You’ll fight creatures who tower over you, and you’ll fight others who are not much larger than you are.
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Every fight forces you to improvise and figure out how to be victorious in a very different combat scenario than the others. Instead, it gives us 16 unique battles that almost feel like they could have been pulled from 16 separate games. The game could have simply offered 15 minor variations on that first battle and it still would have been fantastic.īut it doesn’t do that. The sheer scale of these battles, and the fact that each one unfolds more like a puzzle than a boss fight, is enough to earn Shadow high praise. You’re tasked with finding 16 colossi in the game’s beautiful valley, and then you must kill them by finding their weak points. Perhaps the best example I can give is in its gameplay. But Shadow manages to take just about every element of the game and refine it beyond what most people would have even deemed possible back in 2005, then it makes these elements play off each other in a way that ultimately binds them all together seamlessly. Any single element of the game would be enough to make it a critical darling: either of the two aspects I’ve mentioned above, for instance, would bring a game to an almost unanimous 9 out of 10 through a majority of game review outlets.
It works tirelessly to become the epitome of everything modern game design should be striving toward. The thing is, Shadow of the Colossus isn’t ever content to simply be a great game. These are themes like companionship, death, and the length to which lovers are willing to go to in order to be reunited. The finale smacks players in the chest with its poignancy, hammering home the gravity of the themes the narrative has been dancing around throughout the course of the game. On top of this, Wander’s story is one of the most heart-wrenching in all of gaming. In fact, Shadow of the Colossus presented a world so filled with wonder that a very dedicated community of players spent years attempting to obsessively explore every last nook and cranny of it. Good level design gives you things to do, not just things to look at, right? But Shadow makes its pristine world such a brilliant display of art that it’s hard to experience any area in this game without being emotionally affected, even if it’s difficult to articulate exactly what those emotions are that you’re feeling. That’s an accomplishment that very few game developers can list on their resume, as it seems to run counter to the core expectations of good level design. There are vast spaces that offer nothing for meticulous explorers besides the sheer beauty of looking at them, yet that beauty is far greater than any quantifiable reward Team Ico could have offered the game’s players. The world inside the game is so gorgeous and spacious that meandering around in it is intoxicating. Shadow of the Colossus is simply one of the most beautiful and emotionally powerful games in existence. It was such a poignant moment in an already emotionally overwhelming game experience that I simply can’t judge you if that scene made you sob like a teenage girl going through her first breakup. The closest I’ve come, however, was when I saw Argo’s limp in the finale of Shadow of the Colossus.
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