Shadow of the Colossus

🎮 PlayStation 2 ⏳ 15 hours ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ (5/5)

Minimalist Tragic Journey #

This is a hauntingly beautiful and minimalist action-adventure game that broke conventions when it launched. Developed by Team Ico (same ones that made ICO, another PS2 classic), it tells a sparse but emotional story of a young man named Wander who enters a forbidden land to revive a girl by slaying sixteen massive colossi. What makes it iconic is its atmosphere, a vast, lonely world with no traditional enemies or dungeons, just awe-inspiring boss battles that feel like puzzles.

Lonely Colossal Battles #

You can spend hours on end just exploring the world. Though it’s world is very empty at times, it still manages to make you curious enough to explore. Each colossus is a moving level of its own, requiring strategy, timing, and precision to climb and defeat, just like any other regular “boss rush” game out there. The controls can feel clunky by today’s standards, and the camera occasionally struggles, but the emotional weight, art direction, and music leave a lasting impact.

Poetic Lasting Mystery #

It’s a poetic experience rather than a conventional game, one that helped define games as art, and still to this day there are discussions in the community about what the game’s universe means, what the things which happen have to do with each other. The ending is one of the best things that inspire these kinds of discussions, since it is very open for interpretation, and this is one of the things I like the most about this game, or games in general, that likes to play around with this idea.