Beowulf, Interrupted

The world is vast and pretty and pretty empty, with only the occasional turtle or bird and maybe a save point shrine inexplicably sitting in the middle of nowhere. It’s got the washed out look of old super-8 film, or a dream or a two-lane highway somewhere in New Mexico. Half of Shadow of the Colossus is the simple act of traveling through it on horseback, watching the scenery slide by, wondering what’s going to be at the place you’re going when you get there. This is actually what moves everything forward. So, what’s next?
Because there’s no loot, no leveling, no stats, none of the latter day carrots games shove at us to wheedle us into staying seated for five more minutes, and five more minutes, and five more minutes. Your tools are spare and constant: a horse, a sword, a bow with infinite arrows. There’s something elemental, almost iconic about the simplicity.
As for the other half of Shadow of the Colossus, well, it depends on how you feel about bosses. Because, really, that’s all it is. So if you think of boss battles as obstacles between you and the rest of the game, you might lose patience once you find out there is no “rest of the game.” But these are boss battles at their best. They’re puzzles, usually simple, that require a bit of thought, some persistence, and maybe the occasional foray online to find someone else who figured it out. For the most part, Shadow of the Colossus is not here to confound you.
And what puzzles they are. The colossi are a triumph of artwork, looking old and odd, almost Aztec and often goofy, bearded or scowling or tired or lazy, usually with pinched little faces and bodies patched together from bits of stone and fur for you to cling to like a burr on a dog. They’re myths from a language you don’t know. Some of the colossi are thrilling, some are eerie, a couple are just plain annoying. But the sense of scale and bulk is superlative, a triumph of technology minus the gratuitous spectacle of a God of War.
It’s too bad the looping “dum dee dee dum!” music is a clumsily missed opportunity, particularly the way it gracelessly cuts in and out, swapping from “Here’s the part where you’re trying to climb on the colossus” to “Here’s the part where you’re actually climbing on the colossus,” and then back to “Here’s the part where you’re trying to climb on the colossus” when you fall off.
But like its predecessor, the sublime Ico, it just goes to show that not every game has to be an 80-hour sandbox of something for everyone. Sometimes beautiful, majestic, and mesmerizing will do just fine.

This article originally appeared in Computer Games Magazine #181