Shadow of the Colossus Review

This review originally appeared in E157, Christmas 2005.

There are an awful lot of things wrong with Shadow Of The Colossus, but they all fall into just two categories. The first are the straightforward things that suffer from Ueda's team having bitten off more than it can chew: the framerate that drops to a dreamy stutter; the adaptive music that jars from one track to another; the platforming control scheme that simply isn't always capable of attaching a moving person to a moving monolith; the camera that fails to match up to the prodigious challenge of keeping both wanderer and colossus in sight at the same time. These are the simple failings of the game, and how much they damage your enjoyment of it will depend rather on your response to the second set of problems - especially since it begins to become apparent they aren't problems at all.

Take Agro, the wanderer's magnificent mount. The detail on his mane and tail may look a little low resolution by current standards, but his overall form and animation are beguiling. He isn't just a convincing portrayal of a horse, he's a convincing portrayal of a specific horse: handsome, weighty and a little intimidating at close quarters. But as soon as you take the reins, it's easy to be disappointed. Control - a basic point'n'squirt system - is clumsy, crude and unpredictable, and his majestic grace is undermined by being banged into cliff walls and tight corners with an ungainly thump. But, as the game's first few hours slip by, something subtle and seductive happens. You learn that Agro isn't badly implemented, just a little badly behaved: headstrong and independent, he isn't always going to go where he's led. You notice that, actually, he's a rather bigger horse than the wanderer seems used to riding, causing him to shift a little side-saddle when left idle, to ease the ache in his hips. You notice that Agro is intelligent enough to manage simple pathfinding himself, taking responsibility for both of you across crumbling bridges. And since, by then, the game's overpowering sense of solitude and emptiness has started to sink into your bones, his moments of spirited disobedience are as welcome as his screams of terror when he sees you thrown flying by a lazy swipe of a colossal hand.

Or take the game's stultifying structure: arriving at the central temple structure, it's soon discovered that the wanderer's purpose in this strangely lifeless landscape is to return to life the woman that he loves. To do so, he discovers he must destroy the 16 great colossi that wander its plains and sleep in its caves. Once one is defeated, he is returned automatically to the temple and given his clue to seek out and destroy the next: 16 times over without variation. Finding each is far from simple, but there's no science to the task beyond simply pointing yourself in the right direction and taking the time to traverse the game's almost entirely empty landscape. There's nothing else to find, no interruption in the pace or pattern of search, kill, return. But again, as you relinquish traditional expectations of how videogames work and surrender to the otherworldly atmosphere, this starts to be a story in itself. The space is so vast, the muted beauty of the world so varied and elusive, that travelling through it becomes the tale the game has to tell. The lack of life - aside from the birds which follow your progress like gulls follow a ship and the lizards you can kill to enhance your strength - stops feeling like a lack of detail and more like an expression of the world's oddly dormant state; it becomes hard to shake the impression that the land itself is watching you, waiting to see how it will be changed by your actions. And that tension is amplified over and over by the looping structure of the game. It was obvious from the first images released that destroying the magnificent colossi was going to be a triumph tempered with regret and guilt, but that anxiety builds to an almost unbearable pitch as you skewer one after the other to their monumental quicks.

But beyond those things - of the rules it breaks through ineptitude and the rules it breaks from a determination to forge something new - there's not much that can be said about Shadow Of The Colossus. Not because there aren't pages to be written about the designs of the colossi, the wisdom of some of the puzzles involved in defeating them, or the deliberately ambiguous implications of the story (see 'Bridging the gap'), but because this is a game with so little content that to discuss specifics would be to tarnish an experience that needs to be approached with as few preconceptions as possible. Even the screenshots accompanying this review have been taken to avoid giving more than a couple of hints as to the sights the game contains. This is, as it ought to be, a game like no other before and, as it was always going to be, one that isn't perfect. But an achievement this colossal was always going to cast some shadows of its own. [8]