Have You Played?: Shadow of the Colossus

The video games industry has found itself in a bit of a quandary in the last few years, stuck between the figurative rock and a hard place. On one hand, new technology like Move and Kinect are trying to attract a market, or on the other they provide the comfort blanket of the inexplicably successful Call of Duty and Gears of War series, where you are the leader of a gritty military unit, saving the world from aliens/insects/Russians (delete as appropriate) and everything looks like it’s been sepia stained through a coffee filter. Whenever this suffocating layer of ‘gritty realism’ (a phrase used so much it ought to be taken out behind the sheds and shot) gets too much I boot up one of my favourite games Shadow of the Colossus; a classic released in the PlayStation 2’s heyday in 2006.

The game links on to a previous game Ico, but new gamers (such as myself at the time) do not miss anything. The protagonist enters a shrine in an abandoned land with a seemingly dead girl on the back of his horse, and in order to resurrect her he has to defeat 16 colossi (colosses, colossusses?) scattered round this land. Every time he does mysterious black tentacles knock the hero into unconsciousness, which would make anyone who had half a brain cell aware that this was not exactly a plan from the 'School of Cunning Thinking', but for our hero it’s "Bombs Away"!

The gameplay in Shadow of the Colossus is simple. There are 16 huge monsters of various shapes and sizes; one by one you ride your horse to where they are and kill them, usually by climbing onto their furry bodies, clambering up and administering sword-shaped relief to various pressure points. There are no side missions of quest; you merely ride your (very well-controlled) horse from colossus to colossus, stopping at the central temple between each mission. Holding onto a colossus as it shakes around trying to throw you off like mild dandruff or as it flaps through the air is an exhilarating experience and one truly unmatched within the realm of video games. Merely getting onto them requires different tactics every time.

Yet as the game drags on, a little nagging voice in the back of your head grows ever clearer. The colossi (let’s stick with that) don’t at first attack you, instead going about their normal business. You have to goad them into attack by peppering them full of arrows and even then they swat you away like a mild irritance. Gradually it dawns on you that, like I Am Legend (the book, not the rubbish film) you are the bad guy in all of this, killing these beautiful creatures for a rather selfish purpose. Whether that was the intent of the game is uncertain but there is no doubt that the Colossi are beautiful. Bits of scenery and trees cling to them like particularly nasty pimples; they move and turn as fast as articulated lorries, filling the screen with their vastness.

Shadow of the Colossus was a sleeper hit and there is no reason that, if you didn’t play it when it came out, you can’t now. It is a majestic game that pushes the graphical capability of the PS2 to its limit, but its most impressive feature is its minimalistic, incomparable gameplay.

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