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.
Continue reading Shadow of the Colossus — Retro Gaming Essentials (No. 43)Shadow of the Colossus at a glance:
Genre: Action-adventure
Released: 2005
Platform: PlayStation 2
GamesRadar’s No. 10 “best game ever”
