of the Colossus” was remastered for the PlayStation 3 in 2011 (packaged with its spiritual predecessor “Ico”) and then underwent a full remake for a PlayStation 4 release in 2018. The former was essentially the same experience, while the latter changed things a little, eschewing the moody, muted visuals for crisper, brighter landscapes. It also tweaked the gameplay some, making it a little tougher to hang onto the Colossi, a key dynamic in the overall experience.
For some, these shifts altered things enough to make the remake a lesser experience, despite its improved graphic fidelity.
The original game has its critics too. The camera controls (as well as the horse-riding controls) are oddly inverted, and, as is typical in an over-the-shoulder 3D game, the camera can get wonky at times (usually when pinned in a corner or too close to a large object), blinding the gamer to anything going on around them. This is a wee bit problematic when you’re engaged in a harrowing battle to the death with a towering beast capable of killing you in a single blow.
Any complaints over the visual stylings (the drab colors and the janky framerate, in particular) and the stark landscape (there’s just not much to do other than ride around and look for giants) are, to me, personal taste issues (and maybe people aren’t “getting” the point of the game in some cases?). Same for the game’s length, which clocks in around 10 hours or so and is considered on the short side for some.
“This just isn’t my kind of game.”
Alrighty then.
As I said before, that doesn’t make the experience any less worthwhile.
Lots of really important people within the gaming industry agree with me.
Among the titles whose directors and producers credit Colossus with inspiring elements of their games are such titans as “God of War II & III,” “The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild,” and “Eldin Ring.”
If you want to see where those games got their start, this clearly isn’t a bad game to check out.
Finally, I leave you with this…
When I was in high school, I went to see “Schindler’s List” at the movie theater, and I came away absolutely floored by what I had seen.
I have since, over the course of 32 years, had 100 percent ZERO desire to watch it again.
Once was enough.
I wouldn’t put “Shadow of the Colossus” in quite the same category, as it’s not as emotionally overwhelming as the Steven Spielberg masterpiece. (It’s not really in the same conversation in that way.) Colossus is an emotional piece of art – just not (quite) so devastating and exhausting.
In contrast to Schindler, I could personally see myself revisit it more than once.
And yet this core comparison between the movie and this game remains: I am very glad to have experienced it, and I think everyone else should do the same.
Whether you “like” it or not.
Dave’s Score: 9/10
Check out the whole Retro Gaming Essentials list here!
How to play
- Original hardware (PlayStation 2)
- The Ico & Shadow of the Colossus Collection (PlayStation 3 remaster)
- PlayStation 4 remake