Shadow of The Colossus Guide

Shadow of the Colossus’s story begins with you believing that you are a brave, gentle boy who wants to save the girl he loves, who is dead. That’s why he carries her body through these desolate lands, to the shrine that he believes can bring her back to life if he undergoes a series of trials. As the game goes on, maybe you start to feel not so great about what you’re seeing transpire. These colossi don’t seem to be hurting anyone; in fact, many of them are thoroughly uninterested in you and seem only to be acting in self-defense. And there seems to be an ever-present sense of doom pervading the game. It all seems sad, not triumphant. At the end you learn a more plausible interpretation of the events on screen, which is that you are playing as a thoughtless little shit murdering 16 beautiful peaceful creatures to, against all good sense and verbal warnings, release a powerful demon on the earth who promises to bring your girlfriend back to life, but also kills you and wants to kill more people besides. The classic design of Shadow of the Colossus has stood the test of time without a trace of wear. Each of the 16 colossi are puzzles in and of themselves, and they ramp up from simple as you begin to learn the controls and mechanics, to deviously challenging and complex by the end. Likewise, having a minimal set of tools at your disposal – only a sword, a bow, and your awesome horse Agro – means that you need to master each one in order to take down the beasts. There are some cool upgrades that can be gained by completing the optional Time Attack modes, such as stronger weapons, different colored horses, and even a parachute that aids exploration. And while none of these are necessary to defeat any of the beasts, they provide some solid incentives to replay the fantastic encounters.

The gameplay is nearly identical to the original version of the game, aside from reworked controls. Progression through Shadow of the Colossus occurs in cycles. Beginning at a central point in a landscape, the player seeks out and defeats a colossus, and is then returned to the central point to repeat the process. Most colossi are located in remote areas, such as atop cliffs or within ancient structures. Players are able to choose from several options when playing the game. On a standard Playstation 4, the game runs at 30 frames per second at a 1080p resolution. On a PlayStation 4 Pro, the game can run either at a 1440p resolution (upscaled to 4K) at 30 frames per second, or at 60 frames per second at 1080p. The colossi prove to be intimidating creatures, but Wander is able to exploit their behavior, hidden weaknesses, and the environment to bring them down. He kills each one by stabbing glowing sigils in their fur, often located on their heads or torsos. After each colossus dies, its corpse is covered in a layer of shadow, and several black tendrils emerge from the colossus's body and embed themselves in Wander, rendering him unconscious. He is returned to the Shrine through unknown means, with a number of shadow creatures (equal to the number of defeated colossi) standing around his body. The camera pans to the colossus's idol, which implodes in a flash of light. The camera pans back to Wander - the shadow creatures have since vanished who looks up to the aperture to receive a hint about his next target from Dormin. Locating them in the world can sometimes be tricky your sword shines a beam in the direction of your next target as the crow flies, but it might be in the middle of a cave or a mountain range with only one hidden entrance. But mostly, the journey is for the journey’s sake, which is what’s so impactful about the simple act of riding your horse across the land there’s nothing to do besides look and listen, and the camera pulls out and swoops low, letting you take in the grand curves of a majestic cliff, stare up the towering heights of a distant waterfall, or peer into a dizzying canyon below a narrow rock bridge.

The story, fairy tale-like in its concision, hasn’t changed. A young man wishes to save a slain maiden from her cursed fate, so he sets off on horseback to a forbidden land. Within a decrepit castle, the young man finds a mysterious being with the power to revive the dead. Man and spirit make an agreement: In exchange for the maiden’s resurrection, the man must kill the kingdom’s lonely inhabitants, 16 ancient colossi some as tall as towers, others as powerful as battering rams. For the uninitiated, the game centres on Wander, a young warrior we think who travels to the Shrine of Worship to resurrect a young girl, Mono. Guided, or perhaps lured, by ethereal voices known only as the Dormin, Wander is directed to slay the Colossi roaming the ancient landscape, trading their lives for Mono’s. With each one felled, Wander is pierced by tendrils of darkness, awakening back in the shrine of worship, overlooked by shadows of their former majesty, judging you. Then you rise, and head off in search of your next victim. At a glance, Shadow of the Colossus can appear quite linear. The gameplay loop returns you to the Shrine of Worship after each encounter, points you at the next Colossi, and pretty much says “go get it”. The world is empty – there are no villages or people to interact with, no other enemies to fight, and even the Dormin only speak to you when telling you which titan to assassinate next. Yet it’s one of the most absorbing and fascinating virtual worlds ever created. Like most of Ueda’s games, specifics are left to the player to uncover or even make up themselves, from character motivations and backgrounds, to the history of this fantasy locale. The Colossi themselves are ancient titans, part golem, part living creature, hinting at a mystic purpose beyond understanding. The setting shows signs of having once been inhabited, with detailed stonework and ruined settlements. Yes, you can marathon the game and slay every Colossi in rapid succession, but it’s so much more rewarding to explore, and piece together your own personal mythology of this dark and mysterious world.

In Shadow of the Colossus, beating a boss prompts not triumphant music and a sense of accomplishment, but uneasy self-reflection. You play a skinny, clumsy young man who arrives in a beautiful, forsaken place with a limp woman on his saddle. Upon placing her upon an altar in an empty cathedral, a disembodied voice promises that she can be revived if the man finds and kills the 16 colossi imprisoned in this cursed land. These enormous beasts  thousands of times your size  take the forms of birds, shambling ogres, aggressive lizards, equine giants. Figuring out how to scale them is the challenge, clinging to handfuls of their black fur or hanging by the fingertips from their stone armour, searching for a route upwards. Driving a sword into their bodies, however, feels disconcertingly savage and uncomfortable. Defeating the colossi is not designed to feel good. You aren’t killing these creatures to save the world, or test your skill, or for any of the other reasons with which video games justify their violence .You’re hunting them because someone you love is gone, and you selfishly want them back. Locating them in the world can sometimes be tricky your sword shines a beam in the direction of your next target as the crow flies, but it might be in the middle of a cave or a mountain range with only one hidden entrance. But mostly, the journey is for the journey’s sake, which is what’s so impactful about the simple act of riding your horse across the land there’s nothing to do besides look and listen, and the camera pulls out and swoops low, letting you take in the grand curves of a majestic cliff, stare up the towering heights of a distant waterfall, or peer into a dizzying canyon below a narrow rock bridge. In an age before “walking simulators,” Shadow of the Colossus showed us the joys of downtime in a video game, the pleasure of contemplative solitude. Shadow of the Colossus benefits a lot from having a contemporary remake. When you spend so much of your in-game time just meditating on landscapes, it’s quite a pleasure to have them now look so detailed to the point of photorealism.

Once you reach a colossus, the battles, too, can begin as slow, contemplative experiences. You have to observe your environment and figure out how you might scale these massive beasts. Some of them walk slowly, ignoring you or regarding you with a detached skepticism. Some soar through the skies and must be pestered into even noticing your tiny form on the ground below. A couple of them, later in the game, will actually attack you, but in most cases you’re simply left alone to look at the colossus and think.The beasts’ weak points, where you can do serious damage with your sword, are in difficult-to-reach places, often (but not always) on the top of their heads. At first, it seems like it won’t be possible to get up there, but eventually you’ll figure out how either through pure observation, or through hints provided by a booming voice from the heavens (the same booming voice that told you to go kill all these things in the first place), or most likely through a combination of the two. Once you figure it out, the next step is to do it, to goad the colossus into moving into a certain position that will allow you to grab onto a patch of fur or some craggy part of its body that can serve as a handhold. This is where your stamina meter comes in; you can only grip its fur for so long, and occasionally it will try to violently shake you off, and you can hang on by holding the R2 button until your stamina gives out, at which point you must either find a good place on the colossus’ body to rest (and hope it doesn’t fling you away), or fall off to the ground and start again.  Likewise, having a minimal set of tools at your disposal only a sword, a bow, and your awesome horse Agro – means that you need to master each one in order to take down the beasts. There are some cool upgrades that can be gained by completing the optional Time Attack modes, such as stronger weapons, different colored horses, and even a parachute that aids exploration. And while none of these are necessary to defeat any of the beasts, they provide some solid incentives to replay the fantastic encounters.