Shadow of the Colossus

I have this problem with videogames sometimes. I become so caught up in the carrot-on-a-string elements of a game that I don't stop to look around and experience the world I've elected to enter. Videogames become something I need to complete or finish (or even play enough of to write a review) instead of something to enjoy and appreciate. This is why I so often don't finish games, and why I initially gave up on Shadow of the Colossus: games start to feel like work, specifically homework. I feel like I have to finish a game in order to competently talk about it. I feel like I have to play certain games because everyone else is, or they games in question are beloved critical classics that didn't sell well but offer something very different and compelling from most other videogames.

So, then, let me just say this: if we really want videogames to be accepted as the new form of art, of expression, that they are, we need more games like Shadow of the Colossus. Though it has a story that could potentially be told in another medium, it couldn't be experienced/told in exactly the same way. And that's the key: the translation of this game to another artform would change it irrevocably.

I keep coming back to the argument that they had on one of the 1UPFM Backlog segments about videogames as a medium, and how the one thing that videogames can do that others can't is interactivity. I absolutely agree with Ryan O'Donnell on this point, because I truly believe videogames as an artistic medium, rather than an entertainment medium, will only continue to evolve if they focus on making the story interactive and embedded in the game world somehow. Not all videogames should do this, of course, because not all videogames are trying to tell a story, or at least are so focused on one. Narrative driven videogames, however, should, in my opinion. I felt such connection to the Shadow of the Colossus world and story because I was the one discovering it all and interacting with it. Moreover, even though there are cutscenes that help tell the story, you can always, at the very least, move the camera around.

As with Ico, I think Shadow of the Colossus quickly divides its audience into people who just want to have fun while a story is spoon fed to them and people who want to experience something and exist in an environment, exploring it, in order to get most of the story. I wouldn't consider this game fun to play, but as an interactive experience, it's one of the best the medium has to offer. Much like Silent Hill 2, I can easily forgive and overlook the shortcomings and awkwardness of the "gameplay" aspect in order to get the fulfilling environmental, atmospheric, and implicit narrative. Speaking of which: that the cutscenes in the game have interactivity, however limited, is a step in the right direction for an artform long reduced to aping other mediums to convey information.

If early RPGs, text adventures, and adventure games represented videogames borrowing from books to be art; if games with gorgeous graphics (2D graphics count, haters) represented borrowing from paintings and visual art to be art; if games like Metal Gear Solid represented borrowing from movies to be art...then games like Shadow of the Colossus represent videogames realizing their potential as an artistic medium on their own unique ground: interactivity. Note that this is not a snobbish way of saying that this automatically makes these kind of games superior. Maybe Shadow of the Colossus (or 'art' games in general) is not a game that you will enjoy. This doesn't mean you're a bad person or that you're stupid. After all, not everyone likes watching art films, reading difficult fiction, or going to museums to look at paintings. It's simply an artistic outgrowth of a form of entertainment, and it's endlessly exciting to see an artform in its infancy produce something so grand.

The two things that this game gets right, that I would argue no other game has gotten right before or since, are a sense of scale and a feeling of utter solitude. Both of these things are tied into exactly what makes Shadow of the Colossus so brilliant, so we'll examine them separately.

Upon encountering most Colossi, your reaction will likely be “wow, how am I going to defeat this thing??” Though your sword will reveal their weak points—a trope of boss battles that have been in videogames for years—it's never immediately obvious how you can get to and assault those weak points. People have criticized Shadow of the Colossus for being “only” a series of 16 boss battles, but that is needlessly reductive. As the common saying about this game goes, the Colossi “are” the levels. Even the ones that aren't towering bipedal creatures are 'levels' in the general sense of the word. They're like a combination of a linear platformer 'level' and a puzzle game. You 'solve' each Colossus fight as much as you 'get to the end of the level.' And given the enormous scale of most of the Colossi in the game, the enormity of your task is directly proportional to how satisfying it feels when you take them down. Seeing the comparatively tiny Wander take down these huge beasts, after being initially intimidated by them, is utterly compelling even though the sneaking suspicion that what you're doing isn't totally “good” quickly becomes a walking and then a running suspicion.

The other half of Shadow of the Colossus's gameplay is getting to the various Colossi. Getting lost in most 3D games of this sort is usually a frustration, but, here, it is a kind of reward. Even discounting the fruit trees and lizards that boost Wander's life and grip meter, respectively, the unforgettable experience of traversing the game's world feels like an optional, but wholly complete, gameplay system. Fighting the Colossi may be the game's big draw, but I would argue moving through the world is equally important. From the brilliantly realistic way that Wander's horse, Agro, acts and is controlled, to the breathtaking but completely barren (note: barren meaning “nobody else is there”, not “wastelands”) scenery you see, Shadow of the Colossus contains one of the most complete and 'natural' worlds in all of videogame history. In most games, when you happen upon a cool looking chunk of architecture, or a clearing in a forest, or some such thing, you have been conditioned to expect that some tangible game reward is there. To get a bit behind the scenes on you, a programmer wouldn't take the time to detail such an area unless there is something there. It's a waste of time and money to do this. Not so for Shadow of the Colossus. As with the behavior of the Colossi themselves—which greatly vary in their aggressiveness and reactive-ness to stimuli, just like animals in real life—everything is put into the game just to be there and to feel natural. There are forests, waterfalls, beaches, and desert expanses that serve no game purpose other than to exist and be discovered.

Shadow of the Colossus is an extraordinarily lonely game on top of all this. By the time you finish the game, you'll have spent hours with just your horse, riding around the world and trying to find paths to the next Colossus. This might sound frustrating on paper, but the game is purposely designed to evoke solitude and loneliness in the player. Though dread quickly supersedes the feeling, your immediate reaction upon seeing a Colossus is one of relief: finally, another living thing!! As someone who enjoys being alone, I found this game to be surprisingly satisfying for the amount of time you go without hearing or seeing anything other than the environment and your horse. Some have compared this feeling to the Tom Hanks movie, Castaway, and I think it's pretty apt, especially when you realize you're personalizing and sympathizing with a horse, albeit probably the most realistic horse in videogame history.

I'd like to close by saying that the story of the game is one of the best the artform has to offer even though there isn't technically that much of it. But due to its minimalist style, less is indeed more. The game, like a good art film, trusts you to fill in the blanks yourself. It's also open to interpretation, as most great works of art are, and once you really start to question and think about the implications of the story line, the motivations of the characters, and the results of your actions in the world, you're left with a lot of things to chew on. If most gamers of my generation entered the artform through Mario, in which you were obviously the good guy, saving the helpless princess love interest, then Shadow of the Colossus is, arguably, the point where everything became a little more complicated, and grew up a lot. In this game, you're maybe not a good guy, doing maybe not good things, to save a girl (we're not sure if she's a princess, a priestess, or just an average person) without really knowing our motivation for doing so (she could be our love interest, or a girl we love from afar, or our sister, or something else entirely).

Well, OK, the motivation of the game is, simply, love. Love is the only thing that could cause what is ostensibly an average guy to try to take on these huge beasts, potentially losing his life in the process. Good or bad, what Wander does is for his love of this girl, and that's something that I don't think we, as the player coming to this world from the outside, need explained to us. We've all been crazy enough due to love to try the impossible. So even if we, as the player, have only a vague idea of our motivation in the game, we understand and sympathize with Wander because we've been there. After awhile, I wasn't questioning whether Wander was doing good or bad; I felt like, he's in love, and I've been in love, and good or bad doesn't come into the issue when he is trying to help the one he loves. It's very rare that a videogame can make me relate to a character on a pretty fundamentally human level while not knowing anything about him or her otherwise. And that, if nothing else, proves to me that Shadow of the Colossus is art, and is one of the best videogames ever made.