Shadow of the Colossus

In the opening cinematic of Shadow of the Colossus, the hero places a dead girl on an altar, asks to bring her back, and is told by a voice from the sky to kill all the colossi roaming the land.

The rest is entirely up to you to see it through.

In its simplicity and minimalism of design and play it feels like an 8-bit game. Your goal is killing 16 colossi, however, you are never forced. You hold your sword up to the sky and you can observe where to go. But you are free to detour as much as you like and explore.

Exploration is its own reward. Other games might cram their worlds with enemies and dangers every few meters. They'll put lots of little goals all around the world for you to discover and be rewarded. Mario's gold coins. GTA's packages. Banjo Kazooie's random useless shiny collectible number 12. Shadow of the Colossus gives you a big, empty space. No, a big, empty, beautiful space. It is less a game, and more an experience, something to spend time within on your own terms.

There are moments when this illusion is shattered. The HUD will start blinking with a warning blip (for that matter the HUD itself is distracting, but the flashing just makes it worse) and if "too much" time is spent in a battle, a detached voice dispatches advice. Rather extraneous things, feels like the work of executives or focus group testing and are not in the spirit of the rest of the game.

When I fought the first colossus, it was an exhilarating match of scale. I fumbled through the puzzle of getting to its head, and landed a stab. As if puncturing a high pressure valve blood streams out, and it all became rather horrifying. The camera swung around to its eyes as it struggled in pain to shake the hero off, and I saw the eyes of an innocent creature. The colossi will defend themselves, but they are not violent by nature.

Some colossi are very straight forward. You leap onto them and find new places to get higher up, a rock climber scaling an erupting volcano. Against others you have to observe the environment, and use it to your advantage; one fight involves a sequence of dominos. The worst battle requires steering a tediously slow waterlogged colossus. The best colossi are roller coasters, riding and flying for dear life as you make your way to its weak point.

As exhilarating as it all is, killing the colossi became something I began to dread. As each one falls, the hero gets stronger and stronger, but it's clear from his face that it's taking a toll on his body. The cost of reviving the girl is life, of not just the colossi, but the hero as well.

And so I took it slowly, no more then one colossus a day. Letting it all sink in. I took refuge in exploring the world. Finding awesome vistas over cliffs. Riding across expansive plains. Through canyons and dunes. Enough simulated natural beauty to take my mind off the colossi. But it can't last forever. Eventually I had seen all there was to see, and so it was time to get on with it.

When it's all over, the roles are suddenly reversed. I finally understood crushing inevitability just as the 16 colossi I felled. At several points during the ending, you suddenly gain control over the hero. You can wreck as much damage as you can and struggle all you like, but in the end, there is only one fate for the hero, and you are forced to accept it, kicking and screaming.