The Tragedy of Killing a Colossus

Beauty abounds in Shadow of the Colossus until it's time to draw your weapon.

I remember a mountain. It was spinning. We were on a van in Kota Kinabalu at the tail end of 2014, cruising along a cliffside road that followed a steady curve. I was sitting directly behind the driver, my head pressed against the window while soft, spectral music hummed in my ears. Past the cliff’s edge, a tight blanket of trees crawled up to the midriff of a distant mountain. It appeared to turn slowly as we rounded the bend, showing pieces of itself to me in increments as it sat unperturbed miles away.

It was an enthralling view despite the mountain’s unremarkable shape. Like so many others, it looked like a crooked giant in repose. It bore no definitive peak, except maybe for a jagged crown of rocks that rose above a swathe of clouds. The road continued to trace a wide arc around the mountain. We were moving at above average speeds, but it never drew any closer. It just sat there on its haunches; rotating, but never approaching.

There is a second mountain, this time from a recent memory. It stood a great distance from me, across field, chasm, bridge, and valley. This one was a barren old thing: a steep pile of rocks that was almost a wall between me and whatever lay past it. Though it appeared abruptly, it connected easily to the rest of the landscape stretching before me.

In this memory, I am on a horse, lifting a sword high above. I catch the sun on its gleaming edge, where it refracts and sends a beam of light in the mountain’s direction. It tells me to go there and see what hides behind it. I give my horse a smart rap with my heels, and we make off at a light canter.

It would be a while before I could reach the mountain. The landscape held me back, but not due to any obstructions in my path. In fact, the land immediately before me was a grassy, wide open space. There was a pastoral, although desolate quality to this vast terrain that was there wherever you looked. And I couldn’t stop looking.

This place that begs thoughtful observation is the setting of Shadow of the Colossus, a PlayStation 2 game remade for modern consoles in 2018. Like the spinning mountain from my visit to Malaysia, the landscapes that abound in Shadow of the Colossus are most beautiful when absorbed as a passive viewer. At its heart, this game is about hunting sixteen behemoths scattered around the world, but some of my favorite moments come from just letting the land exist without me.

Despite having one of the longest opening cutscenes I’ve ever suffered through in a video game, Shadow of the Colossus runs on a very thin plot. You are a nameless young man who has traveled a long way to strike a bargain with a disembodied entity: kill all the colossi in exchange for the resurrection of the woman lying dead in your arms. Throughout the course of the game, little more is said about who this woman is and why she deserves to be brought back to life. However, this isn’t a game that asks for your opinion. To defeat the game, you must heed the voice in the temple and kill every last colossus.

My thoughts about Shadow of the Colossus are a reprise of what I previously said about Breath of the Wild, in that they both shine the brightest at their insistent emptiness. There already exist a dozen essays about the similarities these two games share, but what they’ve done for open world games bears further exaltation: they allowed their designed environments to speak for themselves without the need for a hundred quests to give them purpose. In this regard, Shadow of the Colossus is perhaps more confident in its emptiness than Breath of the Wild. Outside of your goal, there is nothing else to mechanically do in the game, except for the optional collectibles that upgrade your health and stamina. 

Shadow of the Colossus is partly a game of observation. Between you and the next colossus on your list are tracts of land that offer nothing of gameplay value except for their potential to be seen, savored, and explored.

As the player, I wasn’t given much of a motive in killing a colossus, and so I took my sweet time. I allowed myself to be drawn to curious features in the landscape: a lone tree in a rocky outcropping; a lush, deep valley that I mistakenly thought was the lair of a colossus; an upright stone ring in the middle of a desert that I threaded at a full gallop on my horse. Each swing of the camera in this game yields a stunning view. It was the spinning mountain all over again: a massive thing that is only there to be observed, not touched.

I just wish I didn’t have to kill a giant.

There is a third mountain, invisible but palpable. In the absolute darkness that existed before dawn, I was focused on getting my footing right. Our only source of illumination were our flashlights, which cast its restless light on trees, waist-high grass, and the well-worn soil that squished under our feet. It was my first time climbing a mountain, but at the moment, there was nothing to see. My eyes were on the ground, scanning for rocks or roots that could trip me.

We would eventually reach the summit just minutes before the sun broke the horizon. Despite everything, the view really was worth the ugly trek. We had conquered Mt. Gulugod Baboy, one of several linked peaks that rose along the west coast of Batangas. We would stay at the peak for an hour and then make our way back to level ground, but not before groping blindly in the half-dark during an ascent that took us almost three hours.

I hated it. I was dizzy from lack of sleep. I wished I was somewhere near sea level, where I could behold the mountain from a comfortable distance.

A final mountain, enraged and thrashing about. I’d broken the colossus’ stone hand and climbed on as it knelt reeling from the pain. As I gripped the fur on its back, trying not to slip, I spied its weak spot: a faintly glowing rune at the back of its head. The colossus shifted violently in an attempt to shake me off. I pulled my sword from its scabbard and lifted it high, high up. Its point was aimed right where I could make the most damage. I let the sword hang in the air for three, four, five seconds. I hated having to do this.

The original Shadow of the Colossus came out in 2005—too long ago by video game standards. I played the 2018 remake, which features sharper textures, better draw distance, and a more stunning visual experience overall. As far as I can tell, the developers never changed the controls, perhaps to preserve the tactile experience of the original game.

As a classic title resurrected for modern audiences used to standardized button configurations (press X to jump, circle to crouch, triangle to swap weapons), Shadow of the Colossus felt strange to control. Its unusually mapped buttons felt even weirder when fighting a colossus, where I found my fingers occasionally playing Twister all over the controller as I fumbled between traversal, weapon use, and stamina management.

Overall, getting down and dirty in Shadow of the Colossus is…well, a messy experience. Whether it’s by design or the inevitability of game mechanics falling behind, it generated an unwelcome friction in my encounters with each colossus. In addition, some of the confrontations had obtuse solutions, which led to a lot of aimless running while the great beasts tried to flatten me with their appendages. On top of this mechanical difficulty lingered the first and only question I had: why are we killing this colossus? Who was this young man and why was his quest more valuable than sixteen lives that could be left alone in peace?

I did not like killing any of the beasts in this game. I felt like the heartless monster in this story. It was especially disappointing to learn about the curse of the colossi’s existence. I should have left them alone. The granular act of finding a vulnerable nick on the colossus’ body and driving your sword into it seemed to be the hard opposite of what the world wanted to happen. Through repeated acts of violence, I had ceased becoming a visitor of this strange land. I’d become an intruder.

I regularly chastise myself for being too sentimental at the expense of pragmatism. Even in video games, it turns out, I tend to extol the virtues of soft things like beauty, silence, and emptiness in an otherwise doomed world. 

Sadly, violence is an unfortunate necessity in Shadow of the Colossus. No matter how much I emphasize the effortless allure of the game’s landscapes, they serve merely as the backdrop of a terrible task. However, it doesn’t diminish what they are: places of beauty and peace that ask for nothing in return. When you can, whether in video games or in real life, take a moment. Before you do whatever you need to do, pull the reins on your horse for awhile and let the mountain keep spinning just a little longer.