Simple mechanics, straightforward goals, diverse bosses, beautiful landscapes. Very annoying camera control, repetitive strategies, uninspiring ending.

Wikipedia summary:

Shadow of the Colossus is a 2005 action-adventure game developed by Japan Studio and Team Ico, and published by Sony Computer Entertainment for the PlayStation 2.

It takes place in a fantasy setting and follows Wander, a young man who enters an isolated and abandoned region of the realm seeking the power to revive a girl named Mono. The player assumes the role of Wander as he embarks on a mission that might entail Mono’s resurrection: to locate and destroy the colossi, sixteen massive beings spread across the forbidden land, which the protagonist traverses by horseback and on foot.

Cited as an influential title in the video game industry and one of the best video games ever made, it is often regarded as an important example of video game as art due to its minimalist landscape designs, immersive gameplay, and emotional rendition of the player character’s journey. It received wide critical acclaim by the media and was met with strong sales compared to Ico, due in part to a larger marketing campaign.

Review

Setup

  • Version: PlayStation 5
  • Difficulty: Normal
  • Total playing time: 9 hours (based on PS5 save stats)

Comments

The game is very beautiful. The scenery and the views are amazing. They are very good for an old game, although I played the high definition remake released in 2018.

It was an interesting and quiet journey, the very few words coming only from the entity giving you the next target, or from Wander yelling for his horse. I would like to say that each colossus felt unique, but to be honest I felt like more than half were just the same fight with different ways of getting to the vulnerable spots.

A few, as noted below in the difficulty section, actually challenged me, but in ways that I felt didn’t feel like it was well explored.

Characters & Story

Wander is our main character and a quiet type. No words are spoken, except interjections and calls for his horse. There was no explanation given to what was happening, or why, or how. You can infer what is going on, and hope that what you are doing will be rewarding in the end, both for you and Wander.

It was not clear to me, at all, that Wander was getting progressively more “infected”, or “affected”, by the dark spirits. While it was obvious that something was happening due to the cinematic shown after each fight, I personally did not notice any changes in the character itself while progressing through the game.

The ending was not completely surprising, although it felt like a very chaotic and unnecessary twist of events. The group of riders arrives just in time after finishing the last fight, but are neither capable of fixing anything, nor from warning us of anything either. They arrive too late and can not influence what has happened. From my perspective, they only appear to give more context to the world and to what Wander has done.

The group tries to fight Wander in the demon form, and utterly fails. In fact, I do not think I did anything in that fight and the story progressed just the same. It made for a very bad feeling that it was completely unnecessary. Or, at least, it was unnecessary to have me suffering through that camera work and controls just to not achieve anything. It could have been a cinematic.

I felt the ending was bad and confusing. In fact, I felt bad for both Wander and the girl. She now has to live by herself in a vast area that has no connection to the outside world, while dealing with a baby and having no idea what just happened since there is nobody to explain it to her.

In fact, I completely missed the baby part when finishing the game, since it only appears after the credits roll out, and I was kind of disappointed with the end, so I just closed the game before watching everything.

Difficulty

The game did not feel hard at any point in the Normal difficulty. As the battle mechanics available to Wander are very simple and limited, it does not require too much of the player to get used to them.

The challenges came from learning each of the colossi weak spots, movement, and attack patterns. Most were straight forward and telegraphed, so it did not require much effort to learn, although taking some minutes to get the timings correctly was common.

For a couple of colossi, figuring out “external” mechanics was the hard part for me. With external, I mean something that had to be used within the environment to make the boss vulnerable. Since I played without hints, it took me a long time before giving up and enabling them temporarily to understand what was required for colossi XI and XV.

  • Colossus XI: at this point in the game, I had interacted with a total of zero extra items in the game. I had found what seemed to be some relics, but they were not really items that I could actively use or that the character would handle in a special way. Therefore, I found it very anti-intuitive that, seemingly out of nowhere, I suddenly had to pick up a torch to scare a boss away. Even after enabling the hints, I still had troubles to understand what was needed, since it did not immediately occur to me that I needed to interact with a new kind of item. Additionally, the boss did not seem to mind the big burning pyres at all, even though the hint said it was afraid of fire, so that also threw me off.
  • Colossus XV: even with the hints, it was still confusing and not intuitive for me. The hint only told you to get to a higher ground, but I spent a lot of time running around and trying to grab into walls and climb on the boss to jump away before, by pure luck, noticing the boss destroyed part of the building, making me able to reach top floors. It also did not help that the destroyed building parts would “regenerate” after a while, so if you were not paying attention you could easily miss that anything had changed at all.

For the final boss, colossus XVI, most of the challenge was testing my patience with the camera. The camera was the real final boss for me, and I seriously got close to quitting at that point. But overall, I liked the fight and thought it was fun and a bit different from the others, up until you got close and personal and then the mechanics repeated.

Menu & Minimap

Menu is very simple and I barely needed to use it, except for turning the hints off (or temporarily on). There was no minimap in the HUD, but there was a map menu. It was not as useful as I would have hoped, but it served its purpose well enough.

Music

The music had no score that would be remarkable for me in the long run. However, it felt organic and intensified each encounter. You could tell that it made sense and was intrinsically built into the game in a way that made it better. It just was not the type of music I would consider hearing on a playlist.

Pros

  • Stunning landscape, with beautiful scenery that goes through different “biomes”: giant water pools, waterfalls, deserts, vast green fields, forests, mountains, etc
  • Soundtrack really makes the difference during the fights
  • Some challenging fights, and some interesting mechanics, for a game of this age
  • The way some bosses required the surrounding map (like ledges, statues, building floors) to be used to your advantage was fun. Part of the fun was figuring out how to use them to make it work in your favor

Cons

  • The camera must have been one of the worse ones I have had the displeasure of dealing with. I can not recall the last game that made me so frustrated with its camera control
  • The ending was not satisfactory for me. It seemed to go for bittersweet, but felt cheap and convoluted. In retrospect, it might have been a bit telegraphed, but I still expected a bit more
  • The core mechanics were a bit over abused. Not every boss had very interesting interactions with the rest of the map and how to get an advantage, so a lot of them were just straight up climb into the big bad guy and stick it with the pointy end