Most colossi aren’t even aggressive, and the ones that do make the first move are usually guardians who don’t chase Wander outside their territory. Wander accepts Dormin’s challenge without hesitation, but we might not feel quite so comfortable. We’ve got to press the buttons and kill the colossi whether we understand the context or not. We’re forced to piece together hints and vague dialogue in order to understand even the basics.īut here’s the rub: we’re still the ones holding the controller. He and other characters introduced later clearly understand more than we do – Mono’s identity, the true nature of Wander’s ancient sword, and the significance of the land in which the game takes place. Wander, while silent, is no self-insert player-character with amnesia. Even at the end of the main game, we know very little about the characters in Colossus, and even less about the setting. My summary above leaves out far less than you might imagine. It’s not just the world that feels empty and spare. The colossi only appear in a fixed order, and there are whole swathes of the world that the player will never see through unless they deliberately go out of their way to do so. Occasionally an eagle flies overhead, or a lizard skitters across your path. Forget bustling towns, wandering bandits or random enemy encounters: Colossus takes place amid miles and miles of (admittedly beautiful) desert and grassland, dotted with crumbling ruins and shrines. Mechanics-wise, this is a game focused on the bare essentials, and it realises them extremely well.Īnd yet, the game world itself is enormous and almost completely empty. Apart from that, there are no new abilities awarded or levels to be gained. Wander’s stamina grows slightly with each defeated colossus, allowing him to climb or hold on to surfaces for a little longer. There are no formal side-quests and no new items in the main game beyond the sword and bow that he starts with. The next colossus is identified, Wander finds it, works out its weakness, and kills it before being warped back to the temple to start on the next opponent. The stage is set and the premise is simple. Arriving at a temple in the centre he calls upon a spirit called Dormin who claims that, if Wander can kill sixteen colossi, there is a chance that Mono can be brought back to life. In it, a boy, Wander, arrives in a desolate land carrying the body of a dead girl called Mono. Shadow of the Colossus was released in 2005 for the PS2 to instant critical acclaim. Play Colossus and you’re unlikely to forget that you’re playing a game, but that’s the whole point. When I first played it, what struck me most wasn’t the enemy design or the music, but the game’s use of alienation, rather than immersion. It’s one of those unqualified masterpieces that seems to score full marks in whatever aspect you care to look at. Game development has spent a long time pushing towards immersion – a feeling not just of being engrossed in the game, but that being able to suspend our disbelief and become part of it. READ MORE: 16 years later, ‘Obscure’ still teaches lessons on co-op horror done right.The goal is to make a world so deep and flexible that the player-character can do almost anything they like without hitting an invisible wall that breaks the spell, taking us ‘out of the game’ and back to the real world, controller in hand. Many of the AAA blockbusters of the last few years have taken player agency as a core tenet of their design. When we play, we have a degree of freedom to choose what happens. What makes a game a game? One answer is player agency – we are participants in the action, not passive observers.
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