Shadow of the Colossus

Team ICO - 2005 - PS2/PS3

Shadow of the Colossus is another one of those artsy games that I know is probably just not meant for me. I don’t exactly know who this game is meant for though; I think nearly everyone I've asked about this game has either never played it or found it unremarkable. Yet I frequently see this game on lists of the “best games of all-time” and lists of “games as art”. Games as art? Yeah, I could see that. One of the best games of all time? Ehhhhh I don’t know about that.

In Shadow of the Colossus, you play a nameless hero who has traveled via horse to a faraway temple to bring back the life of some other nameless dead chick whose body you brought with you. The game doesn't tell you how she died or why it’s important to you to bring her back, which seem like kind of fundamental storytelling details to me, but whatever. Some mystical disembodied voice in the temple tells you that if you kill the 16 giant creatures known as colossi that inhabit the surrounding land, that it will somehow magically bring the dead chick back to life.

So the gameplay in Shadow of the Colossus consists of traveling to the various colossus lairs and trying to figure out how to take them down. For each one, you’ll need to figure out where their weak point is and then figure out how to climb up on the colossus and strike it. This usually involves knocking the colossus down or using the environment to climb up on it or something like that. It’s kind of like 16 boss fights from a Zelda game all strung together in a row. If you’re like me, you’ll get a really strong sense of repetition playing this game, which was kind of a turn-off. Plus the colossus fights are usually quite long, which I guess gives a feeling of epicness to the battle when it’s finally over. But if you die or fall off of the colossus while climbing it, you’ll probably get frustrated with the slow pace of the battles like I did.

Summary:
The game does have a few bright spots though - it conveys emotion with very little dialogue which is always cool to me. And figuring out the puzzles on how to defeat the bosses is kind of fun even though executing them can feel kind of tedious. I've seen the soundtrack to this game given a lot of praise across the internet, but the overly epic orchestra sound doesn't typically do a whole lot for me. When new games boast that they have a “fully orchestrated soundtrack!!” my response is usually “well that sucks”. It's not bad I guess, but it's no DKC2

I’m now going to drop some mild spoilers about this game’s ending, so if you’re thinking about actually playing Shadow of the Colossus, you may want to stop reading.

The ending to this game is insanity. Complete insanity. It’s not clear or understandable what happens or why it happened at all. I guess “open to interpretation” is the polite thing to say, but I’m going to stick with “insanity”. It's just so bizarre and abstract and doesn't serve to wrap up the game or conclude the story in any satisfying way. Just weird random crazy things happen to all of the characters. The end. I've heard ICO actually does have a really good ending, but Shadow of the Colossus has kind of scared me away from playing ICO. I still have it on my “games to play” list though, so maybe I’ll finish and review it one of these days, but don't count on it