“Shrine of Worship” – Shadow of the Colossus

The Chart-track chart commentaries I have been putting at the end of each post tend not to get involved in matters of quality. From Juiced to Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, it’s the sales numbers alone which have been the focus. For one week in February 2006, that all changed. “Sony’s critically acclaimed Shadow of the Colossus […proves] that there is room for beautifully realised and artistically creative IP at the top of the charts”.

It’s a good pointer for the category we are dealing with here, particularly in the kind of marketing terms which dictate the use of ‘IP’. Shadow of the Colossus is the equivalent of an Oscar-bait movie like Capote or an ambitious major label indie rock album like The Strokes’s First Impressions of Earth (both also released in the UK in early 2006 by Sony). Thinking back to Max Payne, it was not exactly the first game presented with artistic acclaim in mind. And Shadow of the Colossus’s diegetic magic sword pointing out where to go is not a million miles from the magic indicator lights of The Getaway. 

Indeed, at the top of the charts it was only two months since the last game to feature a minimalist interface, a strange land in which you did battle with giant creatures including one in the form of a gorilla, and an ending where you control a monster as it is defeated. But Shadow of the Colossus was so much more of a lasting critical success that it feels like the first truly successful version of something I’m going to encounter a lot more of.

The similarity to King Kong specifically is a bit misleading in that: 1) The lengthy development time of games and the steps to show them off along the way mean that it’s not unusual for their influences to show up even before they’ve been released; 2) Shadow of the Colossus’s Japanese release came before King Kong anyway; 3) Some of the similarity is the original King Kong movie having had seventy years as an influence that would unsurprisingly show up, directly or indirectly, in both. But Peter Jackson’s King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie is still a useful comparison point in determining what made Shadow of the Colossus stand out.

For all its minimalism in some aspects, King Kong was still game as roller-coaster ride, a single path taking in staged dramatic moments at every turn. Shadow of the Colossus is not. Neither is it the increasingly popular model of sandbox, or at least to the extent that it is, its sandbox is a barren desert. You can move freely around its washed-out world, but its emptiness is one of its defining features. There are spells when it feels like Fumito Ueda and Team Ico took the intro of Ocarina of Time with Link riding his horse across the endless landscape, and made an entire game just of that.

There is no battling with enemy crabs along the way; any collecting to do can happily be totally missed; there are no exchanged witticisms when your company consists of a dead woman and a mysterious deity in a gothic temple (whose combination of echoed, non-language speaking and subtitles works brilliantly to maintain mystery even as it is rather chatty for an ineffable omniscience). Seeking out the shrines dotted around the place lets you climb for a better view, save your game by kneeling at a memory-card-shaped stone, and get a tiny sliver of information in the location name your save appears as. Half-moon Canyon, Umbral Glade, Blasted Lands. And then there are the colossi.

The game’s sun-bleached austerity elsewhere makes every sense when confronted with any of them. Even playing after the onset of the next generation, they are a breathtaking sight. Blurring the lines between architecture and life, they are moving castles, primeval Transformers, divine beasts, all at once. While leaping around to not just move out of the way but attempt to climb upon them, Shadow of the Colossus manages to fit in all of the solitude and ancient wonder that gripped me in the original Tomb Raider while simultaneously boss-battling giants.

Each colossus has its own twist of setting or design, but some common themes. They generally try to shake you off and you have to find whatever grip you can and cling on for life, Wanda’s actions mirrored in having to grip the controller and hold down R1. You have to find the weakness that any reputable mythical creature should have, and exploit it with a bit of carefully targeted stabbing. All of this works really well with the relative simplicity of the game’s approach. As much as there is generally a large component of figuring out one intended solution (climb up the giant’s beard as he leans down, knock over the fire to scare them off the edge, make the colossus break his wristband by hitting the solid structure on the ground), it’s compensated by the semblance of life and the successful design of making just holding on and moving around such an enjoyable thing to do.

The same kind of overarching success applies to the story. Whatever some later trends might seem to indicate, the key to the narrative of Shadow of the Colossus is not that you as the player are led to do terrible things and then have that pointed out at you. That is set up by a story which plays by the rules of the Faustian bargain pretty fairly. Your character Wanda turns up with his magic sword at the beginning of the game in a temple in a strange land, and starts getting orders from on high for how to restore life to his unfortunate companion. It sets out the goal of the game in defeating the sixteen colossi. But before even that, it says there will be a price to pay. If you and he wrongly assume that the trials are the price, there’s soon much evidence suggesting otherwise, starting with the dark energy streaming out of each dying colossus and into Wanda.

What powers the narrative is a tremendous thematic unity that lines up perfectly with the gameplay focus. Much of the story is in effect told by the gigantic features and architecture of its vast empty lands. Everything is set up to make Wanda look tiny even before you get to the colossi towering over him, with the button on the controller dedicated to looking towards them presenting him in their shadow to best effect. You go through killing each of those magnificent creatures, one by one, and there could be a message there about triumphing against the odds. That’s certainly what the fights themselves and their heroic music emphasise. But as you repeat the ritual again and again, the downbeat aftermath and everything else ensure that the lasting impression isn’t of that triumph, but of its insignificance. Every step Wanda takes reinforces his powerlessness in the face of fate. The classic tragedy of Shadow of the Colossus is, indeed, beautifully realised.

The game and the discourse worked on me. When I got a PlayStation 2 a couple of years later, it was on the back of reading about Shadow of the Colossus (and Ico, and We Love Katamari) and perceiving it as my type of thing, more than it was to play the latest Final Fantasy and Gran Turismo games. I was as impressed as I hoped when I played it. These days, looking back at its week on top of the chart, it feels like an odd combination. It’s easy to imagine a game being released and praised with many of the same attractions as Shadow of the Colossus, the same simple focus and narrative effectiveness. It happens all the time in the indie space, even if you’re not just talking games directly inspired by Team Ico. It’s also easy to imagine a game being promoted to the top of the chart with the same kind of accolades and appeal to artistry as Shadow of the Colossus. That model has only been refined since. It’s just no longer so easy to imagine those two games being one and the same.

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Top of the charts for week ending 18 February 2006:

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