Riding around on your beautifully animated, headstrong steed, you don’t really need any more reason to wander.
And, eerily – apart from your horse or the odd gliding hawk and creeping lizard – you’re the only living thing for miles around. And this world is peppered with the strange ruins of a lost civilisation tombs, towers, buildings, shrines. It’s a world of lush, grassy plains, vast canyons, raw deserts, misty lakes and crystal rivers, with murky forests pierced by sunbeams and caves that open up to reveal a hidden waterfall tumbling from a sun-dappled lake. Why? Firstly, because the land itself is one you’ll want to explore. Important note number two: that really isn’t as much of an issue as it sounds. Important note number one: finding and killing the colossi is the be-all and end-all of the game. All we do know, is that the warrior can find the colossi by focusing light from his shining blade, and that – while seemingly indestructible – each can be killed by finding and stabbing its hidden weak points. What purpose or threat do the colossi serve or pose? Again, we don’t know. If so, under instructions from a strange voice from the sky, he must travel the land and destroy 16 colossi.
Perhaps his desire is to bring her back to life. He takes the girl to an ancient, ruined temple, where he lays her down on an altar. He carries what looks like a sleeping, dead or dying girl.
A young warrior enters a strange land on horseback. To talk about why, we need to go back to the basic concept. Artistically, it’s everything its predecessor was a unique, gorgeous looking experience that can evoke such a real sense of wonder.īut as a game – as an article designed to entertain – it sometimes falls a little flat. It does try to do things that no other game has ever done before, and it succeeds more often than you might think. And these people won’t be bitterly disappointed by the finished result. Gamers in some circles need it to be a flawless, polished classic – a game that can carry its considerable ambitions to their limits and triumph. It’s a standard bearer for alternative, arty gaming. The problem is that Ico’s reputation has left Shadow of the Colossus with a huge weight of expectation resting on it. It’s as close as games get to works of art. Ico makes a mockery of that sort of careless hyperbole. When we talk about a game being beautiful, we normally mean it looks superb. It was a wonderful piece of stripped back storytelling and intelligent gameplay. Its characters – a courageous horned boy and a ghostly princess – had more soul and personality than just about any game characters I could mention, and the whole design was breathtaking. Its setting – a vast, gothic castle, it’s enormous, gloomy rooms and jagged ramparts – was an incredible piece of game architecture. Perhaps Ico leant heavily on the existing tropes of the platform puzzle game, but it did so with a style and atmosphere that few games have every matched. It received excellent reviews, was hailed as a next-generation masterpiece, and has since been acclaimed as one of the best games ever. Back in 2002, Sony brought us a strange Japanese fantasy game called Ico.
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