Shadow of the Colossus

There is nothing to kill between the fights. Lizards scurry along ledges, birds circle, fruit hangs from trees, and none of it will hurt you. Team Ico built an entire landmass and then declined to populate it, which in 2005 read as either a technical shortfall or an act of nerve. It was nerve. The Forbidden Land is empty because emptiness is the point: the ride out to each colossus is where the game does its quiet work, and the arrival is where it collects.

Sixteen encounters, each one a boss, each one also a level. That double function is the design's whole trick. A colossus is terrain that fights back, and the sword's beam of light points you toward it rather than telling you what to do once you are hanging off its shoulder by a fistful of fur. The grip meter governs everything — climb, wait, feel the beast shake, move when it stops. Wander's hands are the interface, and the animation sells the strain in a way that few games since have bothered to match. Agro, the horse, is famously stubborn to steer, and that is deliberate too: she has her own momentum and you negotiate with it.

The hardware buckles under the ambition. Frame rates sag when a colossus fills the screen, the bloom-heavy lighting smears, and the camera loses the plot in tight spaces. Anyone coming to the PS2 original after the remakes will notice within a minute. What survives intact is the sense of scale, because scale here is not a texture resolution problem, it is a problem of geometry and time, and both were solved on this machine first.

Ueda's script says almost nothing. A dead girl, a bargain with a voice in a ruined temple, a sword, sixteen creatures who mostly want to be left alone. The story is told by the black tendrils that pour into Wander after every kill and by what happens to his face over the hours. Killing a colossus is never celebrated. Several of them barely register you as a threat until you have already climbed to the weak point, and the music at the moment of the strike is closer to mourning than triumph.

It has been remastered twice and both versions are more comfortable to play. Neither has replaced this one, because the original's roughness — the strained framerate, the wilful horse, the grain over everything — is bound up with the loneliness the whole thing is built to produce. You leave the temple with a name and come back with less of one.