Shadow of the Colossus
Oct 11, 2005
Shadow of the Colossus isn't a difficult game to sum up. Explore a vast, largely deserted landscape searching for a series of 16 vast colossi to kill in order to restore your lady friend to life. All you have for guidance is a disembodied voice in a huge stone temple, and all you have for companionship is your horse. If that doesn't sound like much fun you're in for a surprise, because it's the recipe for one of the most creative and unusual games of the year.
From the team previously responsible for critical smash Ico, an achingly emotive tale of rescue and dependence, Shadow of the Colossus is an action-adventure stripped down to its skeleton. You carry a sword and a bow; your health bar regenerates if you're hurt, and you can ride the horse to get about more quickly. The only interface component that's unusual is your stamina -- rather than a bar, it's a circle that shrinks as you use it, and quickly grows as you rest.
As you ride around searching for your next colossus, you'll find the landscape to be a lonely place. Shadow of the Colossus doesn't feel the need to litter itself with throwaway monsters or incidental enemies -- you fight the colossi, and that (except for a few harmless lizards and a bird or two) is it. It's a huge place, and includes terrain from grassy plains to mountains, dark forests, and hidden lakes.
Doesn't this emptiness make it dull? Far from it: it makes it eerie. After a while you'll start to feel uneasy even at the sight of your own horse approaching. Subtle sound and graphical touches underline the sense of isolation, and the contrast between the stark, bright world and the black, violent vastness of the colossi is tremendous. Shadow of the Colossus' sparseness is a real strength.
These colossi are nothing if not varied. You'll see two-legged and four-legged ones. You'll see ones that fly, and ones that swim. You'll see ones that shoot poison gas at you, others that try to crush you with vast clubs, and others that try to kill you with electric attacks. Imagine 400-foot black-armored Pokemon, and you'll be... well, nowhere near the colossi, but that's beside the point.
Their weak spots are conveniently highlighted with glowing symbols. Reaching them is the trick, and each one is different. Here's an early example: faced with a four-legged, armadillo-like colossus, you have to shoot arrows into the sole of one of its feet as it tries to crush you. The colossus will stagger in pain, giving you the chance to leap onto its wounded leg, hanging on to a patch of fur. From there, you must scale the beast, hanging on between bouts of
shaking, and reach its vulnerable spot on top of its head.
And this is just one of the monsters you'll face. Figuring out the way to take them down shares more with puzzle games than action adventures, and each colossus is different. Some require close observation to pick out a route to the top. Others require you to explore your environment, looking for some feature of the landscape to use against them. Still others just require sheer courage and commitment.
All the time you're hanging on, your stamina bar is dropping. You must plan your ascent carefully, either to give you spots to rest without fear of being flung off, or to reach the top fast enough to avoid the problem. Once you're there, you have to time your hits, both to charge-up your attack and not be caught off-guard and thrown to the ground.
While your character, his horse and the landscape are beautiful, it's the colossi that steal the show. Vast and altogether convincing, they're impressively detailed up close, covered in small graphical touches that make them very lifelike. Each colossus' scale and power is captured with outstanding animations -- you can feel the weight of their limbs, and the awe-inspiring power of their ponderous attacks.
Sadly, it all gets a little too much for the engine here and there. Catching the lighting effects at the wrong angle can cause the framerate to dip noticeably. And unfortunately, the same problem of poor detail on middle-distance objects that plagued Ico is present here. Grit your teeth and ignore it, because there's far more that's right about Shadow of the Colossus's graphics.
Once you're fighting a colossus, the camera is perfect. No, really. It's almost as if the camera knows where you're going before you move, and highlights your destination in readiness. When a colossal limb does get between the camera and the action, it's just more effective. After all, when a skyscraper-sized beast is doing everything it can to throw you off its back, you'd expect things to get a little chaotic.
16 colossi doesn't sound like very many. Exploring the map hunting for the next one can be as much a part of the game as the action, but it's true to say that this is not one of the longest games around. Passing it over on this basis would be a shame, because Shadow of the Colossus offers an intense and concentrated experience that's hard to match. Ico players will be nodding in agreement, remembering how much heartache that game managed to fit into its relatively brief duration.
Shadow of the Colossus isn't Ico. But in terms of the way it can arouse and manipulate the emotions of its player, it's not far off. It'll be another one of those games people cite as an example of the art of the video gaming medium, and its few mechanics mean there's very little to get between the player and the dark, hulking beasts of the designer's imagination. Original, gripping, and outstandingly produced, Shadow of the Colossus is not to be missed
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