Tea Leaves

Shadow of the Colossus

There really isn't much to say about Shadow of the Colossus that is all that different from what I said about Ico. The two games share many of the same strengths and weaknesses, and are clearly cut from the same stylistic cloth. If I were as disciplined as the game's designer, I would just walk away now. But, I think there are some aspects of the game that current reviews have missed. And, there is the whole matter of the boss battles. I bet you thought I was going to try and squirm out of that one. No such luck.

Less is More

Shadow of the Colossus, like Ico before it, is a barel and minimal game. It places the player in an overworld which is large and yet almost completely empty. It also provides the player with a small set of gameplay mechanics. You have your climbing, jumping, riding the horse, the sword and the bow and arrow. That's it. The game then presents you with a series of challenges that utilize these mechanics in progressively more complex ways. In addition, every challenge Shadow of the Colossus is placed within this world in an area with a fairly distinct environment and mood. There are desert areas, forest areas, water areas and so on. Finally, like Ico, the challenges in Shadow of the Colossus require the player to use their environment in clever ways in order to prevail.

Where the two games differ is primarily in the nature of the puzzles that the player must solve. In Ico, the goal is always to get from point A to point B. In Shadow of the Colossus, the goal is to find and put down the 16 colossi, one by one. The game never really strays from this core mission. There are no hordes of faceless enemies to rain down upon you. There aren't even the little inky black people from Ico.

Puzzles, not Bosses

Most of the press about this game has described it as a game consisting of "16 Boss Battles". I suspect that the people who wrote this did not actually play the game, or did not think abotu the game that much while playing it. It is true that the goal of the game is to destroy a collection of 16 huge lumbering creatures. But, the core problem to be solved in these encounters is not how to beat the colossus. You beat every one of the colossi in almost exactly the same way. The real problem is how to get on to the colossus and stay there long enough to finish your task. Instead of emphasizing combat, the game presents you with a variation on the "move from point A to point B" theme in Ico. Rather than navigating the static castle, the player must navigate a creature that is dynamic and in motion within its environment. It's as if the castle in Ico got up and started walking around.

Figuring out what to do takes careful study and reflection, and the game goes out of its away to make sure you always have a as much time as you need to study the situation and work out the puzzle:

1. No cheap kills. For the most part there are no cheap one hit kills. It is almost always possible to put yourself in a position where you can observe the situation without being damaged. In fact, as many of the reviews of the game have pointed out , some of the colossi won't even pay attention to you unless you whack them once or twice. This puts you in the interesting position of occasionally feeling guilty for doing what the game told you to do.

2. No health packs. If you rest, you heal automatically. This means that you can iterate different strategies almost endlessly without worrying about restarting the fight because you died.

3. Clues. When you don't understand the puzzle, the game will give you clues about what to do. In fact, it is generally the case that the game explicitly tells you exactly what you need to do to dispatch the creature in front of you. It just doesn't tell you how to get there.

4. Same rules all the time. In general you use the same mechanics and the same techniques to fight each each colossus. There is no special three eyed colossus that requires that you put a blue spike in each eye in order for a secret door on his body to open up so you can climb in and find the real colossus inside. The game designers only allow themselves to expand on things they have already shown you, and they only do that once or twice.

Thus, where big fights in most games are a twitchy combat-based deathmarch, the encounters in this game are environmental puzzles that are often filled with emotional ambiguity. Once you solve the puzzle, the final result of the encounter is a given. You just have to proceed in a measured and patient manner to the eventual finish, even if you can't really tell that the end is desirable.

But the real brilliance of the game is in the evolution of these puzzles into succesively more intricate set pieces. These sequences are not necessarily more difficult, but they do require that you combine elements of the game and its environments in more complicated ways. At the game's high points, the environments combine with your actions and the scale of the colossi themselves in ways that are truly breathtaking.

I found that I could enjoy all of these missions precisely because, with a few exceptions, they have none of the hateful characteristics of a Boss fight. They reward logical and methodical application of a fixed and known set of mechanics and rules. I was only tempted to peek at a walkthrough once or twice. In a game that bills itself as all bosses all the time, I think this is a singularly excellent achievement.

Small Annoyances

Just as Shadow of the Colossus shares many of the great aspects of Ico's design, it shares some of its weaknesse as well.The main character often acts in ways which make you question his mental acuity. It's hard to make him run in a straight line, he likes to jump instead of getting on his h horse, and he has an annoying habit of jumping in the wrong direction just when you'd rather not have him fall off the ledge to which you have spent the last twenty minutes climbing. This, combined with a sloppy camera makes some of the trickier platforming in the game harder and more punishing than they should be. Beware of Colossus Knee.

The horse is also something of a mixed blessing. While you can't help but develop an emotional bond to the horse, the creature is much like Yorda in Ico in that it can be difficult to make the thing move in the direction you would like it to move. In this sense, I think the horse shares in the mental feebleness of his owner.

Finally, the game uses an even more minimal savepoint system than most. In general this did not bother me, but as the encounters became more complicated and time consuming, I would have taken the ability to do a mid-level save as a sign that the game designers didn't hate me.

In the greater scheme of things, none of these problems is bad enough to keep you from playing the game.

The Rest

The rest of the main game consists of some extended cut scenes that set up the story, such as it is. These scenes add to the feeling of ambiguity about the tasks and goals put in front of the main character. After just a few of the early battles, one suspects that there is more going on than meets the eye. As the battles continue, this sense of doubt and foreboding builds, but you gain no additional insight until you get to the end of the game.

The end game presents the user with the most complicated battle in the game, and another long cut scene that shows you the rest of the story. The ending is satisfying, if a bit predictable. But, it does a good job of tying together the explicit narrative of the game with the "implicit" narrative of the colossus battles. In the end, the encounters with the colossi are the core of the game and the emotional core of the narrative, and this is how it should be.

Shadow of the Colossus stands as a testament to how much a video game can achieve by using a small number of elements in the most creative way possible. In this regard, it is a more than worthy successor to Ico, which the best compliment that I can think to give to a game.