Sometimes, You Really Can Go Home Again: Shadow of the Colossus - An Introspection

Perhaps its story - that of a boy travelling to a forbidden land in order to restore life to his lost love - will never be lauded as ‘unforgettable.’ But the tale of Shadow of the Colossus is far more than it’s plot betrays. It is not simply a story of love, and the desire to bridge the gap between life and death. It is a story of companionship, between a young man and his horse: an obedient, dependable creature, who travels with you into the shadows of the beasts themselves. It is a story of impossible odds, as creatures seemingly made of the earth itself rise to combat you, to halt you in your attempt to raise the woman you love. Ultimately, it is a tale of grand betrayal, and the whim of a power you cannot understand.


Though released during the later years of the Playstation 2’s lifespan, Shadow of the Colossus, like it’s predecessor Ico, was in many ways far ahead of its time. Within this beautiful, forbidden land, little lives aside from you, and Agro, your faithful horse. Lizards crawl between the rocks, hiding in the shadows and the nooks and crannies of the landscape; birds will take wing from the trees and launch themselves into the sky, fleeing your approach. But there are no other humans to be seen, and no quarry save for the colossal beasts of the earth themselves. The landscape is not plagued by people who exist solely to offer ambient dialogue, nor any who would ask for your help, giving you naught by a meagre reward in turn. You are alone. But you do not feel alone. Your horse is rarely more than a whistle away, and even during those few times Agro cannot reach you, there is the monstrous size of the beast you are hunting to contend with. You cannot help but notice you are one of few living creatures in this forbidden land, but you never feel as though the land is lacking for life. That is the triumph of Shadow of the Colossus: though its story is simple, it is told in such a complex manner that you never feel as if you are simply watching it pass you by. You can journey from place to place, playing the game for nothing more than the fights themselves, but you cannot possibly experience the entire game this way. In order to truly understand this game, you must see the world around as more than simply an obstacle in your path to the next colossus. You must see it as it is: a forbidden land, devoid of all but the purest, most natural forms of life, housing within it beasts of a forgotten lore than can grant you the power to restore life to your lost love. It is one of few games where the setting itself is more important than the characters that populate it, as the characters are so few, and the setting so vast.


As a player, there comes a realization when you finally become immersed in the world that this forbidden land sketches out for you: a realization that a story does not need to be told explicitly. Cinematics explaining every nuance and detail of the world are not needed: the hero’s motivation does not need to be sketched out in black and white. Circumstance, context, animation all of these can tell a story in a fluid and more immersive way than a cutscene ever could. You do not need to be pulled from the action, even temporarily, to grasp the full importance of what is happening around you. You can infer good and bad, right and wrong, positive and negative, simply by the way the game reacts to your presence. You do not need the tonal shift of a character’s vocals to understand that perhaps they are not telling you all that you should know: such a revelation can come simply from playing the game. You do not need future events foreshadowed to understand that something terrible is on the horizon: the reaction of the world to your character’s actions can warn you of this. Implicit storytelling is an art that, if done well, cannot be matched by the exposition of a game’s entire cast of characters.

Source: Video Games as Art

But, alas, time does pass. Silver tarnishes, steel rusts, and once great structures can tumble and fall at the slightest gust of wind. Gaming has changed in the years since Shadow of the Colossus emerged. A good story is no longer the commodity it once was in videogamedom. It is now expected: the story of a game now gets attention only if it is revelatory in its execution, or dismal in its content. Implicit storytelling seems to no longer have a place in the heady action titles of today’s market: replaced instead by the rattling of gunfire, or the clash of steel-on-steel as swords meet. But then Shadow of the Colossus, alongside Ico, was re-mastered and re-released for the Playstation 3, and, initially, it was simple nostalgia that drove me to buy the collection: the memory of that first play-through, when each new colossus was awe-inspiring in its size, movement, and detail.

The game proved, however, that the old adage is false: sometimes, you really can go home again. Within less than an hour, I had forgotten the age of the game, forgotten I had played it before. I was immersed once again in this vast forbidden land, devoid of all life save the lizards crawling through the shadows, the grass of the valleys, the trees of the forest, the colossi themselves, and that lone man and his horse, desperate to bring his love back from the dead. I instantly forgot all that the newer generation of video games had taught me about presentation, and found myself, once again, creating the story from the giants, the subtext, and the landscape itself. There needed to be no firefight to sustain my interest, no epic sword battle to keep my attention. This world, in its forbidding beauty, was enough to keep my eyes locked.


Modern videogames may have set a bar that very few of the classics can come close to, save when played through the rose-coloured glasses of nostalgia. They are extremely well-versed in presentation and execution, unmatched when it comes to landscapes and urban centres. They can create a compelling hero, or an unquestionably wicked villain with a few well placed facial expressions, and well-written lines of dialogue. But for all their flash and charm, for all the work that goes into them to make them as good as they are, modern videogames have forgotten one thing: sometimes, a story doesn’t need to be told through dialogue and cinematic moments. Sometimes, silence and a simple gesture can say more than a thousand words ever could. That is something that Shadow of the Colossus understood, and that is why it still remains an unmatched title to this day. That is what gives me the belief that sometimes, you can go home again. 

The Unmitigated Disappointment of What Comes After: Rage - An Introspection

Rage is ID Software’s latest game, one that spent years in the making, and that I was incredibly excited for. Graphically, it looked stunning. From a gameplay standpoint, it promised something new, something exciting. It looked to reinvent both the idea of the modern shooter, and the almost tired post-apocalyptic setting it fashioned for itself. In theory, it was an amazing concept. In practice, it panned out to something remarkably less. After playing through the game, it quickly took a spot at the back of my mind, and there remained. Until recently, when I looked over my library of games to see if there was anything I wanted to get rid of, to help put money toward something else new, something else that gives me the same feeling of anticipation I once had for Rage. And there it was, near the bottom of my stack of games, forgotten. Most times, when I decide to trade a game in, I do so with little hesitation: if I’ve played it, and finished with it, and forgotten about it, there is no longer any sense in keeping it around. Something was different with Rage, though. Something compelled me to put it back in one more time, to play it once more, to try and figure out why I hadn’t gotten rid of it already. Into the console it went, and I began the game anew.


And instantly remembered why I had kept it.

Image source: dotTech

Emerging from your Ark for the first time in one-hundred-and-six years, blinking against the blinding glare of the sun, you find an indeterminable desert where once your home existed. It is bleak, lifeless. Around you, there are only the vague remnants of once-proud structures. Yet there is a strange kind of beauty to this world: a naturalistic sense of identity. The absence of pronounced human existence has let the land take back what it will, and it obliges with fervour. But it is not enough to lift your spirit. The wind whistling by you is the only sound, a melancholy reminder of one simple fact: the others who took to the Ark with you have died, and there are no immediate signs that human life managed to persevere after the asteroid’s collision with earth. Here, at your moment of rebirth, you are entirely alone. You were given one goal, one purpose: to aid in the rebuilding of human civilization when you awoke. It is not a task that can be undertaken by a single man. There is naught you can do except begin to traverse this dry, seemingly post-human wasteland, in hopes of finding others like you. You take your first tentative steps into this new world, this new existence.


And your life nearly ends. In one brief moment that seems to last for an eternity, the question of continued human existence is answered. Struck to the ground by a savage man wielding a makeshift club, you raise your hands to your face in a feeble attempt to protect yourself from the blow he is readying, while behind him, his companion watches with excitement. Then the savage is thrown sideways from your prone figure as a bullet strikes him dead. His companion barely has time to turn before he, too, is shot down.


In this first flurried moment, Rage showcases both what makes it great, and what will be its ultimate downfall. The game is about the complete, unmitigated disappointment of what comes after, in a very complete sense. In game, you see the havoc wreaked upon the earth by the asteroid: as a player, you progress through the game, and begin to realize that there will not be a connection made between all the events you precipitate throughout the game: that what comes after will never be as good as what came before. And all that can be seen in that first moment.  


There is an unquestionable fluidity to the movements made: from the murderous sneer of the bandit about to end your life, to the collapse of his companion as the bullet extinguishes his life. There is a satisfaction to the kill in this game: an unquestionable weight to each round fired from your weapon, and a clearly visible effect as it pierces the blood and meat and bone of your enemy. There is death inherent in this game, but there is also a life, a history each character gives, expressed through their very movement. From the Ghost clan, who rely on surprise and acrobatics to take down their prey, to the Gearheads, who let their machinery do the talking, to the Authority themselves, whose possession of technological advancements clearly grants them the edge. No group of enemies choose to attack you in the same way, and there are any number of ways you can choose to clear each room during your quest, each with its own merits and problems, each imparting a different reaction from your enemies. This is the story of Rage: a story told through the motion of the characters, and the weight of your weapon. And this tells a better tale than the writing in the game ever could.


Ultimately, this is not a full story in itself. From start to finish, it reeks of an introduction: a way to familiarize the player with this world ID has created without bestowing upon them a reason behind their actions. The motivations granted you are thin: you are asked to stop the Authority before you even see the Authority: asked to believe blindly that they are a power that needs removal. But there is a disconnect between your actions and the sparse narrative given. There is never the sense that your actions truly hold weight in the world. You are almost a placeholder, a figure told to make certain changes to this world you have been thrown into so that someday, eventually, the real battle can take place. In a way, you have no more purpose than you had when you initially emerged from the Ark. After ten hours in this desert wasteland that is all that remains of earth, you have no sense of importance. There are narrative twists that drop, suggesting that there is a greater story to be experienced, but you are not a part of it. You are not the Hero of Rage. You are the Wasteland’s Protagonist: a means to an end, simply a tool, like the weapons you carry, to shape this world into something that can be properly used later.


There is, perhaps, merit to this method of storytelling. The player does not always need to be the grand hero. There can be a lesser narrative occurring at a parallel to the epic quest the hero is undertaking, but there has to be an ultimate goal, a way to gauge success or failure. Your choices must have consequences; your actions must have impact.


ID did an unquestionably excellent job at creating the world of Rage. The desert, with its bleak beauty, and the bandit clans, with their complex, murderous methods, all speak of a greater plan. But the story they chose to tell in this world was ultimately one without reason. There was no climax, no dénouement. There was a wink, and a calm ‘trust me,’ as though the developer knows a secret the player has been left out of. There is a tale to this wasteland, but it is not that of the Ark Survivor in Rage: it is one that has yet to be told, and that is why I hold on to this game: so that when the first chapter is finally written, I can say with certainty that I’ve lived the introduction. 

An Introduction to the Introspection

Hey, all.


So, if I sound at all familiar, it may be because you know me from my recently started my own opinion blog, The Honest Opinion Corner - which can be visited by clicking that link, or the one that exists up there in the sidebar - wherein I give my honest opinion on recently (relatively, anyway), released video games. So far, I'm enjoying trying to navigate the thoughts I have about a game in my head in order to get my opinion out in text. Getting it all from head to page can sometimes be a chore. But this, The Introspection Corner, is only tangentially related to that, in that I write them both.


The real deal behind this blog has less to do with my opinion on video games, and more to do with my introspection on them. Sometimes, there are games that strike a chord with you, but when you're trying to tell another person whether or not they should play the game, that chord bears little or no relevance. That's more or less why I'm here: to tell you how certain games made me feel. Not whether I think you should buy them or not. To keep that straight, my introspectives will usually be on older titles. Not old, per say, but older. My first, for example, is on Rage, which came out back in October. Again, not old, but a mainstream title that has already been and gone. Mainstream titles are not like indie games: indie games often sit for a while, undiscovered. Mainstream titles hit shelves, and then everyone makes up their mind about them within the first month.


Anyway, I'm rambling. Basically, what I wanted to say is that The Introspection Corner is meant to get you closer to my deeper feelings toward a game, without a 'buy,' 'rent,' or 'pass' sticker hanging inherently from the corner. Hopefully my feelings on these games will be similar to your feelings on them, or perhaps completely different, so that a discussion may be born, but that is really neither here nor there.


In short, welcome.