It’s October 2005. Your PlayStation 2 has been with you for a few years now, and at this point you’ve got a pretty good sense of what most games have to offer. After all, genres and stories haven’t yet discovered their full potential, and developers have mastered a formula you and your gamer peers know and love. They set expectations and more or less deliver. Hell, the PS3 is coming out next year, and that’s surely going to blow expectations out of the water.
Then comes Shadow of the Colossus, (2005) (SotC) and you don’t know it yet, but it’s going to change everything.
SotC is simple in concept: Wander, a blank-slate protagonist, must defeat 16 colossi across the Forbidden Lands with his trusty steed Agro, to resurrect a girl named Mono. The worldbuilding and plot are short and sweet, leaving the vast, empty wilderness to carry the narrative through environmental storytelling — and let me tell you, it’s beautiful. The PS2’s graphics weren’t anything special, but this game’s rich landscapes evoke a time long past: an ancient, afflicted land you are scraping through the memory of. Even in my youth, it had the effect of forcing a sense of melancholy and nostalgia I would not yet learn to appreciate for years to come.
And that vastness is not just in the terrain, in the weather and sound design, and reductive game mechanics. No, the simplicity itself evokes a sense of humility, dwarfing the player and Wander with responsibility and the weight not just of his solemn task, but of something far greater hanging in the balance, going unspoken. Each colossus is unique, presenting challenging encounters, more like puzzles than actual fights, and often waiting for you to approach. Lonesome challenges lingering on the horizon as you are guided to them, knowing where you ought to head, but in no rush to get there.
Through themes of spiritualism and history, SotC invites the player to think — to ponder, introspect, philosophize. Looking back 20 years at how easy it would have been to skip a game for a console about to be replaced, the question emerges: what was it that captivated audiences across generations?
Some developers were trying their hand at storytelling, yes, but video games as an art medium weren’t something anyone was really considering yet.
Then, the workhorse that is Fumito Ueda and Team Ico decided to stroll through, cement their reputation off of just one other release alone, and then launch SotC. Learning from the commercial failings of Ico (2001), they built on what worked, and shook the industry for decades.
And I do mean decades. We aren’t just looking back at some cult classic. SotC was so successful that Team Ico has released only one other project in the past 20 years. They’ve got new things on the horizon, sure, but the demand for a re-release or remaster of SotC has always been so high, that even the latest version in 2018 was met with renewed critical success, despite being nearly the same product over a decade later.
This game could give Bethesda’s Skyrim (2011) a run for its money in terms of how often they re-publish it. The difference? Exclusivity.
Team Ico has no intention of SotC crossing platforms any time soon, and this has the effect of rendering SotC a sort of ephemeral title: well received, but no longer easy to play or get your hands on.
You’d think people would’ve moved on by now, less passionate about a 20th birthday already come and gone. But no — the forums are lively, and the video essays and TikToks keep getting better (seriously, what are they feeding these editors?). Is it just nostalgia? I don’t think so. I loved this game without playing it at release, so it’s not childhood fondness or overhyped reputation. It’s that good.
And maybe that’s the real secret. It isn’t just nostalgia, hype, or even the sheer artistry of the landscapes and colossi. It’s the intentionality — the patience — that Team Ico poured into every frame and mechanic. Their projects always feel methodical, personal, like they were crafted with the quiet confidence that someone out there would find meaning in them. Even when wildly popular, SotC manages to feel like it was made just for you. That’s rare. That’s why it endures. It’s not just that Ueda treated video games as art before most others dared — it’s that he did so with a kind of intimacy that makes the player feel seen, even across decades.
I could go on and on about SotC as a piece of literary genius. But others have said it better than me, and who’s got the time, really? I’ve got a game to replay. Talk to me in another 20 years.
