Shadow of the Colossus is the game that people who do not usually play games are most likely to cite as the thing that changed their mind. It is also the game that generates the most earnest arguments about whether games can be art, and about what we mean when we say something is beautiful. These are not accidental outcomes.
Fumito Ueda made exactly the game he intended. The emptiness of the Forbidden Lands is deliberate. The sixteen colossi are not difficult in the conventional sense: they are puzzles that happen to also be enormous living creatures. The ending is what it is because Ueda designed it that way, knowing what it would do to the player. This is one of the most intentional games ever made, and it shows.
What Happens
You are a young man named Wander. You carry a girl named Mono to a forbidden shrine, where you are told by a disembodied voice that killing the sixteen colossi will restore her life. You kill the sixteen colossi.
There is almost nothing else in the game. No towns, no NPCs to talk to, no items to collect beyond a few optional lizards. Just the empty landscape, your horse Agro, and sixteen enormous creatures living their lives in isolated corners of the world until you arrive to end them.
The minimalism is the statement. Every other game of the era filled space with content. Ueda removed content and put moral weight in the vacuum. The colossi are not enemies: several of them are passive until attacked, wandering their territories without aggression. You initiate every fight. The game’s refusal to let you forget this is what earns its reputation.
The Combat as Puzzle
Each colossus has a weak point that can only be reached by climbing, and climbing them requires reading their form, finding the handholds, managing your grip stamina while they try to shake you off. The moment when you first reach a weak point and drive your sword in, the camera slowing, the creature’s cry filling the room, is one of the most deliberately uncomfortable moments of triumph in gaming.
Uncomfortable is the right word. The sound design for the colossus deaths is not the sound of victory. It is the sound of something dying.
How It Holds Up
The PS2 version is technically rough: the frame rate drops to the low teens in complex fights. The PS4 remake (2018) by Bluepoint is a complete visual reconstruction that preserves every mechanical element while running at 60fps. It is the version to play now, one of the best remakes ever made.
What the remake cannot change is the pacing, which is genuinely slow by modern standards. Getting to each colossus involves riding across the landscape for several minutes. This is intentional. Whether you read it as meditative or boring will determine how much the game reaches you.
Shadow of the Colossus is not for everyone. It is, more than almost any other game, for the specific kind of player who wants a game to make them feel something they were not expecting. Twenty years on, it still does.
