Shadow of the Colossus (PS4, 2018)
Sometimes I start a write-up of a game in a style which explains what it is to people who haven't played or heard of it. Sometimes I do this because I think it's a bit obscure. Sometimes I do this glibly if I think the game isn't any good or if it's a bit ridiculous. I don't really know how to start off writing about Shadow of the Colossus, because if you're reading this you probably know what the game is and don't need it reduced to the simplest description by way of an introduction. At the same time I feel a duty to expand this game's audience if at all possible, so I hope I manage that.
In Shadow of the Colossus you play as Wander, a boy who steals a horse and a sword and takes his dead or dying girlfriend to The Forbidden Lands, a vast, sealed off landscape with a giant shrine in the middle of it. He places his woman on a plinth in this shrine, then a voice called Dormin appears from the ceiling and tells him in the second person that they can bring her soul back if he just goes and kills sixteen "colossi" dotted around the lands.
It's been a while since I've played the original. In saying that I've only ever played the PS3 version, not the original PS2. I'm going to keep my comparisons confined to the one section later on, rather than constantly going on about it.
Gameplay in Shadow of the Colossus is simple. You have a sword, a bow and arrow, and a horse. You hold this sword up and it shines a beam of light in the direction you're supposed to go. You follow it and it leads you to a Colossus. Each Colossus has one or two weak spots and you have to figure out how to reach them to stab them enough to kill them. This usually involves jumping on to and climbing up them, so you have a stamina meter on screen which runs out the longer you're climbing, or jumping, or clinging on while it tries to shake you off. Outside of the Colossus fights there are some trees with fruit on them you can eat to increase your health, or strange shrines with shiny-tailed lizards crawling around which you can eat to increase your stamina.
If you're unfamiliar with the game, it's at this point I surprise you by saying that's it. That's all the game is. Travelling to sixteen boss fights through an open world with virtually no interactive objects. How, then, is the game so brilliant?
Conquering the Colossi is a thrill in itself. It's been long enough since I last played the game that I didn't remember how to beat all of them immediately, so I got to experience the satisfaction that comes when you figure out how to stop one of them, or even get close enough to them to be able to stop them. The game is well named too, because for the most part you feel completely overwhelmed by the sheer size of what you're facing. Some are a bit small (11 and 14 are phoned in, really) but the mixture of feelings when you finally scale one of the giants - awe, fear, relief, panic, desperation, it's not really explainable until you're up there fighting for your life. Wander can take quite a lot of fall damage so you're not really fighting, but you don't remember that when the stamina bar starts ticking.
The best thing about the sense of scale is probably how different it can feel from fight to fight. Take the fifth Colossus for example, effectively a giant bird. You shoot it to make it swoop down towards you, then jump and grab on to its wing and pull yourself up. The swooshing feeling when you're in the air has you bracing yourself in your chair. You go from that to clinging on for dear life as it flaps its wings and twirls in the air, trying to throw you off. Compare this to the fourth Colossus which wanders around looking to see where you've gone when you duck into one of the holes in the ground you need to use to distract it. Just a large, almost dinosaur-like thing whose house you've wandered into and are now buzzing around like a fly. This is before you even get to the bipedal Colossi who are much more violent. Each fight feels like a struggle, but because of the variety it's never something you just get used to.
I'm going to make one quick comparison to the original here. Part of the sense of scale in the original was down to how the camera and control functioned, or didn't. You could barely see all of the Colossi in the frame at once, especially if you were attached. Wrangling the camera with one stick and Wander with another felt impossible enough, but the clunkiness of the PS2 controls caused by the limitation of the hardware contributed to this. The remake retains this. The camera is a pain in the neck and trying to jump and climb on any kind of surface is even worse. I was so happy at this. Controlling Wander isn't supposed to be easy. He's a young guy who's doing something completely terrifying and unthinkable, and this should be reflected in the controls. Thankfully, it is.
One thing that still surprises me about this game after all this time is the replayability. As much joy as there is in actually reaching a Colossus, then defeating them, this doesn't actually get old. On my way to the platinum here I defeated them all seven times. My first playthrough, normal time attack, hard time attack, a hard difficulty run, an easy difficulty run, another quick run on normal and then one final one on hard. There's a New Game+ option which lets you continue upgrading your health and stamina with each Colossus you beat. There's an in-game reward for this which doesn't really offer you more gameplay, just an extra, small area to explore. The time attack modes offer items such as new weapons or map upgrades, but if you can beat the hard time attacks then you don't need a sword which does slightly more damage. Even after all of those playthroughs, I was never bored. Even knowing the story and what happens, I was never bored. I never stopped being impressed. Even after finishing the game in about two hours on hard, I never felt like I had any advantage over the Colossi.
I think I worried too much about comparing the remake to the original, so I'll get it out of the way before I continue. I've mentioned the gameplay but I was probably more worried about graphical upgrades. Part of the original game's charm was in the sparseness of the environment which seemed like a necessity due to the resources available. Would things change if that detail improved? No. Well, no and yes. Everything is more detailed and more engaging as a result, but it doesn't feel any different. The Forbidden Lands are huge, and they still feel huge. They're empty, and they feel empty, but the sense of atmosphere that makes the world so engaging is still here. It's just a bit less obviously one or two texture tiles copied and pasted as far as the eye can see (or the game can draw).
The best example of how impressive the environment is is a personal one. As I was playing I took loads of screenshots of different areas. I think I have over a hundred sitting in my capture gallery. I did this without the game's photo mode which I didn't realise was there at first, but offers a range of filters and things to really let your artistic side out. For me, I didn't need them. The game and the way the game looks inside of individual images was striking enough for me. The only time I really try to make a point of taking screenshots in games is when I'm capturing a funny subtitle to use to start one of these write-ups. Shadow of the Colossus not only motivated me to just take in the ambiance, it let me. Traversing the Forbidden Lands offers you the time to actually appreciate your surroundings in a way other open world games with a lot more in them just don't.
The two changes I don't like are cosmetic. Originally Wander's stamina bar was a pink circle which would grow and grow until it went outside the boundaries of the screen. I liked this because it was a bit rubbish and didn't really make sense. It's now just an actual bar above the health, and as I type I've realised why I don't like it. When it took up a quarter of the screen you were more acutely aware of it running out, and you felt more urgency to complete whatever you were trying to do. That's lost, and it's a shame.
The most significant change in the remake is probably Wander himself. In the original he looked a bit like a generic potato-faced low-res person from a pre-HD game. Someone whose face looks like it was designed about three minutes before the game went to print. This, along with a plot-sensitive change to Wander's appearance throughout the game, somehow fit the situation because it was easier to see the deterioration as the game went on. He's someone out of his depth doing extremely demanding things, and being able to see the effect of that is a significant part of character development for someone who only talks in the opening cutscene.
New Wander looks like a secondary character from a Final Fantasy game. Shiny androgyny. It could work, but he looks too good throughout for the same sense of vulnerability to be there. Riding the horse is a pain, grappling Colossi is a pain, and he makes all the same noises, but Wander himself seems less significant than before. Just on that point about the noises he makes, one thing carried over from the original I found slightly unsettling is the sound and the music. The sound in this game is exceptional. Colossi fight music is equal parts tragic, spectacular, desperate and rousing. It'd be nice if each Colossi had their own unique themes, but the music's still good. Wander and his horse Agro's sounds just feel like real creatures going through what they do. The minimalist sounds of the Forbidden Lands perfectly complement the feeling of scale and lost grandeur. The problem is they're all exactly the same and to begin with I found that really disconcerting. All the memories I have of the original were triggered by those sounds, but I was playing something which looked and felt different. I got used to it, but it's something to keep in mind.
I don't want to go into detail about the plot for two reasons. One is if you know the game, you know the plot. Two is if you don't know the game, well, you won't have read this far, but if you haven't played it then go and do so immediately. It's better than I'm making it out to be. Actually a third reason is something I realised after I'd finished this time and was reading up about the game, watching videos and exploring the assorted theories fans have cultivated about this over the years, as well as Ico and The Last Guardian.
Much of the Forbidden Lands and the Colossi is unknown. Each Colossi alone features a raft of details which invite questions that are never answered. What is the structure surrounding 8, 14 or 15? What happened to the top of 12? Why are they the only things here, when clearly some sort of civilisation existed in conjunction with them? Why are there so many things lying around that look like they come from Ico? What connection does the ending have with Ico? The structures you encounter are impressive in their own right, but if you actually speculate about their construction and apparent abandonment they take on a new level of mystique and awe.
This is why I think Shadow of the Colossus is one of the all time great video games. It transcends the format in a way very few others have ever managed. Just starting from scratch with no prior knowledge, you'll finish the game in eight hours at most. You'll know everything there is to know and see everything there is to see. We've already covered the minimalist gameplay. It's the atmosphere, the art direction, the sound, the concept, everything else that combines to make something greater than the sum of its parts. This remake was released twelve years after the original. Twelve years is two generations in video game terms. Yet the game still persists. It still inspires the awe, the obsession, the speculation about everything you see.
There are hundreds of hours of video online of people exploring the original game and finding assets and things cut from the final game. The speculation and theorising about the world is even more imposing than the game itself. In my mind, this is what makes a truly great story and world. The sort of thing which inspires its fans to this extent. I can wonder what the temples and massive structures are, or how they were built. I can wonder what the Colossi are. I can wonder where Wander comes from, or where the priests who chase after him came from. I can wonder what Dormin is, or what they represent, or how they got there. I'll never get an answer. Some things are clearer than others, but for the most part the game remains as shrouded in mystery now as it ever has.
This is why the game persists. The recognition from players that they've experienced a unique world with a clear yet undefined history. Think of the tales that captivated you as a child. Books, television, film, whatever. How much time did you spend thinking about them? How much did you imagine yourself as part of that world, interacting with the characters? That's what Shadow of the Colossus does. The remake is just as effective at this as the original. The greatness here goes well beyond gameplay, even if that minimalism is an integral part of it. The time between original and remake filled with Ubisoft open world collectathons probably exacerbates this feeling, but the notion of an open world video game with sixteen things to do and a largely non-interactive environment feels like something that wouldn't happen now.
As I was playing the game and had the above epiphany, I realised something else. I've played other games where I've had that same reaction, but had an emotional response to go along with it. The moments of realisation when playing Journey and BioShock are probably the two best examples for me. I don't remember if I had that feeling when I played Shadow of the Colossus for the first time. I know it took a while for Ico to get under my skin as much as it did, so I'd guess and say no. Right now, for everything I've just described, that all feels like an objective assessment rather than an emotional one. The rush of taking on the Colossi is an immediate, visceral response but I still feel like I'm recalling all of this consciously in a way I never did with the other games I mentioned.
Part of this is probably my age. Or the amount of time I've spent writing things like this, at probably 99% my own benefit. If anything I think this makes the game even more impressive, that it's still able to cut through to me and make me appreciate it.
I can only end here by repeating what I said at the start. If you know, you know. If you've never experienced it, you should. Whichever the case is, I'm glad this game exists. I'm glad the remake was a success, and I hope a some point that genuine gaming landmarks like this get the respect they deserve, and get preserved like this.
