Shadow of the Colossus

A frustrating and majestic game.

Reading through my review of Ico, almost all my reactions there are relevant here. It's a beautifully, sometimes breathtakingly realized world (in 4K or 60Hz HDR on PS4 Pro) but with no real rewards for exploration. It screams for some open-world gameplay, but instead you spend many, many minutes galloping from boss to boss across an evocative yet barren and empty landscape.

The whole game is a series of 16 bosses. That's it. There is absolutely no other gameplay. Much of the combat involves hanging on to dear life while the colossi try to shake you off. It's basically like riding a bull in a rodeo (two colossi actually resemble bulls). Still, you do need different tactics to defeat each one, and sometimes must make use of the environment. It's ... fine. Not the best gameplay ever, but quite polished within its limitations.

Combat aside, the colossi are, for the most part, delightful. They're not very diverse, but still each has its own special "thing" going on. The physics of their movements are marvelously fluid, and it's all especially impressive when you consider it was achieved on the PS2.

Controls are, as in Ico, miserable, even for the PS4 remake. Your worst enemy is not the colossi, but the crap camera. Horse riding is a tragicomedy: it's like steering a broken boat that loves to slam against the rocks so that it can be broken again. You stupid, stupid horse. I want to kill you.

But somehow, as with Ico, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. There's something to the bare, almost non-existent story, the silent landscape scattered with the ruins of an ancient civilization, and the minimalistic gameplay, that strikes a specific, if faint, emotional chord. I didn't enjoy this game very much, but I do not regret experiencing it.