Shadow of The Colossus - Nick Suttner

Shadow of the
Colossus
Nick Suttner
Boss Fight Books
Los Angeles, CA
bossfightbooks.com
Copyright © 2015 Nick Suttner

All rights reserved.
ISBN 13: 978-1-940535-10-4

First Printing: 2015
Series Editor: Gabe Durham

Book Design by Ken Baumann
Page Design by Adam Robinson
For Amber, my Mono
and Finn, my Agro
CONTENTS
Forewordix
Introduction1
Ico7
Shadow of the Colossus19

Raise thy sword by the light25
In the seaside cave37
A giant canopy soars to the heavens47
In the land of the vast green fields57
Across a misty lake67
It lusts for destruction75
A ripple of thunder81
A shadow that crawls on the walls89
Where trees nary grow97
Its gaze is upon thee103
It keeps the flames alive113
A silent being wields thunder119
Thou art not alone127
City beyond the channel135
A giant has fallen141
Make haste, for time is short149
Poor ungodly soul157
Epilogue167
Notes171
Acknowledgements175
FOREWORD
When I was growing up, every so often I would stumble

over a video game with a startling vision or a personal
touch—where some deep video game magic was allowed
to take root. In the early 2000s while at art school, I had
a strong interest in creating my own games with these
qualities. To this end I founded Superbrothers, began
painting pixels and poking at prototypes.
I had been playing video games on VIC-20, Com-
modore 64, PC, and on Nintendo systems. I was late
to PlayStation, but when I encountered Fumito Ueda’s
Ico I was floored. The characters seemed alive and the
spaces felt real. There was none of the usual noise or
dissonance. Instead there was a soul, a heartbeat.
When Fumito Ueda’s next effort Shadow of the
Colossus emerged a few years later, it was a memorable
moment for myself and my housemates. We hooked it
up to a projector and played it on the slanted wall loom-
ing over our living room attic. It was dazzling!
Shadow’s scope and spectacle were unprecedented,
but then there was that stoic sadness—that lingering
weirdness, those mysterious whispers, those touches of
ix
darkness and wonderment… and within was that quiet
warmth, gradually eroding. It was a potent brew.
After my encounter with Shadow, I spent a few
years at a traditional Japanese video game company in
Toronto before I met the folks at Capy Games and we
began to build Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP with
a tiny team. In Sworcery’s credits we cited as inspirations
Jordan Mechner, Eric Chahi… and, of course, Fumito
Ueda.
Sworcery employs a cinematic, slightly handheld
camera style. The design is fairly stripped-down, with
touches of The Legend of Zelda. The story concept
involves a sword-carrying protagonist traversing a
mythic natural landscape, whose semi-obscure adven-
ture is motivated by an unseen presence, and whose
spirit degrades as the adventure wears on towards its
grimly climactic finale. Echoes of Shadow, to be sure.
An unexpected highlight of my first trip to Japan
while attending to Sworcery’s Japanese launch was a
lengthy evening conversation with Fumito Ueda him-
self. We spoke mostly about the practicalities of creating
video games with heart, and I was struck by how Ueda’s
warm, composed, precise, and sincere manner so per-
fectly matched the tone of his video games.
All these years later, Shadow still stands apart, cast-
ing into stark relief some of today’s more muddled
action-adventure games. For me, Shadow demonstrates
that a video game can audaciously mount a cinematic
spectacle with a bold concept and a distinctive style
shadow o f t h e co lo s s us
while simultaneously being understated, heartfelt, even
intimate.
I think it’s worth investigating Shadow’s particular
profile, and you’re in great hands here with Nick’s wit,
personal touches, deep appreciation, and profound
insights.
Enjoy!
Craig D. Adams
founder/creator/bozo at Superbrothers A/V Inc.
Autumn, 2015
xi
INTRODUCTION
A massive, open world with almost nothing in it. A

big-budget game that’s more interested in exploring the
experience of its questions than distracting you with
answers. An unwavering trust that players will figure
out where to go, what to do, and even think about why
they’re doing it. Shadow of the Colossus is a landmark in
so many ways, and still unique more than a decade after
its release.
It’s also a study in focus, as it was in its time amongst
its peers. Resident Evil 4 released earlier that same year in
2005, revitalizing the entire survival-horror genre with
a tight over-the-shoulder perspective that made com-
bat a tense, precise nightmare. Just a couple of months
later came God of War, a bold and bawdy exploration
of Greek mythology with a deeply satisfying bloodlust.
All three games have since seen HD re-releases
and are considered seminal events in gaming history.
Yet both Resident Evil 4 and God of War hew closely to
convention, very much gamers’ games filled with inven-
tories, attack combos, and carefully scripted setpieces
always upping the ante. Both games are also very filmic,
1
with long expository cutscenes wrapped around every
big event, and a monologue for every hero and villain
that dives deeply into their lore.
Clearly, 2005 was an incredible year for games. But
what interests me is just how far Shadow swung away
from those other hits. Its reductions were across the
board, and uncompromising: Only sixteen “enemies.”
Only two weapons, both of which you start with and
will never level up. You’ll never learn new moves, only
strengthen your grip and your health over time. You
won’t unlock new areas, only new challenges in places
that have been accessible all along. You won’t meet
any new main characters after the opening cinematic.
There’s (almost) nothing to collect.
Yet despite all that isn’t there, Shadow is absolutely
riveting. At a time when games were doubling down
on the gamer by betting big on proven formulas, and
leaning on the legacy of film to tell their stories, Shadow
was content to spin its mystery up front and shove you
into the blinding sun to fend for yourself and figure out
the rest. The entirety of the experience lives deep within
me, like some primordial dream. Soaring high above the
sprawling desert, clinging to my foe as the wind laps at
my unsteady feet. Finding the relief of fire at the bot-
tom of a treacherous crevasse, itself in the shadow of an
ancient, endless bridge.
••••••••••••••••
I first read about Shadow in the pages of Electronic Gam-
ing Monthly, a long-running gaming magazine I would
later write for. A game in which entire levels were puz-
zles set atop the backs of massive creatures, the prom-
ise of an epic puzzle-platformer from the team behind
the thoughtful, sweetly haunting Ico. Building on their
craft and artistry, Team Ico’s Shadow promised action,
and a gauntlet of giants to conquer. Its titular creatures
were striking, even in those early screenshots. Tower-
ing, dimly sentient relics with piercing yellow eyes and
mossy manes. I was smitten.
In broad strokes, Shadow is about a boy trying to
save a girl. The situation is dire, and her last hope lies
in a distant, long-abandoned corner of the world. He
brings her to this place, throwing himself at the mercy
of its overseer. This spirit tasks him with defeating a
number of guardians that dwell within the land, and in
exchange there may be a glimmer of hope for her yet.
But like so many wonderful moments in life and art,
Shadow of the Colossus is defined by the space between
its lines: the gulf between its quieter, contemplative
moments and its tremendous spectacle. Strung end to
end, its titanic battles would make for an amazing—
if exhausting—barrage of action. But driving your
horse across an imposing sunbaked expanse, twisting
up through shade-mottled woods, only to find your
ageless, unwitting foe at rest in the stillness of a lake
gives the encounter exactly the breathing room it needs.
3
Shadow lets its best moments come to you at your own
pace, subtly leading and showing rather than telling.
••••••••••••••••
There were rumors that Shadow was originally planned

to have whole cities and dungeons dotting its spar-
tan landscapes, lost in time to schedules, or budgets,
or something equally mundane. And one of the best,
most wonderful things about it is that it feels that way.
The remnants of a world that once was, or never was,
frozen in time. A lost civilization perpetually under
construction.
There are so many empty, functionally useless cor-
ners of Shadow’s expansive world, but it hurts to even
call them that. They still feel alive and mysterious, as if
exploring the right nook or climbing an especially pre-
carious peak will unlock… something. A bridge to that
lost civilization, a seventeenth colossus, some armor
for my horse maybe. Despite its creator Fumito Ueda
telling me years ago in an e-mail interview that all of
Shadow’s secrets had been found, it never felt that way,
and still doesn’t.
Thankfully, the legacy and lessons of Shadow live on
in gaming today, through a generation of fans, artists,
and game developers—whose work carries its influence
forward. Game development has become democratized
in recent years through cheaper and more user-friendly
software while the audience has expanded tremendously
through more ubiquitous platforms to play on. As a
result, many players are looking for more varied games
across the full spectrum of human experience, and some
of the themes that Shadow explored—such as hope,
regret, and sacrifice—have become both easier and
more commercially viable to express. At the same time,
series such as Dark Souls have built on Team Ico’s leg-
acy, dropping players into vast, unforgiving worlds that
seem to have existed long before they came along, with
narratives that unfold primarily through the experience
of gameplay rather than traditional storytelling—no
doubt influencing a future generation of developers to
live by the tenets of trusting and respecting their players
while giving them something surreal and spectacular.
••••••••••••••••
Oh right, and I’m Nick Suttner, bearded indie game

advocate. After writing about games for EGM and 1UP.
com (where I hosted a retrospective podcast series on
Shadow), I went to work at Sony to help shape the cul-
ture of independent games on PlayStation. Shadow is
the entire reason I’m working in games, and specifically
the reason I went to work at Sony (which published the
game). I’ve spent almost nine years in the gaming indus-
try championing the more artful, emotional, intellectu-
ally stimulating side of gaming, and truly, Shadow has
been my constant muse.
My endeavor here as your guide, as a Shadow dev-
otee, and as someone whose career and personal aes-
thetic has been so deeply influenced by the game, is to
dig into the experience and unearth what makes it so
special. Why is Shadow still so singular over a decade
5
later? How has it managed to maintain an air of mystery
beyond that of any other game? I’m hoping that you’ve
played Shadow already, but if you haven’t made time for
it I’m happy to give you an excuse. Consider this your
companion guide—I’ll be playing through it again with
a critical eye, talking about it with others who love it
the way that I do, and sharing my findings along the
way. Maybe I’ll even pinpoint the enigmatic quality that
grants the game it’s enduring appeal. Or maybe not, and
instead just get lost in the roar of the earth once again.
ICO
Before we go galloping off across the plains of Shadow

of the Colossus, it’s important to look back at its genetic
destiny—embodied in its deafeningly quiet predecessor
Ico, humming just outside the periphery of gaming his-
tory. Ico (pronounced “EE-koh”) released on the Play-
Station 2 in September of 2001, engineered for unique-
ness by an ambitious new team led by an imaginative
young animator. While threads of companionship,
fatalism, and futility would eventually weave their way
through Team Ico’s narratives, Ico started with a much
simpler premise: a game about holding hands.
“The inspiration for Ico was to tell a story about a
small boy and a taller girl,” explains game director
Fumito Ueda. “I just thought it would work really well
visually, and that’s how things got started. But you need
more than that to make a game, so for the gameplay
itself I had the idea of letting the player directly touch,
interact with the AI.”
Unlike many visionary creators, Ueda managed to
largely skip the step of toiling away in obscurity before
delivering what would later become recognized as his
7
first seminal work. After graduating from Osaka Uni-
versity of Arts in 1993 he applied at game developer
WARP, and despite not passing the initial application
process he was hand-picked by company head Kenji
Eno (who would later become an influential game com-
poser before passing away in 2013) thanks to the con-
cept behind some animation work Ueda had submitted
of a dog running in the rain. He went on to work as
an animator on their stealth horror game Enemy Zero
during its brief, difficult development, before going to
work at Sony Computer Entertainment in Tokyo in
1997. After working mostly by himself for a few months
on a three-minute CG concept video for Ico (inspired
in part by 1978 manga Galaxy Express 999), Ueda and
his newly assigned producer Kenji Kaido were given the
green light to move forward with production, though
its development was kept under wraps for a number of
years.
As best as I can remember, my first exposure to Ico
was in the pages of Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine
(OPM), whose September 2001 cover proudly pro-
claimed it “The Best Game You’ve Never Heard Of ”—
something that still holds true today for many. Then-
editor-in-chief John Davison remembers Sony being
surprised that OPM wanted to put the game on the
cover, scrambling just to provide the needed art assets.
“We had opportunities to really champion games that
we wanted to get behind,” he told me via e-mail. “Before
Ico, we didn’t know how to articulate the desire for a
game experience that was defined by its artistic vision. It
gave everyone something to point to and say ‘something
like that.’ Fumito Ueda gave form to an aspiration.”
Upon release, Ico was lauded for feeling like nothing
else. “An ethereal and elusive opera,” Ollie Barder of The
Guardian would later call it—the most apt description
I’ve found. The dreamlike adventure of a horned boy res-
cuing a pale girl from their castle-cum-prison, stripped
of everything but the journey from point A to point B.
With Halo: Combat Evolved and Grand Theft Auto III a
month away from release, minimalism wasn’t especially
en vogue, but Ico stayed the course with a deft confi-
dence that was hard not to notice. When most games
still slotted neatly into a template of shooting, racing, or
fighting, or iterating on our collective childhoods, Ueda
had engineered a team to create something wonderfully
undefinable. “Well, we didn’t want to make a ‘game-y’
game from the start,” explains Ueda, “so we felt that
bringing in people who were entrenched in video games
and the industry might be a problem, so we brought
people in who didn’t have a lot of experience […] or
from other areas like video production.” I’ve read mul-
tiple interviews in which Ueda points to that same lack
of experience—across almost the entire team, many of
them friends of his from university—as the reason why
they were able to avoid compromising their vision. They
simply didn’t know what they didn’t know, and the sky
was the limit.
9
••••••••••••••••
As Shadow would do years later, Ico unfurls most of its

story up front in a single, beautiful cutscene, economic
in its intrigue. Masked men journey through an idyl-
lic forest, escorting a young horned boy on horseback
(whose name—Ico—we won’t learn until the closing
credits). They soon reach the edge of the forest, the
decaying ruins of what used to be one end of a mas-
sive stone bridge set into a sheer cliff overlooking an
ocean. Where the bridge would have found purchase on
the other end, we see the walkways, ramps, and arches
of a huge foreboding castle built into a rocky island
outcropping.
Ico is carried, childlike, deep into the guts of the cas-
tle to a glowing stone pod, already open and eagerly
awaiting its new prisoner, while dozens of other pods
line the walls, standing still and silent. “Do not be angry
with us,” the men say as Ico is sealed inside. “This is for
the good of the village.” After they’ve left, the boy rat-
tles the pod, which—almost too easily—falls and cracks
apart, spilling him out into the cavernous room.
Ico moves with a loose, skidding awkwardness—as
real boys do—animated with the misplaced confidence
of adolescence. His movements are weighty and intu-
itive, driven by momentum. It’s fun just moving him
around. The adventure is framed from deliberate van-
tage points, with a non-traditional third-person camera
that watches like an eye pinned to a different spot in
each room, turning to look as Ico scurries by. The cam-
era often accentuates the depth or scale of the spaces,
creating expansive chambers and dizzying drops simply
through clever positioning.
Another of Ico’s visual experiments is the player’s
ability to move the camera during cutscenes to peek
just offscreen, perhaps Ueda’s nod to Super Mario Bros.,
the game that convinced him that video games were a
particularly intriguing medium: “It was the first game
where I felt there was a world beyond what you could
see on the screen,” he told 1UP.com in 2011. “Up until
then, you just kind of thought it ended with whatever
you saw, but with Mario it felt like the world extended
beyond that.”
Ico’s transitions between cutscenes and gameplay are
seamless—there’s never any information or iconogra-
phy displayed on screen, just a beautiful window into a
lonely stone world for your adventures to take place in,
undistracted. I can’t think of many earlier games that
kept the screen completely clear of extraneous informa-
tion, save the 1991 Amiga classic Another World (known
as Out of This World in North America), a cinematic
adventure game set in a harrowing sci-fi world that’s
cited by Ueda as one of the key influences behind Ico.
I spoke to its creator Eric Chahi via e-mail about his
decision to keep the presentation so spartan in a time
when games were anything but. “Having scores was
standard at the time—it was the legacy of arcade games.
But it was anti-immersive. It collided with the universe
11
and distracted the player, so I intentionally decided to
break the rules. One consequence of doing so is that
life becomes infinite.” Indeed, that small aesthetic inno-
vation moved many games away from the concept of
“lives,” an increasingly unnecessary trope when you
weren’t pumping quarters into a machine, and one
that’s critical to Ico’s narrative momentum.
••••••••••••••••
At the top of a huge, cylindrical room, Ico finds—and

shortly frees—Yorda (whose name we also won’t learn
until the end), a pale girl trapped in a cage, dressed all
in white. Yorda speaks in a strange tongue (depicted
as hieroglyphs in the subtitles), and despite her fragile
appearance, seems powerful. Otherworldly. Startled at
times but never scared, curious but hesitant. And she’s
taller than Ico, as Ueda promised, a small but effective
visual touch.
Ico tells her that all horned children are brought
here. “Were they trying to sacrifice you too?” he asks
in his own strange language (subtitled in English), a
curious choice of words that we’ll learn little else about.
Interrupting them, a shadowy creature with glowing
blue eyes tries to carry Yorda away, which Ico must beat
back with a flaming stick. Even after it drops her and
disappears, Yorda just sits there quietly, unfazed. This
leads to the first of many beautiful gameplay interac-
tions between the two. Pressing the R1 button reaches
out to Yorda, lifting her to her feet, and will thereaf-
ter be used to call out to her, or take her hand if she’s
nearby.
So much of the charm and narrative innovations
of Ico are framed by your relationship with Yorda. She
rarely walks anywhere on her own, but will always try
to come to you when you call out. You’ll often take her
hand, dragging her around as if she’s vaguely lost and
confused but with just enough confidence in you to
not let go. In a subtle but affecting touch, you’ll some-
times feel her footsteps through small vibrations in the
controller—motors thrumming in protest if she’s feel-
ing especially reluctant—an effect used later in Shadow
to bring you closer to your equine companion. Yorda
doesn’t hesitate the first time she has to jump a big gap
to catch your hand, but takes a smart step back before
she lunges and leaps. Similarly, while Ico hurries up
and down ladders, Yorda places two hands and feet on
each rung before stepping up or down, never tentative
but ever careful. While the two children could have
been made of different texture skins wrapped around
the same character model and behavior set, significant
attention was paid to make them feel like individuals.
Filling in the spaces between Ico and Yorda’s often
wordless communication is the ever-present wind. Even
in the most interior chambers, a distant din of seaside
air can be heard alongside your echoing footsteps or
the crackling of fire, growing to a howling rush as you
explore the far edges of its exterior. Many of the castle’s
13
spaces feel larger than they are as the wind expands
through them and whips down passageways, and you
even see it represented on Ico and Yorda’s clothes, often
blowing towards or away from exits and entrances. Ico
isn’t quiet throughout, though, as a sparse soundtrack
accompanies many of the story beats and cutscenes, and
even tiptoes into gameplay at times. Distant, distorted
walls of sound haunt the darker moments, reverberating
organs or synthesizers gone mad. Though Ico’s theme
song—inspired by Simon and Garfunkel’s “Scarbor-
ough Fair”—portrays the game more sunnily, a melange
of Spanish guitar and wistful, vaguely Middle Eastern
finger-picking, with an ebbing, soulful bass line.
••••••••••••••••
While Yorda’s companionship provides the heart of the

experience, Ico’s body of adventure lies amidst a vast,
interconnected castle teeming with environmental puz-
zles to solve and pathways to uncover. Waterways need
to be drained, beams of light rerouted. Blocks are used
as stepping-stones and then recast as weights for pres-
sure plates. The visual vocabulary of Ico’s puzzles feels
familiar after a couple decades of adventure games,
but within Ico’s castle they’re particularly cohesive. The
design rarely feels nonsensical; the castle is a place of
ritual, utilitarian against the sweeping beauty of its sea-
side surroundings. And while it often feels like a tangi-
ble place that could almost exist on Earth, Ueda didn’t
visit any real-life ruins during its conception—he had a
vision of it in his head already, inspired in part by the
architectural sensibilities of eighteenth century Italian
visual artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi (likely for the
labyrinthine wonder of his “Imaginary Prisons” series).
While traversing the castle you’ll regularly encoun-
ter a variety of shadow creatures, which single-mind-
edly try to carry Yorda into seeping portals on the
ground from which they spawn. The creatures become
increasingly animalistic and even demonic as the game
progresses—always hewn of black fog, a Lovecraftian
darkness of something your mind can’t entirely pro-
cess. Fighting them can feel like a messy and desper-
ate chore, one that some players argue is the game’s
only true blemish. I can’t imagine the game without it,
though—combat makes the castle feel more alien and
dangerous, and lends an unpredictable pacing. It also
grants the quieter stretches of the journey a welcome
sense of relief, and carefully sets up Ico’s role as Yor-
da’s protector before their inevitable role reversal, in
the most impactful scene of the game. After countless
rooms of leading Yorda by the hand and pulling her up
ledges to safety, a decisive gameplay moment comes
in which Ico must leap for his life, putting all of his
trust—and the player’s trust—in being caught by Yorda.
It’s a beautifully designed scene, two halves of a bridge
separating with nowhere else to go, the ultimate test of
the wordless bond that the characters have developed.
Ninja Theory co-founder Tameem Antoniades knows
15
something about that bond, having developed his own
story of escorting another character through a foreign
world in 2007’s fantastic Enslaved. “To make some-
one care about a character requires a great amount of
respect for humanity and representing its facets truth-
fully and subtly. […] We put way too much emphasis
on trying to find mechanical innovation in games rather
than experiential ones. The fact that I fell in love with
a ghostly set of pixels in a world that felt real to me was
Ico’s innovation.”
As one of the early mainstream games to bear the
banner of “games as art,” Ico feels every bit as affecting
today as it did the first time. Though it’s (thankfully)
now less of an anomaly in an ever-growing crowd of
games about the human condition and the people we
connect with, given visibility by commercial hits like
Journey, Gone Home, and The Last of Us. Developer
Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann, creative director and
narrative architect of The Last of Us, cites Ico as a key
influence and one of the games that got him into the
industry in the first place: “[Ico] was fantastical but
believable; all of its architecture had an internal logic to
it,” he told CVG in 2013. “But the main thing I loved
about Ico was that relationship; that hand-holding
mechanic that helps build a bond. It was the first time I
realized you can create something meaningful through
interaction, as opposed to just telling a story.” Games
are special and unique because of those interactions;
taking Yorda’s hand has an exceptional power, one that
couldn’t be replicated in a movie, or a book, or a song.
Ico, before most, and with a bold confidence, under-
stood that. By simply trying to make something differ-
ent, Team Ico planted a seed that would quietly help the
medium to grow to new heights—even if it was never
the intent. AI programmer Jinji Horagai says it best,
“I truly appreciate the fact that after 10 years from its
original release, there are still so many fans of Ico. But
back then, those things didn’t enter our mind. We were
simply playing our own Rock ’n’ Roll.”
17
SHADOW OF THE
COLOSSUS
Shadow of the Colossus opens on the wings of a bird,

flying high and free. A lone rider hugs a narrow cliffside
ledge, urging his horse across a gap in their path. They
journey together across stark plains, past serene forested
ponds, through rocky passageways. A soaring, almost
gothic introductory theme plays—a choir swells over
strings, and the delicate, searching trill of a flute.
The rider and his mount reach a vast stone bridge,
stretching out over cliffs and canyons into the distance,
towering over the land around it in all directions save for
the structure at the very end. The design of the bridge
is striking, each long curved supporting beam leaning
forward against the next, ageless and immovable. It also
serves as a visual counterpoint to the notably absent
bridge in Ico’s opening—one that would lie between the
cliffs and the castle—setting up one of the first of many
subtle connections between the two game’s worlds.
They eventually reach the structure at the end (offi-
cially known as the Shrine of Worship), as circling birds
19
chirp over the howling wind. A stone door slides open
by some unseen force, the horse staging a brief protest
before being coaxed inside just as the door slides closed
behind them. The horse and her rider spiral their way
down a huge cylindrical chamber, past a small pool at
the bottom, and a series of sixteen different, vaguely
beastly stone idols. It’s suddenly clear that a bundle
slung over the horse is no bundle at all, but the body
of a lifeless girl. The rider—our protagonist, Wander,
whose name (in apparent Team Ico style) we won’t learn
until the credits—carries her to a waiting stone altar,
setting her down gingerly before dramatically pulling
off the cloak she’s wrapped in, letting the breeze take
it. The girl, Mono, is pale, with flowing black hair and
a long, lightly patterned white robe. Her ailment is
unclear, but she rests still as death.
The scene cuts to what appears to be a memory from
Wander’s (recent?) past, in which we see a mask float-
ing against a backdrop of smoke and hear the sound
of crackling fire—perhaps a village elder speaking to
Wander before he left. The voice speaks in a backwards,
swirling tongue, subtitles translating:
“That place…began from the resonance of inter-

secting points…They are memories replaced by ens
and naught and etched into stone. Blood, young
sprouts, sky—and the one with the ability to con-
trol beings created from light…In that world, it is
said that if one should wish it one can bring back
the souls of the dead…
…But to trespass upon that land is strictly

forbidden…”
Jumping back to Wander’s present, shadow creatures

emerge from the floor, immediately reminiscent of Ico’s
ever-shifting foes. Unlike Ico, Wander simply needs to
unsheathe his sword, which shimmers with a deep light,
to dissolve the creatures into nothingness. Thunder
crackles high above, and a voice speaks from somewhere
in the rafters—an echoing, inhuman murmur, filling
the shrine: “We are the one known as Dormin.”
Wander explains his presence, in his own foreign
tongue: “I was told that in this place at the end of the
world—there exists a being who can control the souls
of the dead.” Wander explains that Mono has a cursed
fate and was sacrificed (another familiar beat from
Ico), and asks for Dormin to please return her soul.
Dormin laughs, musing, “Souls that are lost cannot be
reclaimed… Is that not the law of mortals? With that
sword, however… It may not be impossible.”
••••••••••••••••
In the period between having submitted Ico for produc-

tion but before it released, Team Ico experienced some
rare downtime. It was then that Ueda began drawing
21
storyboards for a concept video that would become
Shadow. Ueda told Kenji Kaido that it felt like all the
games he played had big bosses that needed to be shot
at to be defeated, and wondered why he couldn’t just
climb up and kill them with his weapon—so they
decided to take matters into their own hands, and more
deeply explore the role of game bosses.
Shadow was a trojan horse for subtler, more mature
storytelling and emotionally challenging themes, mar-
keted foremost as an epic, action-packed adventure. It
almost never got the chance to do so internationally
though, as its US release was initially kiboshed in a Sony
greenlight meeting. “The gameplay was a big departure
from Ico,” remembers then-director of product develop-
ment Allan Becker. “The perception was that the team
had bitten off more than they can chew.” Becker insisted
that the game would be a masterpiece, though, and that
Sony would look stupid if they didn’t pick it up for a
localized release. I asked Becker what stood out to him
about the game so early on. “Even in its early state,” he
said, “Shadow had an air of reflective wistfulness—that
intangible something. […] It’s one of those few titles
that transcends its boundaries as a game and moves into
a true emotional experience, perhaps even spiritual?”
Interestingly, Shadow’s success wound up primarily as
an American phenomenon, dwarfing international sales
and also trumping Ico’s sales by a substantial margin.
Shadow’s premise is even more dire than that of
Ico—a dead girl, an adventurer willing to do anything
to bring her back, and an ancient, mysterious presence
setting the stakes. The key elements aren’t too dissim-
ilar to those in Ico, but the adventure is all the more
grand, and tonally more mature. And while Ico may be
the more seminal game of the two—opening the eyes
of countless developers and gamers to the efficacies of
storytelling through gameplay—Shadow will forever be
the more singular beast, building on those same design
tenets on a wholly different scale, never to be repeated.
The desperation of Wander’s quest has always reso-
nated with me, and ever since Shadow I’ve found myself
playing games more in character. Within most games,
I try to act how the characters would act in a given sit-
uation. I’m not Nick playing as Wander, I’m simply
Wander. Some of that comes with making judgment
calls about a character to decide how they would react,
but it’s typically an unconscious decision. In the open-
world Western Red Dead Redemption, I was John Mar-
ston, a rugged gunslinger just trying to get back to his
family. I was vicious if provoked but fair when I could
be. Once I found out that there was a button to doff
your hat, I simply had to do so to everyone I met—it’s
the polite thing to do, really. And in perhaps a more tell-
ing example, my John Marston walked when in towns,
instead of running everywhere to save time. There’s no
in-game reason or benefit to walking, the AI characters
don’t care, but it simply felt right to me, the uncon-
scious side of my player agency further immersing the
conscious side through my actions. In Shadow, it doesn’t
23
matter that I don’t know the specifics of Wander’s moti-
vations—I just know that I have to revive Mono at any
cost, and I play the game with that same desperation, a
self-sacrificial chip on my shoulder.
Whether you play wholly in character as I do or
tend to keep your entertainment at an emotional arm’s
length, Shadow will put your feet to the fire and make
you think about your actions in a way that few games
ever have—it isn’t just a game about conquering giant
beasts, it’s a game about how you feel about conquering
them.
••••••••••••••••
Dormin explains to Wander that the beastly idols must

be destroyed if Mono’s soul is to be returned, and that
the only way for a mortal to accomplish this is to seek
out and defeat colossi which serve as incarnations of the
idols. The voice ends with a dark foreshadowing: “But
heed this, the price you pay may be heavy indeed.”
It matters not to Wander.
“Very well,” Dormin continues, as the camera pans
out of the shrine, and across a great sweeping landscape.
“Raise thy sword by the light… and head to the place
where the sword’s light gathers… There, thou shalt find
the colossi thou art to defeat.”
RAISE THY SWORD
BY T H E L I G H T
The opening cinematic ends as the camera transitions

into live gameplay, and I’m given control for the first
time. Moving Wander around is a joy, both in execution
and for the fact that there’s no particular rush or threat
as I prepare myself for this world and its as-yet unseen
battles. The shrine is empty, save for Mono lying still,
and my horse Agro, quietly exploring nearby while I
come to grips with the controls. Wander’s gait is more
mature than Ico’s, the earned confidence of an adven-
turer rather than that of a resilient child. His jumps are
fearless lunges forward that can cover a lot of ground.
If his sword is unsheathed, he’ll run with it ninja-like,
pointing it down and back along his side. And many of
his basic movements are contextual—he’ll leap from a
running horse, or simply dismount with a step down
from a stilled one. Agro is a star in her own right—a
living, breathing companion and partner in crime for
Wander, not simply a vehicle for speed or safety. And
when I’m not riding her, she’ll wander off on her own,
25
or rein up dramatically alongside me without prompt-
ing, or stay close when staying close is called for. She’s
unpredictable, as animals are, but a fierce friend and
really my only one in this world.
As we leave the confines of the shrine, the true
breadth of this place—the Forbidden Lands, as they’re
known—becomes evident, and with it a mounting
sense of adventure. It’s breathtaking. Rolling wind-
swept hills and crags flow off into the distance ahead
of me, overcast skies above burning with sunlight just
behind the clouds. The camera stays low, following
behind and keeping Wander off-center, maintaining
focus on the landscape. Even while casually exploring,
there’s a sense of cinematography to the framing, some
distant director playing up the drama of each shot while
maintaining a visual balance.
An old companion returns in the howling wind
from Ico, making the Forbidden Lands feel just a bit
more lonely and desolate. While I can charge off in
any direction and explore for hours, I won’t be able to
progress without finding and defeating the first colos-
sus. Dormin has given the first hint—“Raise thy sword
by the light”—and holding the Circle button does just
that, reflecting the sunlight off of my sword to create a
simple 3D radar that focuses from a wide net down to
a tight beam as I point towards the location of my next
foe. This works on foot or while mounted, as long as I
have access to sunlight (which adds a challenge in some
shaded spots later on). It’s an elegant replacement for a
traditional waypoint marker that avoids the visual busy-
ness of so many modern games.
The first colossus lies directly south, a relatively
quick journey from the shrine straight across the plains
to the cliff walls in the distance. Along the way, I pass
a small oasis along the edge of a hill, a verdant out-
cropping surrounding a large tree. It’s a bit unfair since
I’ve played the game many times, but I know that the
alluring fruit hanging from the highest branches can be
retrieved with a single shot from my as-yet-unrevealed
bow. I equip it with a quick flick of the D-pad, and hold
down the Square button to nock an arrow and aim. The
bow feels good, responsive, and once I’ve shot down a
piece of fruit I can pick it up and consume it, slightly
extending my health bar. This discovery may not hap-
pen during your first playthrough if you’re not curious
enough to stop or figure out the bow, but finding these
fruits is one of the very few activities outside of fighting
the colossi.
Back on track, l soon hit a shadowed basin below a
cliff (roughly where the light directed me to), where a
short cutscene kicks in. The camera tilts up to the top
of the cliffs, as panpipes chirp a mysterious, search-
ing little tune that tells me I’m in the right place. To
scale the cliff, I’m given a crash course on how to climb
mossy vines, roll under obstacles, pull myself up ledges,
and jump from one handhold to another. It’s a smart,
concise introduction to the same tools I’ll need to scale
and fell my first foe (and subsequent others), if a bit
27
overt with its messaging. Whereas Ico didn’t put a sin-
gle instruction on screen in its entire playtime, Shadow
spells out all the basics up front through a short series
of tutorial messages. It’s certainly a more mechanically
complex game than Ico, but it’s a bit of a shame that the
first few minutes lean more on non-diegetic instruction,
when the atmosphere and storytelling are otherwise so
immersive. This section also serves to separate me from
Agro for the first time, which feels discomforting even
in these early moments.
As I crest the top of the cliff, next to a thin cluster of
trees, rocks, and bushes, from somewhere to my right
comes an echoing bellow and a series of earth-shaking
stomps. Massive, hoofed feet fill my vision as they tromp
by, attached to legs like mossy oaks, and a huge armored
hand swings low to the ground. The behemoth walks
past me, trees rattling and a black cloud of dust kicking
up in his wake, my controller rumbling with each mon-
strous step. I’m given back control of Wander before
I’ve had time to fully process the scene, and all lonely
comforts are forgotten. I focus on my new foe, birds
circling above him as he patrols this canyon, wielding
a massive club with gorilla arms. There’s so much to
take in—there have been no practice runs, no smaller
enemies to cut my teeth on. I’m alone against massive
odds. The creature feels like an ancient extension of this
wild place, disturbed by my presence. The haunting
colossus design has become an evocative touchstone of
my mind’s eye—this first colossus, the box art cover star
who forever adorns my Mac’s desktop background in a
piece of fan art whose origins I’ve long forgotten. The
colossus is terrifyingly top-heavy, a broad-shouldered
brute with piercing blue eyes shining out from a face
constructed of symmetric stone and a shaggy, shoul-
der-spanning mane of mossy fur. The colossi often look
like long-abandoned temples come to life, elements
of their bodies or armor seemingly designed by some
great mason. “I avoided designs that made it obvious
what the motive was,” Ueda told OPM in 2005, “so I
combined various things, like the front of a car or the
surface of a building. Normally, things like that aren’t
used for monster design. By doing so, I thought that
the colossi would have peculiarities, yet seem realistic at
the same time.”
Holding the L1 button will focus the camera on a
colossus for as long as the button is held, immediately
useful in taking in my foe while keeping my distance as
I plot my attack. There’s not much space in this clear-
ing, and nowhere else to go—I could climb all the way
back down, perhaps find some comfort in seeing Agro
again, but there’s no other way to progress. In this way,
the game puts my back against the wall while at the
same time placing the impetus on me to take action
and make the first strike. The colossus patrols nearby,
but Wander must disturb its path to begin the battle.
While most traditional video game boss battles lock the
player in a small arena with an enemy who immediately
attacks, Shadow casts the player as the aggressor instead,
29
a distinction with ever-growing importance throughout
this tale. It’s the beginning of many role reversals that
become more evident as the game progresses—but like
many things in Shadow, the theme starts more subtly.
••••••••••••••••
I wish that I could remember the feeling of playing out

this battle for the first time, but it’s just out of reach.
My first hands-on exposure to Shadow was in 2005 on
the blaring show floor of E3, the annual industry show-
room hullabaloo. I was there to cover it for an enthusiast
gaming blog (G-Pinions.com) that I ran with my friend
Tom Mc Shea, and my primary takeaway was that E3
was simply the worst environment in which to experi-
ence something so nuanced, especially considering how
excited I was for the game. Months later, Tom and I
would crack open a final copy of Shadow in the more
appropriate quiet of my apartment, and truly experi-
ence what it had to offer.
During that same period, I worked as an assistant
manager under my friend Greg at an EB Games store
in Chicago, where we took immense pride in champi-
oning all sorts of weird and unique games to our cus-
tomers—through our infectious excitement, our store
garnered the most pre-orders of Shadow in our district.
Despite the hellish stereotype of working at a video
game store, EB felt like the front lines of the gaming
industry. Later, while reviewing games professionally,
I would put a piece of criticism or a recommendation
out into the world, and eventually it would garner com-
ments, maybe influence a few purchasing decisions…
but in those years behind the counter, people would ask
me to recommend a new game, and I could walk them
over to Shadow, bursting with superlatives, and place a
copy in their hand. The best feeling in the world would
come about a week later when they’d come in raving
about it and ask me for my next recommendation.
While I was doing my best to champion Shadow
online and in my store, other fans were taking further
initiative—to bestow names upon the colossi, for which
no official names are ever given (in-game or anywhere
else). It’s not entirely clear where these names origi-
nated—many cite a 2004 thread on the PlayStation
forums in which user Thantanos mentions a “friend in
Japan” who read them in an issue of Dengeki PlaySta-
tion Magazine, but by all accounts it appears that said
issue never existed. Nevertheless, the intel apparently
provided by this legendary Japanese friend has granted
the colossi the closest thing to official names that they
have. Complicating things further, Greg Off of Off-
Base Productions—who wrote the original strategy
guide for Shadow—explained to me that in the develop-
ment build that he played while writing the guide, the
game referred to the colossi by a different set of names
(since forgotten), which he was later asked to remove
from the final guide. It’s likely that those were similar to
what the development team referred to them by during
31
production—in the case of the first colossus, “the Mino-
taur.” I find his fan-bestowed name—Valus—much
more personable, so let’s stick with that. I’m also going
to go with “him” for my colossus pronoun of choice, as
the more anthropomorphic creatures read as male, and
“him” feels more reverent than “it.”
The battle begins by noticing Valus’s furry achilles
(a well-known weak spot, mythologically), which I can
grab onto once I’ve evaded his earth-rattling stomps.
Climbing a bit higher and unsheathing my sword, a
glowing bluish-white sigil appears beneath the creature’s
fur. By holding the Square button, I charge up a one-
handed stab of my sword while clinging on to Valus’s
ankle with the other hand, and letting go at just the
right moment drives the weapon deep into Valus’s flesh.
He kneels briefly in pain from the impact, giving me a
moment and a handhold within reach to scurry up onto
the balcony-like structure built into his back. This also
triggers a change in music, an appropriately epic blast
of horns and pounding drums that mounts in intensity
as I climb higher. The music throughout Shadow feels
as if it’s being orchestrated live, mirroring the drama,
curiosity, or anguish of each moment.
I climb high enough to be able to run the rest of the
way up his back and onto his broad neck, though stum-
bling and tumbling over in an attempt to stay upright
while he shakes in protest and rears his massive head.
It’s at this point that players will realize that despite the
relative precision of the jumping and grabbing—all
the while discovering which parts of a colossus can
be gripped—that Shadow is very much a game about
trying to perform those actions under extreme duress,
as if someone was slapping at the controller while you
try to hang on for dear life. Shadow’s mechanical use of
that verb—holding on—is also one of its most effective
analogs for the real-life experience of playing the game.
Bennett Foddy, an assistant professor of game design
at NYU and the creator of the 2008 ragdoll runner
QWOP, spoke to me about this link. “Generally in video
games there is a very weak correspondence between the
type of action you perform in the real world, on your
controller, and the action that subsequently occurs in
the game world. In Super Mario Bros. and every game
that followed it, I press a button down and that makes
my character jump into the air, even though compress-
ing the spring under a button is not really anything like
jumping into the air.” Foddy notes that the gripping
actions taken in Shadow, however, directly translate to
how the player is manipulating the controller. As the
player holds down the grip button for longer periods
of time, it directly corresponds to Wander’s fatigue,
measured on-screen, even aching after longer sessions.
“I feel more embodied in the character of Wander than
I do in almost any other third-person game. It might
be the best and deepest use of correspondence between
controls and character actions that we’ve ever seen in a
game.”
33
Another central mechanical element that coheres
the challenge, the colossi, the controls—and really the
entirety of the gameplay—is the concept and measure-
ment of Wander’s stamina. As I grip and hold onto any-
thing in the game—or hold my bow drawn, or swim
underwater, or charge up a sword strike—a pink cir-
cle appears in the lower-right corner of the screen, and
decreases as I continue the action. If I let go and return
to a default state, the bar will slowly refill—in short, I
can’t hold on to anything for too long. This introduces
a constant stream of strategic considerations when
ascending and hanging onto foes, a lesson Valus teaches
early on. Even once I’ve managed to get up to his back, I
must seize the moment before I’m knocked off entirely.
I need to get to the top of his head, and every so often
it becomes necessary to let go of his fur and regain my
grip while balancing awkwardly, like surfing a subway
train without a handhold. I get my feet under me long
enough to forge forward onto his head, where I find
another glowing sigil. Valus roars desperately as I drive
Wander’s sword into this vulnerable spot, each time
producing a thick arterial spray of inky black blood or
some arcane lifeforce. His previously still blue eyes flash
orange with… anger? Confusion? Fear?
Valus has a health bar of his own at the top of the
screen, and the moment my final stab empties it a
cutscene kicks in. Valus collapses bodily, falling forward
limp upon the ground, a destructive collision of one big
dead stone into another. At the same time, a mournful
tune swells, a choir paying their respects to this difficult
moment. This is no celebratory music, no triumphant
Final Fantasy post-battle fanfare (a Pavlovian reward for
victory in that series). There’s no winning message, no
experience points tallied, no positive reinforcement or
typical game-like closure of any kind. The only indi-
cation that it’s over is that Wander is still alive and the
colossus is not. The music fades to careful strings as con-
trol is given back to me, while Valus’s body is enveloped
by black fog. Blue-black tendrils shoot out from the
fog, hovering momentarily like undecided cobras before
piercing Wander’s body with their full force, a violent
crunch juxtaposed with the serenity of the music. No
matter how far I run in that moment, they always find
me, an inescapable, futile dance. Wander collapses, his
own body taking on some of the blackness, and the
scene fades to white—and then into imagery of moving
through a dark tunnel towards a bright light, swirling
voices (maybe Mono’s?) echoing from somewhere in the
ether.
Valus is Ueda’s favorite colossus, a critically import-
ant introduction to the true meat of the game—one that
took significant trial-and-error to get just right. It feels
unfair until the moment it doesn’t, all the accomplish-
ment of fighting a “boss” without the typical buildup.
But at the same time I feel a bit conflicted by the vio-
lence of my actions and the reward of a solemn, uncele-
brated death. It’s clear even in this first victory that what
I’m doing is wrong on some level, though I’ve journeyed
35
too far to not continue at least a bit further down this
road, into the depths of Dormin’s deal.
After being given the option to save my progress,
I’m taken back to the shrine. A shadowy figure stands
silently over Wander’s body, watching. How did I get
back here? Was this wraith involved? Wander wakes,
groggily, and the figure is gone. He immediately moves
to check on Mono, who lies still as ever, though undis-
turbed. Somewhere, an organ swells, as one of the
beastly statues nearby glows from within, a turquoise
light piercing its cracks, before the whole thing shatters
into rubble.
IN THE SEASIDE CAVE
I’m given control of Wander again, who stands sternly

facing the camera, Mono lying still as the sun pours in
behind them, blurring the edges of the rocky tableau
that lies just outside the shrine. Dormin has given a
vague hint for the next colossus:
“Thy next foe is…

In the seaside cave…
It moves slowly…
Raise thy courage to defeat it.”
Argo paces quietly nearby. It’s comforting to see her

again.
Before heading out, I travel deeper into the shrine
instead, retracing Wander’s steps back to the cylindrical
room of the opening cutscene, running all the way back
up the spiral ramp to the very top. It’s real, walkable
architecture in the game world—very little in Shadow
is purely set dressing, or built for just one purpose and
then thrown away. Touches like these help the Forbid-
den Lands to feel more like an actual place that can be
37
deeply explored, should your curiosity take you there—
you’re limited only by the towering cliffs and perilous
drops that border the edges of the world. A closed door
awaits me at the top of the spiral ramp, perhaps unsur-
prisingly, but it’s worth the quick side trip just to see (as
side trips in Shadow tend to be).
I pay Mono another visit on the way out, peaceful
in death as the wind catches the edge of her robe, a
stir of false life rippling over her. I like the ambiguity
of Wander and Mono’s relationship. Are they friends?
Lovers? Siblings? Is her condition something that he’s
responsible for? Is she simply a fallen princess and he
an errant knight coming to her aid? Though his mission
seems more desperate than that, risking everything in
the hopes of reviving her.
Mono’s altar is comprised not only of the pedestal
on which she lies, but of a tall, shapely column of stone
that extends down from the ceiling before flattening
out to rest a few feet above her. It’s wisely designed,
not only for the visual gravity it lends that part of the
shrine, drawing all eyes to the altar, but also serving as
an obstacle for more curious players who might seek to
climb on top of Mono’s resting place. There’s an inter-
esting impulse in some players to break the intended
immersion and instead be playful in serious spaces (like
driving the wrong way around the track in a racing
game); I tend to fight off the desire in the spirit of stay-
ing in character, but I have friends who’ll jump at the
opportunity to bring about chaos or narrative friction
(looking at you, Brendan). The world design of Shadow
tends to minimize those opportunities, stopping play-
ers from desecrating Mono’s alter, riding Agro off cliffs
to her death, or otherwise creating dissonance in the
experience.
As I venture back down and leave ahorse, I’m struck
by how gracefully the camera sweeps out of the shrine
and across the plains to follow me. Wander isn’t always
the visual center of attention, and often appears small as
the camera pulls out to frame the breadth of the land-
scape instead—Team Ico are much more interested in
creating a sense of place than a sense of empowerment.
In chatting about Shadow with Adam Saltsman, creator
of Canabalt and director at Finji, he named the cam-
era as his favorite thing about the game. Saltsman tells
me about what he calls the “uncanny valley for cam-
era work,” a term he ascribes to the disconnect felt in
most modern third-person action games between the
cinematic presentation of the cutscenes and the invis-
ible rig that players are dropped into behind their
character when transitioning into gameplay. “Leaping
between the two is massively jarring… this never hap-
pens in Shadow. I feel like nobody understands how
insane this is, because it is entirely unique to that game.
Nobody else has figured out how to do this. Ico does it
but Colossus does it out in the wild. And at scale. It’s just
incredible.”
Shadow’s seamless camera transitions are accom-
plished through a variety of methods, such as drawing
39
the player’s eye to environmental details that transform
into gameplay objects, and using a different aspect
ratio during cutscenes for cinematic impact before
gently fading back to a gameplay perspective to keep it
smooth. But primarily, Shadow’s harmoniousness is due
to eschewing a static gameplay camera entirely. Rather
than following Wander from a consistent vantage point
or cutting between multiple ones (as in Ico), Shadow
finds a rare middle ground—always keeping Wander
in view, but carefully framing both story and gameplay
moments with equal importance. That same invisible
camera rig that sits behind most game characters is
instead a free-floating directorial eye in Shadow, always
considerate of the context of Wander’s surroundings
and his actions, be it in a long shot of riding Agro over
an endless desert or in an uncomfortable close-up of the
killing blow on a colossus.
•••••••••••••••
Traveling across the plains once more, it’s difficult to

miss the beam of light now emanating from where I
felled the first colossus, a spotlight piercing the sky and
swirling the clouds above it. These beams will grow in
number as I conquer more opponents, serving as visual
landmarks to help me orient myself, but this first time
it also serves as a reminder that despite the dream-like
trappings of my battle’s resolution and my mysterious
journey back to the shrine, the fight was very much real.
I follow the light of Wander’s sword to the next
colossus, curving around and behind the shrine, further
reinforcing the massive scale of the game and making
sure I’m aware that my starting point is surrounded by
explorable land on all sides, not just across the south-
ern horizon. The light takes me across a natural stone
bridge that spans a wide canyon, and down a long cliff-
side slope that ends in the shady shores of a beach, adja-
cent to a misty, enclosed lake. I can feel the coolness of
this place, a nice contrast to the sunnier expanses above.
One of my favorite touches here is the visibility of the
very bottom of a few of the supporting beams of the
bridge from the game’s opening, huge columns embed-
ded deep into the base of the canyon. Again Shadow’s
architecture helps to tie its world together, naturally
stitching new locations to previous visual landmarks.
I explore the beach for a bit, even wading out into
the water, before checking the light of Wander’s sword
again, which points to a huge walled-off cave nearby.
A familiar mysterious tune plays, letting me know
that I’m in the right place. As I venture even closer, a
cutscene kicks in as my enemy bursts through the wall
and out of the cave—Quadratus (nicknamed the Mam-
moth in development), a giant four-legged bull-like
colossus. The music changes to a more frantic clip, rac-
ing towards a resolution of its own. Quadratus walks on
massive hoofed feet, peering down at me from between
sharp curled horns (one broken off near its base), the
bottom of its chin jutting out in stony columns like the
41
front of a snowplow. His construction highlights a more
distinct meeting of stone and moss, looking more like
armor or an exoskeleton than rocky flesh. His back and
the tops of his legs have plenty of stony architecture
that might be able to be gripped, but his lower legs that
stomp around me are layered in a smoother stone, so
the path to my ascent isn’t immediately clear.
As one of the least abstracted colossus designs—
and a star of much of Shadow’s marketing materials—
Quadratus is a regular recipient of fan art homages.
There’s a monument to him recreated block-by-block
in Minecraft, an impressive papier-mâché replica cov-
ered in what looks like real moss complete with eyes
that actually light up, and countless entries in a lengthy
DeviantArt thread highlighting arts and crafts projects
inspired by Shadow. As much as I’ve loved and thought
about the game for over a decade, I haven’t taken a deep
dive into its fan culture until now. Much of it is simply
a love letter to the game’s memorable colossus design;
even stripped of all context and placed on a table or a
blank canvas, the designs are still wonderfully evocative.
•••••••••••••••
This fight feels immediately different from the first as

you never need leave Agro behind, and are likely still
riding her as it begins. Ride close enough and Quadra-
tus will rear up, exposing sigils on the bottoms of his
hooves before stomping down menacingly. If you can
loose an arrow at a sigil before that happens, Quadratus
will cry out (sounding almost like an elephant) before
kneeling down in pain on the corresponding leg. From
there you must leave Agro once more, shimmying up
Quadratus’s mossy bits and up onto his back. It’s a dif-
ferent world up there, much more steady but divided by
a massive stone backbone of sorts that runs the length of
the creature’s body.
All told, Quadratus is one of the easier colossi once
you’ve found your way up—simply destroy the sigils at
the base of his backbone and on his head—but serves
an important early lesson in familiarizing players with
the more animalistic colossi. I remember having a tough
time spotting the sigils on his feet and finding a way up
the first time, which only adds to the appeal of replay-
ing Shadow—problems that once felt overwhelming
are often simple to execute once you’ve solved them.
Despite all of the moving pieces, Shadow is a puzzle
game foremost and an action game second.
Quadratus’s beachside battle is reminiscent of a spir-
itually similar one in a much more mainstream game—
that of the Scarab fight in Halo 3, an epic action setpiece
that pits players against a giant walking robot. Halo 3
game design lead Jaime Griesemer tells me that the bat-
tle was directly inspired by Shadow. The design team at
Bungie was playing Shadow together over lunch when
they had an epiphany about how much fun it would
be to take on a giant, reactive creature with the Halo
tool set. “Having something that big that would notice
43
you and look at you and chase you and that you had
to use your tools to figure out how to take down—it
was just such a powerful idea. […] Shadow really gave
us the template for how to make that work. And so it
was easier to sell it to people. […] The psychological
barrier was gone.” Griesemer isn’t shy about the inspira-
tion—he’s mostly just surprised that press never picked
up on the similarities. “What’s the quote, that great art-
ists steal? To me the similarities are just so obvious, but
maybe it’s just because I saw it evolve. […] I think a lot
of people don’t see past the context and the fictional
overlay to the mechanics underneath—and so giant
stone colossus and big metal scarab were very different.
But really, mechanically, it’s theft.”
•••••••••••••••
Upon my final thrust into the sigil on his head, Qua-

dratus keels over, crashing into the sand as the music
swells mournfully once more. Again I try to run from
the black-blue tendrils that envelop him, and again it’s
in vain. They find me, and I’m whisked away to the
tunnel of light, and then Wander is back in the shrine
unconscious with two shadowy figures standing over
him. Quadratus’s statue bursts and crumbles as Wander
awakens, ready for Dormin’s next set of instructions.
Where Valus brought me across the southern plains
and up a cliff, Quadratus took me across the northern
land bridge and down into a canyon, giving a sense of
the verticality and environmental breadth I’ll be explor-
ing in this world. I’ve already used both my sword and
my bow, taken on a colossus alone and with Agro, and
fought both bipedal and quadrupedal opponents. If
Valus had been a carefully crafted introduction to the
colossus battles, Quadratus was the first test to see if I’m
paying attention. The key elements are familiar—crip-
ple the leg, scale the back, reach the head—but each
is slightly more obscured, challenging my observational
abilities and pushing my newfound skills just a bit fur-
ther. I’m not quite ready for anything, but I’m getting
there.
45
A GIANT CANOPY
SOARS TO THE
HEAVENS
I really take in Wander for the first time when he awakes.

He’s young, a teenager maybe, but clearly an experienced
adventurer. He may have been headstrong coming to
this desperate land, but it’s clear that he knows how to
survive. A pretty boy with almost shoulder-length crim-
son hair held back with a blue headband, his appearance
leans towards androgyny. Matching blue shinguards are
tied on with straps above his sandals, looking almost
Grecian. He wears a stitched tunic and lightly patterned
green shorts, forearms wrapped tightly in white cloth
or bandages, with what look like feathers hanging from
his belt. Most notable is Wander’s serape or poncho, the
bottom portion of which is patterned identically to the
one Ico wears—their most iconic (jokes!) similarity. In
Wander’s idle state, one hand rests on the scabbard that
hangs loose from his belt, his sword clearly comfort-
able in the other. While his bow cannot be seen until
47
readied, he brings it forth in one smooth, fast move-
ment as he nocks an arrow.
Since gaming protagonists moved to the realm of
3D and mostly evolved away from cartoony mascots,
they’ve often been sortable into gritty archetypes like
soldiers, space marines, and treasure hunters. This is
especially true of games developed in the West, whereas
Japanese-developed games tend to have more flair,
character, and visual panache. While Team Ico’s games
are relatively muted, there’s a timelessness to Wander’s
design—vaguely low fantasy, but also of our world,
functional and not over-designed. His construction is
especially important in a game where you need visual
contrast with the larger-than-life colossi—Wander’s rel-
ative plainness makes it much easier to project your-
self onto him, whereas a more colorful hero may have
offered escapism at the cost of empathy.
White doves—similar to those that flit around Ico’s
castle in the mist—have started to amass near Mono’s
resting place. Like the shadowy figures that look over
Wander before he awakes, there are now two instead of
one, part of several elements in the game that increment
with each colossus killed. Shadowy figures appear, doves
collect, idols crumble, and light beams pierce the sky—
it becomes hard not to notice the growing impact of
your actions. Following one of those beams, I backtrack
to the place where I felled Quadratus. I find his body, or
what’s become of it: a jagged, mossy pile of rocks, fused
with the ground. It looks as if it could have been there
for hundreds of years, but only I know that it wasn’t.
••••••••••••••
Climbing out of the canyon, the next colossus seems

to be further north, my sword’s light pointing to a pas-
sageway between rocky walls in the distance. There’s a
curious clashing of biomes here, arid desert and lime
green grass mere feet from each other—and a tree
nearby… covered in fruit! I find it easy to get distracted
in Shadow, despite always knowing roughly where to
go and what to do next. A black lizard skitters around
the tree and when I kill with an arrow, it drops its tail
behind. Around a hill I find a small, perfect pond next
to some saplings; I imagine bringing Mono there to
relax when this is all over. I follow a breadcrumb trail of
lizards, working my way around the lip of the canyon
that housed Quadratus, before eventually getting back
on track and heading into the passageway.
I weave my way through narrow walls of stone until
they open up into a misty valley, a crater housing a giant
lake that I emerge at the edge of. In the center of the
lake a huge island-like structure rises up, a wide column
of rock that appears to be flat on the top, too tall to
see, with an even wider stone structure embedded on
the top, almost like a natural helipad or a crash-landed
alien ship. A long, narrow curved pathway breaks away
from it and ramps down, dipping into the water at its
49
end. It’s a beautiful, serene place to explore, though my
destination is clear. I leave Agro on the shore and start
swimming towards the base of the narrow pathway,
headed for the top of the structure. Wander moves less
confidently in water, keeping proper breaststroke form
with his right arm but doing more of a sweeping doggy
paddle with his left. He can also dive below the surface,
at which point the stamina bar measures his remaining
breath. The water is placid with no immediate threat,
yet there’s a tinge of tension in swimming for the first
time, not knowing what may lie beneath the surface in
the darkened depths.
I emerge at the base of the pathway and make my
way up to the top. There, a few tricky, seemingly arbi-
trary jumps between handholds are required to get over
to the main platform, which for most will likely result in
a few accidental plunges back into the water far below.
These handholds are actually serving a purpose, though,
testing your skill at jumping between two back-to-back
ledges, a big help in the coming fight. It also serves a
secondary purpose, which is to inform players that they
won’t take damage from a high fall into deep water.
I crest the top of the platform, revealed as a broad,
flat circular arena, tilted slightly, one that houses what
may be my favorite colossus of the bunch: Gaius, called
the Knight during development. I recall Dormin’s
description:
A giant canopy soars to the heavens…
The anger of the sleeping giant shatters the earth…”
What appears to be a pile of rocks near the center of

the arena begins to rumble, then sits up, then stands fully
upright as a bipedal, absolutely towering colossus. Gaius
is roughly human in shape and proportion, emphasized
and contrasted by Wander’s diminutive frame in the
foreground, while also looking like an entire ancient
city come to life. An armament of columns and curved
ridges of stone jut out from his chest, neck, head, and
arms, somewhere between eroded armor and decorative
regalia, atop a thick layer of furry moss. He also carries
a massive blunt sword in his right hand, itself seemingly
as large as the entire previous colossus. The camera stays
low as I’m given back control of Wander—I can see the
shrine distantly in the background, under a bright sky
mottled with clouds, dry plateaus stretching away from
the crater in every direction—and Gaius starts stomp-
ing towards me.
This battle is what inspired the Western name of
the game, which needed localization from the Japanese
title, Wanda to Kyozō (essentially “Wanda [Wander] and
Colossus”). The credit goes to Shadow’s original US
producer, Kyle Shubel, who worked on SCEA’s Inter-
national Software Development team (who made sure
that games from other regions were appropriate for
an American release), and his marketing manager at
the time, Mark Valledor. Shubel explained to me that
51
Wander was too confusing (“is that a name, is that a
person, is that a boy, is that a girl?”), and that it took
some fighting with both the Japan side and the US mar-
keting team (who were trying to come up with some-
thing “hip and trendy”) to land on a new name. But
the Gaius fight helped them nail it, as Kyle explained
to me: “It was the shot with Gaius when you would be
running along and you’d swing the camera the wrong
way […] and all of a sudden you would literally see the
shadow of that I-beam that he carries as a sword come
crashing down, and the shadow would pass over you
like a jet when you’re near an airport and it would freak
people out.”
Despite having played Shadow several times before,
I’m breathless and overwhelmed by the odds of this bat-
tle yet again, and I can’t quite remember what to do.
Whereas I could fight the previous colossi at my own
pace, even leave them alone completely for a while, I’m
now stuck in this relatively small arena with a massive,
armed giant closing in on me. He also seems more
aware and sentient than the others, perhaps appropri-
ate given his more human form. The encounter feels
like a duel, two knights squaring off as if nothing else
existed around them. I let Gaius smash his sword near
me—a leaning, full-bodied windup that rapidly closes
the space between us—and when it lingers in the earth
I sprint towards it, scurry up onto it, and suddenly I’m
running full bore up the length of this tremendous
weapon. This may well be the most iconic moment of
the game, as evidenced by the endless fan art trying to
communicate the scale, impact, and sheer awesomeness
of this interaction. It perfectly captures the David versus
Goliath milieu of the impossibly bigger and stronger
opponent being foiled by unmatched smarts and nim-
ble ingenuity, and it requires a moment of spontaneous
bravery from the player to run across such a perilous
surface.
Few games can be said to provide these true moments
of awe. Another is Journey (2012) by thatgamecompany,
in which players adventure across a stunning desert
world while reflecting on life and companionship. I
spoke to its creative director Jenova Chen about the awe
that both games are chasing. “Awe is when you don’t
understand something, when you feel that the mystery
is so big that in contrast you are so small, so insignifi-
cant, so that you have exposed yourself towards some-
thing divine. We have to make the player feel small and
so a large landscape is very effective in making you feel
that. And that’s also how church works—most churches
have such a high ceiling, that makes you feel small and
makes you feel this moment you share with God.”
The religious allusions in Shadow are not eas-
ily missed, from the church-like construction of the
shrine to the disembodied voice in the ceiling that is
Dormin—or spelled backwards, Nimrod. According to
ancient religious texts, Nimrod (the great-grandson of
Noah) led the people of Shinar in the construction of
the Tower of Babel, meant to reach up into the heavens.
53
Seeing this, God scattered the people of Shinar across
the earth, confounding their speech and giving rise to
a world of mutually foreign languages. This is but one
of several interpretations of Dormin’s name, but the
scattering of entities across a land certainly has growing
importance in Shadow’s tale.
••••••••••••••
I can only scale Gaius so far before the armor at his

elbow blocks my path and he flings me back to the
arena below. It takes me long enough without progress
that Dormin’s disembodied voice chimes in with a clue,
pointing out that the colossus’s armor is brittle. It’s a bit
creepy, really, and it’s unclear at this point why Dormin
is omnisciently guiding me. I take his hint, though, and
stand on a small raised platform in the middle of the
arena; the next time Gaius takes a swipe, his sword con-
nects with the platform and the piece of armor that was
blocking my ascent shatters off, granting him a slight
vulnerability.
I scurry back up the sword, up and around his elbow,
and leap across to his midsection where a sigil glows
brightly from a distance under the light of my sword
(oh, it can locate sigils too—multi-use sword!). A few
charged stabs (under great duress of Gaius fervently try-
ing to shake me off) and the sigil is gone, leaving me one
final tricky journey to the top of his head. As I clamber
up his shoulder, there’s a moment when Gaius seems to
have forgotten me, looking out over the beauty of the
sprawling lands, still and unthreatened. It doesn’t last
long, though, and he turns his attention back to the
nuisance.
These final moments of fighting Gaius are monu-
mental—it feels like a fight to the death at the top of
the world, a clear view for miles in every direction save
for the writhing titan beneath me. It’s also the first time
that the scale of the game is truly communicated. Wan-
der, as a relative ant, on the apex of a stories-tall giant,
who’s standing on an arena, on top of a towering col-
umn of rock, in a lake, in a crater. Somewhere far below,
my speck of a horse runs back and forth nervously on
the shore.
55
IN THE LAND OF THE
VA S T G R E E N F I E L D S
Let’s talk about horses.

First, our equine companion in arms, Agro. A video
game horse like no other. If you let Shadow idle at the
start screen, it will sometimes take you in-game to the
last spot you saved, where Wander lies asleep and Agro
explores the lands by herself, while the camera follows
above like a bird. One of the more peaceful, quietly
stirring songs keeps her company, an almost Italian or
Spanish arrangement of acoustic guitars. It’s a beauti-
ful way to see the world more passively, as Agro gallops
across plains and trots carefully past chasms, explor-
ing the countryside until the next time you need her.
Another thoughtful touch by Shadow’s creators to fur-
ther immerse you in their world.
•••••••••••••
And now, a brief history of relevant horses in modern

gaming. Red Dead Redemption is an incredible Old West
57
epic where the horses are a lot of fun, but you’re so often
swapping horses that you can never build an attachment
to your mount. The Elder Scrolls series of first-person
high-fantasy sandboxes uses horses mainly as a means
of speeding up travel, and also led me to a hilarious
discovery that if you sleep to change the time of day
while mounted on your horse, you’ll awaken standing
next to its corpse. Darksiders, an under-appreciated
action game in which you play as War, one of the four
horsemen of the apocalypse, features your horse Ruin, a
massive fire-trailing Clydesdale that—once unlocked—
gallops up out of the ground whenever you desire. It’s
awesome. And most recently, there’s Metal Gear Solid V:
The Phantom Pain, in which your horse—D-Horse—
can be deployed into the field via balloon drop-off at
any time, provided you have the cash.
The list drops off pretty severely after that, save for
gaming’s most widely beloved horse: the Legend of
Zelda series’ Epona, named after the Gaulish goddess of
horses. While I’m not the biggest fan of the 3D Zelda
games where Epona made her mark, I spent enough time
riding her to get a feel for her role in protagonist Link’s
world and the unchanging purpose that she serves. On
his blog The Pretentious Gamer, Bryan Ma—previously
a designer at 2K Games—outlines some of the differ-
ences between the two companions:
As characters, Link and Epona have a similar

relationship [to Wander and Agro], but to very
different effect. The game continually illustrates
their relationship through cutscenes, but the game-
play doesn’t reinforce the emotions that the narra-
tive is meant to promote. Although expressed as a
central character figure and is often supposed to tug
at our heartstrings (“Look, she’s hurt her foot!”),
in the game Epona fills the sidekick role, the tool
of the player. […] She disappears and appears and
there is little expression of realism in communicat-
ing that Epona acts like something approaching
a real horse. […] At the start of the game, Agro
also seems to be simply a tool for the player, but
the shared experiences of fighting the colossi and
wandering the landscape bring the player and Agro
together. Although you control Wander, gameplay
is a shared experience, in a sense. Rather than being
an accessory to the experience, Agro is a necessity;
dashing in and out of a colossi’s view, leaping onto
Agro’s back as an enormous foot crashes down
where Wander would have been. The sheer repeti-
tion of these events has a constructive effect on this
formation of a player-AI bond.
Since Ico, several high-profile games have involved

an ever-present partner character, though Shadow is
the only one I can think of with an ever-present horse.
And to me, Agro never feels like anything less than a
real partner—a character with a mind of her own, one
who is always aware and considerate of my intent. It’s
59
tough to think of her purely as an AI driven by dif-
ferent commands and behaviors. (In my notes I wrote,
“maybe she’s controlled by a real horse with a game pad
somewhere.”)
And while I ride her—through treacherous passages,
across sun-beaten deserts, and into battle against over-
whelming odds—I never control her directly. Where
most game horses aren’t functionally different to manip-
ulate than their riders—move the analog stick right, and
the horse moves right—Agro is different, acquiescing
to Wander’s instructions while still being perceived as a
fully independent entity. I simply guide her reins in the
direction I’d like to go, shifting my weight and giving
her a small spurring with a sandal, and we’re off.
Another nice touch is how Agro responds to Wander
from different distances. Whistle from far away (one
of those high-pitched whistles involving fingers, which
I’ve always wished I could do), and Agro will often
rear up, immediately charging back over to me. From
a medium distance, Wander will instead yell out Agro’s
name, pulling his shoulders back as he does so to push
the name out, “Agro!” (If you’ve played the game before,
I’m sure you can hear it in your mind now.) If Agro is
close enough, Wander will simply speak her name at a
conversational volume, simply reminding his compan-
ion that he’s close by. During combat, it becomes a more
desperate, strained yell, an urgent expression of are you
okay? Agro’s concern for Wander is evident as well, as
she whinnies in alarm when he falls from the top of a
colossus or a high ledge. The controller’s vibrations fur-
ther increase this bond—in a slow trot, it almost feels
like a joint heartbeat, whereas running harder pulses the
motors with accompanying momentum.
Even at face value, the imagery of Wander rid-
ing Agro across the expanses of the Forbidden Lands
is striking, and has inspired a range of homages. One
that has brought me particular joy is the lesser-known
mobile title A Ride Into the Mountains, a fantastic little
action-puzzle game by Sunhead Games out of Taiwan.
It clearly draws inspiration from Shadow, with striking
pixel art and a smooth running animation for its horse,
which was accomplished by pixelating the frame-by-
frame animation of Eadweard Muybridge’s 1878 The
Horse in Motion (which you’ve likely seen as one of the
earliest examples of the motion picture). While research-
ing art styles for the game, Sunhead came across Darwin
Yamamoto’s “Pixel of the Colossus” fan art (please Goo-
gle it) and pinned it to the top of their work software so
that they’d see it every day. Over time, it influenced the
look and structure of the entire game—the influence of
Shadow, even a step removed through fan art, helped
their two-man studio find the soul of their aesthetic.
All this horsing around can only lead us to one
place, of course: the next colossus, who lies across the
eastern plains through a network of shadowed, twist-
ing canyons. I dip through a cave near the end, emerg-
ing at the edge of a beautiful, verdant valley, greener
than anywhere I’ve yet seen and draped in vines and
61
a thick carpet of moss. It’s also noticeably more quiet
and serene, far from the howling winds of the plains,
replaced by the sound of a breeze through rushes, or
perhaps an unseen waterfall. While the coming battle
itself will be familiar to me, there’s a gap in my memory
to the introduction of this place, and the journey there
feels wonderfully new and mysterious.
In the center of the valley, a small meadow holds
four small hills, symmetrically adjacent to one another
as four corners of a square. The outward-facing side of
each is flattened off, bisected by a stone wall with an
opening to walk through. Each opening leads down a
short flight of stairs, which interconnects underground
between all four hills. Around a far corner of the valley
lies my foe: Phaedra, called Kirin during development
after a mythical unicorn-like creature from East Asian
culture. Phaedra is the first colossus I’ve been able to
clearly see from a short distance before it comes to life,
resting sphinxlike, the clear protector of this meadow. I
walk close enough, and Phaedra snaps awake, standing
up on long, bony legs, rib cage jutting out below his
chest, almost the skeleton of a horse. Where Gaius was
furry and dense, Phaedra is cadaverous, feeling espe-
cially old and mystical. Flanking his mask-like face dan-
gle two long columns of decorative stone, like tassels or
fallen reins, maybe payot even. (That’s the most Judaism
you’ll get out of this Jew in this whole book, so enjoy
it.) Its music is softer, more tentative, and the threat is
less immediate.
I start to back up as Phaedra lumbers towards me,
but Agro isn’t moving from her spot where we both
stood moments ago, and I panic—while I know she
can’t actually be killed, my concern for her supersedes
that knowledge. I run back in for Agro, and Phaedra is
upon us as I mount up, so we weave our way quickly
between his legs back out into the meadow. I ride Agro
to a safer spot near the entrance, and dismount to be
more nimble near my foe. I look at Agro, who’s looking
at Phaedra, almost an ancient blueprint of a horse. (I
wonder if she’s thinking that too, because I’m a crazy
person.) I duck in and out of the grassy burrows as
Phaedra slowly pursues me on talon-like legs that crack
the earth, and I fire a volley of arrows to lure him in
Wander’s direction as I try and remember what to do
next. My sword indicates a sigil on his head, but I can’t
see any way to climb up, save for a few ladder-like stone
rungs at the base of his coccyx, still too high for me to
reach. Eventually I catch his attention long enough to
focus him on the mouth of one of the burrows, where
I promptly run underground and pop out one of the
other entrances. Phaedra is still transfixed on my disap-
pearance and leans down low to get a closer look, and
my opportunity has arrived. I bolt across the meadow
between us, and grab onto the rungs that were out of
reach while he was standing. I climb up his back along
the ridge of a mossy mane, and he tries to buck me off,
rearing up on his hind legs in protest.
63
I flash back to a bad horse-riding memory from
childhood. The first horse I ever rode—on what was
supposed to be a peaceful forest excursion—jumped
over a stream, shook violently to dry off, and suddenly
broke away from the group to gallop full-speed across
a field. While I walked away intact, I’ve since found
horses to be terrifying in person, unpredictable harbin-
gers of broken bones that I am wholly not comfortable
being mounted on top of.
Wander and I are still clinging for life as Phaedra
settles back down to earth. A glowing crack at the nape
of his neck beckons my sword, and a well-timed stab
there makes Phaedra lower his head slightly. I can’t see
a sigil anywhere, so I take a death-defying leap from
his back over the frictionless stony armor that rings his
neck, aiming to land on the top on his furry head. I
hang in the air a moment, feeling the resistance of grav-
ity, wind, and the momentum of jumping between two
moving objects, before slamming down successfully on
my landing spot, a blue sigil glowing brightly between
my feet. It isn’t easy, but the jump feels incredible, a
high mark in my playthrough thus far.
A few brief stabs and it’s over. I don’t even run from
the tendrils this time, standing saddened on Phaedra’s
motionless body as they whisk me away through the
darkness and back to the shrine in our bittersweet
routine.
This time, Agro trots over gingerly to check on
Mono as Wander stirs awake. Still no signs of life. Agro
whinnies and stirs when Dormin speaks next, but she
doesn’t leave my side.
65
ACROSS A MISTY LAKE
The fifth colossus lies even further across the eastern

plains, past a winding cliffside trail overlooking a wall
of waterfalls supplying a large body of water at the bot-
tom of a canyon, an intriguing island poking out of
the middle. At the end of the trail a small man-made
structure catches my attention, the first of its kind I’ve
encountered in this playthrough. These are save shrines,
a glowing stone embedded in one wall, radiating energy.
Kneeling before it, I’m able to save my progress in the
field, as it were, rather than at the home base of the
Shrine of Worship. I climb to the top of the structure,
maybe two stories tall, up multiple ledges that are tiered
like a wedding cake. As I stand on the very top, the cam-
era pulls back, showing me the sweeping breadth of the
landscape before me. It’s as if Shadow wants me to take
a moment and enjoy my surroundings at every oppor-
tunity, a respite from my dire mission and a reminder of
the stillness and beauty of this land.
••••••••••••
67
My girlfriend Amber and I went to Japan in the fall of
2014, the first time for both of us. It was an amazing
trip, our first in a country where English isn’t the pri-
mary language, a glimpse into the culture and customs
of somewhere both ancient and ultra-modern. Kyoto
was particularly memorable, a place we still reminisce
about on a daily basis, and whose souvenirs now dot
our apartment back in San Francisco (just as bits of
our hearts will now always reside in Kyoto). I loved the
pace of life in Kyoto, the juxtaposition of impossibly
delicious restaurants blocks away from stunning ageless
temples, and the feeling that everything was right in
its place. Above all else, I would describe Japan’s defin-
ing characteristic as considerate, at least as an outsider.
Everyone was immensely kind, regardless of social stat-
ure, and even the most mundane aspects of life were
thoughtfully envisioned and executed—in the budget
hotel that we stayed for a couple of nights, the center of
the bathroom mirror would stay heated during a shower
as to never fog up. That small-yet-thoughtful innova-
tion is Japan in a nutshell.
Being there also gave me context for the artistic
motivations and inspirations behind some of the Jap-
anese art and entertainment that I’ve enjoyed for years,
from Princess Mononoke and Seven Samurai to Katamari
Damacy and myriad Final Fantasies. Within much of
Japanese art, there’s a respect for the patience and curi-
osity of its patrons, and an aesthetic defined by ideals of
imperfection and impermanence (wabi-sabi), subtlety
(shibusa), and mystery (yūgen). The perfect words to
describe Shadow, I’d say.
••••••••••••
My peaceful moment looking out from the save shrine

is interrupted by a lizard tiptoeing just below me, this
time with a white streak of a tail, skunk-like. I hop
down and loose an arrow, and the glowing white tail
is left behind as my prize, extending my stamina bar
slightly. (I’ll come to learn that one of these special
white-tailed lizards can be found at each save shrine.) I
head to a nearby tree that I spotted from up top, which
droops with fruit that I immediately harvest the entirety
of. I’m struck by the feeling that I’m decimating this
place in more ways than one, but surely the fruit will
grow back? This is the guilt that I’m now carrying, and
it reminds me to get back on track with my greater (and
ever guiltier) mission.
Through another stretch of canyon I find more ante-
diluvian ruins, across from a rocky shore and rimmed
with a sharp-looking wrought iron fence. It feels like
the bowels of Ico’s castle here. I leave Agro on the shore
and swim through an archway, climbing up a column
of stone on the other side. A fenced walkway takes me
to an overlook of what appears to be a sunken city, the
peaks of its buildings poking out from the water. It’s
at this moment that the next colossus introduces itself,
69
swooping majestically overhead before landing to perch
on one of the tallest structures.
This is Avion, simply called the Bird during devel-
opment, a magnificent colossus with broad spiky-edged
wings, and an even longer tail—easily double its wing-
span—that dips almost all the way down to the water
from its perch high above. (According to Ueda, in the
original design of this encounter the player would need
to climb up its tail from underwater, which is why it’s
so long.) Avion is beautifully symmetrical, and one
of the more literal recreations of a real-life creature in
Shadow—beak, talons, and all. I’m also struck by the
realization that I’m looking at Avion through the bars of
a cage I’ve found myself in, as the overlook is surrounded
by tall metal fences, completing the bird allusion.
Jumping down from the overlook through a hole
in the floor, I swim to the structures jutting out of the
water, pulling myself up on a low platform. Avion sits
still, a sentinel waiting for my inevitable provocation. I
fulfill my role of aggressor as I fire an arrow across the
lake and into the body of my foe. In one sleek, silent
motion, Avion rises from his spot, and in a single beat
of his massive wings he’s bearing down on Wander,
flying low and alarmingly fast over the water. Before I
have time to think, he’s closed the gap entirely, and I’m
jumping towards him in a desperate bid to land and
catch a mossy strip on his wing. I brace for impact—
even closing my eyes for a moment—and the next sec-
ond I’m clinging to Avion as he whisks us away, higher
and higher into the air, the water a distant blue back-
drop below.
••••••••••••
While Shadow is in part a product of Japanese culture,

its design owes even more to the vision of Ueda himself.
“Artist is the best term [for him],” Kyle Shubel (Shad-
ow’s US producer) tells me about Ueda. “He can artic-
ulate his vision through words and through drawings.
A lot of times he won’t even tell you, he’ll pull a pencil
out and start sketching, and magical things happen. I
hate to mystify the man further but he’s incredibly cre-
ative, he’s in his own world, and he knows the goal that
he wants everyone around him to achieve well before
he communicates it to them.” The more you read and
hear about Ueda, the easier it is to understand why
Shadow is so extraordinary. According to Shubel, Ueda
isn’t even much of a gamer himself, finding most games
to be too much of a diversion and choosing instead to
spend his time working on his art and his writing. Even
so, he managed to surround himself with like minds
at Team Ico, a team that truly believed that they were
doing something special and trusted Ueda to see them
through it. “For being a quiet guy, Fumito is a very
compelling man. He really inspired people… it was
[like] being on the state champion football team—you
all believe you’re going to win your next game.”
And like any champion team, they had to put in
the hard work and overtime to see it through. Often
Shubel would visit the studio to find producer Kenji
Kaido asleep under his desk, his jacket hung from
underneath his keyboard as a makeshift curtain after
having been at the office for days on end. Kaido may
71
be the unsung hero of Team Ico’s legacy. Just as hear-
ing more about Ueda clarifies Shadow’s vision, hearing
more about Kaido clarifies how the team actually pulled
it off. “You could see him watch Fumito go off on one
of his tangents and his idea and you’ll just watch Kenji
start writing down notes. […] Kaido is programming
and production, Fumito is art and design—they are
opposite sides of the same coin. Kenji was the one who
reined Fumito in so that the games would ship even-
tually. […] They compliment each other’s weaknesses,
they enhance each other’s strengths.”
••••••••••••
I’m in the thick of an airborne battle, completely

removed from the quiet comforts of the watery ruins I
enjoyed moments ago. While the other colossi encoun-
ters were thrilling, Avion is an absolute rush. A frenzy
of strings rises and falls as a choir swells in time, under-
scoring the drama of the moment. The wind whips by
as I alternately cling to and surf the length of this beast,
as what look like orange embers fill the skies around
me. Avion’s movements feel reactive to my own, and
he twists sideways as I sprint the length of his body,
perpendicular to the ground as he soars. I’m forced to
cling on tightly until he flattens out, and I run to the
base of his tail, where I stab a sigil. After, I have no
choice but to push my way back upstream, against the
wind, the light of my sword revealing another sigil on
the mossy tip of his wing. I nervously scurry across the
slippery stone middle of the wing—the ultimate risk at
this height—hoping that Avion stays level. Successful, I
drive my sword into the glowing moss. Avion shrieks in
pain, and twists fully upside down, so that I’m dangling
completely off his body, gripping onto the moss for dear
life. Kenji Kaido was once asked at what point during
Shadow’s development did he feel that it was going to
be a game that ‘came from the heart’: “For me, it would
have to be when I lost the impression that the colossi
were moving according to obvious AI algorithms. I felt
it all of a sudden one day while I was testing the game-
play. The colossi didn’t feel alive, and they didn’t feel
like animals, but they weren’t machines, either. That felt
right to me.”
I’m running out of stamina, and I plummet down,
down, with a splash into the water below (luckily miss-
ing the less-forgiving ruins poking up from it), and
everything is quiet and peaceful again. I’ve come too
far, though, and I need to finish the fight. Avion cruises
tranquilly above, and I re-engage his attention with an
arrow. He swoops down, I jump (to the other wing this
time, thinking ahead), and we’re back up in the skies
together, stumbling and shrieking.
Avion is a resetting of expectations, and a favorite
colossus for many of the developers I’ve been speaking
to. I asked Ueda for his thoughts on why this battle in
particular resonates so strongly. “I think this flying boss
allows players to feel the weight and presence of their
hero character in the game world,” he said. “Players
break away from the confines of the world’s gravity and
soar along with the boss, but only for a moment. If the
game had many bird-type bosses, it would have made
that sense of liberation from the ground less special.”
73
I finish Avion off with a stab to his other wing, and
his death knell takes over. I’m thrown from his body, as
black blood sprays from his wing, an airliner out of bal-
ance and out of fuel. He crashes into the water, instantly
submerged, sinking to the bottom of this flooded city. I
try to hold my breath underwater to hide from the ten-
drils, dancing in the distance over Avion’s resting place.
It takes a few long beats, but they eventually separate
from Avion completely, shooting out like symmetrical
lasers before honing in on me.
IT LUSTS FOR
DESTRUCTION
Southwest of the Shrine of Worship lies a cool, sun-dap-

pled forest. Not too dense with trees, but with a thick
enough canopy of leaves to let only bright rays of sun-
light in. I quietly ride Agro through this still, peaceful
place on our way to the next colossus, vaguely following
the light of Wander’s sword. It doesn’t work in shadow,
though, and we’re left to our own devices to find the
best route through. But first, I make sure to purpose-
fully head the wrong way out, something that I’ve done
for a lifetime in most every video game I could. That’s
usually how you find the best treasure and the most
obscured secrets. It’s a systematic dismissal of the correct
next step, blowing off maps and navigational arrows to
read between the lines of what the game really wants
you to do: “Psst, don’t go there, go here.” Taking the
wrong path first so often rewards us that it’s become the
only sensible thing to do; the way to see the most that
a game has to offer, knowing that it will inevitably loop
us back around to the correct path soon enough. The
75
off-the-beaten-path discoveries vary hugely between
games, of course, but I like the idea that gameplay itself
is simply a means to an end, to indulge human curiosity
and a lifelong quest to become closer to the unknown.
Shadow’s rewards aren’t always as tangible as most,
except for the slight health and stamina boosts that fruit
and white-tailed lizards provide. But I often find myself
exploring simply because it’s beautiful.
My wrong route takes me to a treacherously narrow
path along a cliff, leading to a dead end where a fruit tree
hangs over a long drop to a reservoir below. I’m struck
with a mixture of nostalgia and déjà vu. There’s a white-
tailed lizard here to grab, a rare sight away from the save
shrines, but the branch holding the fruit is growing out
over the drop, so my usual routine of shooting the fruit
down and collecting it off of the ground won’t work. It’s
a stymying scene that’s stuck with me for years—this
isolated tree growing at a dead end, with forbidden fruit
that I can’t gather. It feels both natural and specifically
authored, hand-placed by a level designer with a playful
smirk on their face. “When you’re constructing a world,
it’s boring if everything is just there for logical or func-
tional reasons,” Ueda tells me. “We left in some noise
on purpose.”
I weave my way back through the woods, connect-
ing with a new trail that leads me through a variety of
biomes before spitting me out into a wide, arid desert.
The light off the sword points me all the way across
the sand, to the symmetric face of a temple embedded
in a broad, imposing cliff. I find a sly entrance at its
base, and leaving Agro behind I venture into a series of
underground tunnels, taking me deeper into the bowels
of the mountain. Eventually I emerge near the top of a
massive, subterranean hall. Scaling down nearby ledges
to the floor below, no sooner do Wander’s feet touch the
ground than a huge adjacent wall lowers, revealing the
sixth colossus, Barba.
According to Ueda, Barba (called Minotaur B in
development) is a sibling of Valus, the first colossus,
another one of three Minotaur-esque creatures. He
looks similar, though perhaps more well-preserved in
this lair, his many outcroppings of armor fully intact,
his limbs even thicker and more muscled. He wears a
different mask, too, and diminutive horns jut out of
his head on both sides. He’s also aggressive, needing no
provocation, and immediately heads towards Wander,
smashing and stomping the ground nearby. I make a
break for it across the huge hall, running full-speed
towards a low wall, scurrying up and over it moments
before Barba comes crashing through. This is a true pur-
suit, an angry giant after a panicked flea, and we scurry
and crash through two more low walls before I reach the
protective confines of some ruins at the end of the hall.
I hide behind a pillar as Barba stomps around, even-
tually leaning down to look for me more closely. This
reveals Barba’s defining physical characteristic, and big-
gest distinction from Valus: a long, layered beard that
hangs in front of the ample mane that covers his chest
77
and shoulders, and now hangs freely in front of me,
beckoning.
I have a complicated relationship with beards.
Which might sound weird coming from a guy who’s
very much known for and defined by his beard, both
personally and professionally. I couldn’t grow any whis-
per of a beard until my early twenties, at which point
I made up for lost time, and within a few years I was
more often fully bearded than not. I’ve only been clean-
shaven twice since I moved to California almost nine
years ago, and my beard is now inseparable from my
identity. I get very kind, very regular compliments from
strangers of “nice beard!” And while I thank them, I also
think, “I basically did nothing for a while and now it’s
here.” And while I’ve come to terms with the fact that
I have a pretty good beard, I don’t like being defined
by my beard, the way certain colleagues feel the need
to comment on it every time they see me, as if we have
no other way of connecting. Still, having a beard feels
sort of primal and even masculine—a characteristic
that doesn’t come easily to someone who can’t throw
a football properly and thinks his car runs via magic.
As a result, I often do define myself by my beard (as I
did in the introduction to this book). Like I said, it’s
complicated.
So with apologies to Barba—I mean come on, his
name is basically “Barber”—I remember him primar-
ily as the bearded colossus. And when he presents the
opportunity, I take a running leap forward to grab on.
I’m successful, and as he stands back up I leap horizon-
tally, working my way up and around his beard to his
mane, and up onto his back. There’s a sigil on his head
that I take out with a few desperate stabs as he thrashes
beneath me, almost fully draining my stamina several
times as I try to hang on. He eventually succeeds, and I
run around on the ground for a while, trying to spot the
second sigil with the light of my sword while avoiding
Barba’s stomps, until I narrow it down to his back. I
hide for a bit, shimmy back up the curious beard, and
work my way over to a familiar glow on his left shoulder
blade. It’s a tough spot to cling to, but I get in a couple
of stabs and it’s over. Barba crashes violently forward as
the orchestra plays him off.
In the grand scheme of Shadow, Barba is one of the
least interesting colossi, especially coming on the heels
of the thrilling airborne battle with Avion. But he’s
also a smart step in pacing and contrast, and serves as
a pop quiz to test out some of the techniques learned
from previous battles. According to Ueda, “Humanoid
colossi have some pliability and can move in a variety of
ways, so it was easy to come up with ideas for this one.”
This may have been a case where one of the first ideas
was solid (climb the beard!), and the implementation
gave them a colossus flexible enough to slot into the
lineup where needed, even if it wasn’t one of the stron-
ger ideas on its own.
My girlfriend had been watching this fight from the
sidelines, but she missed the ending, so when she returns
79
I excitedly tell her where the final sigil was located. On
Barba’s left shoulder blade, in the exact same spot that
I’ve been having sharp recurring pain for the last couple
of years. Amused, I summarize the similarities between
us—lengthy beard, weak spot in the shoulder blade, and
I realize there’s one more: it’s a bright, beautiful Satur-
day outside, our blinds are drawn, and we’re holed up in
the darkness. Like it or not, Barba is my colossus today.
A RIPPLE OF THUNDER
Wander is single-minded, seemingly numb to the trag-

edy and gravity of this murderous goose chase, but
for me it hasn’t gotten any easier. Shadow’s stakes are
uncommon, to say the least—there’s no world-threat-
ening crisis looming, no immediate timeline on Mono’s
further deterioration. Nothing would come to further
harm if Wander—or I—were to simply walk away. But
Wander is defined by his persistence, enduring his quest
in the hope that all this death will amount to a resto-
ration of life, and I mean to see him through it.
Despite living in a light state of existential crisis most
of the time, I don’t have much of a relationship with
death outside of art and media. My college roommate
Adam died from overdosing on heroin not long after
I’d moved out of a bad living situation with him. My
grandfather Julian died of ailing health, across the world
in New Zealand. My great uncle Lionel Abrahams died
in my birthplace of South Africa in 2004, an amazing
man described as “the yeast in the dough of South Afri-
can literature” in his obituary in The Independent. Lastly,
my childhood cat Kenja died in 2010 at the ripe old age
81
of seventeen (or so), living with my dad in his cottage
in upstate New York for the last few years of his life.
That one hit me hardest by far, and it’s still something
I can’t think about for too long without getting misty-
eyed. All that is to say, maybe I’m impacted more by
fictional deaths than most, since I gratefully have not
been exposed to much real death in my life thus far.
I’m glad that Shadow is so reverent in its moments of
death, something made to be so ubiquitous and casual
in countless other video games. In a 2011 interview,
Ueda discussed his first time infusing a colossus’s death
with melancholy:
When we started developing the game there was no

music composed yet, so for that scene when you
beat him I added something provisionally, some sad
music from a movie soundtrack. When I did that,
all the staff who saw that scene burst out laughing.
To have a scene like that, where you would expect
some triumphant trumpet fanfare, but instead
you hear sad music… it must have seemed like a
mistake to them. I remember that experience very
vividly. You know, deciding things by majority has
its merits, but I think there’s a danger that lies in
that too. After we had officially released Shadow
of the Colossus, I asked players if they felt anything
uncomfortable or awkward about that scene, and
they said no.
It’s a difficult thing to ask players to empathize with
barely sentient beasts, especially ones that are often try-
ing to kill you. But Ueda’s clear authorial direction and
that “rock ’n’ roll” spirit that served the team through
both Ico and Shadow make it work completely. I had
experienced mature moments of storytelling in games
before, even cinematic character deaths such as the infa-
mous killing of Aeris in 1997’s Final Fantasy VII. But
games are defined by their interactivity—what you can
do as the player, not what can be passively told or shown
to you. It’s something that I desperately wish film critic
Roger Ebert would have understood before he died,
being one of the more vocal critics of games as art—it’s
an impossible task to judge an artistic medium without
experiencing what defines it firsthand. Ico was the first
time that I had connected deeply with a story in gam-
ing, told not only through minimalist plot points that
respected and encouraged my curiosity and imagination
(like many of the best films do), but told by playing it
(like only games can do). Shadow resonated with me
even more, and allowed me to feel loss, and guilt, and
regret.
Games could be just as compelling when focus-
ing on more ambiguous rewards than simply being
fun—a small but formative revelation in the way I
thought about the medium. Vander Caballero, CEO
of Minority Media, understands this deeply. Caballero
was creative director on Papo & Yo, a fantasy adventure
told as a parable for his relationship with his alcoholic
83
father. Caballero cites Shadow as providing the foun-
dation upon which he built his story, inspired by the
emotional conflict of defeating a colossus. But he first
had to distance himself from years of design reflexes
acquired during big-budget studio development. “One
of the main points of [internal] disagreement was when
people on the team made a fun level, for its own sake,
but which didn’t fulfill any emotional point in the nar-
rative. I had to convince them that, even though it was
a great level, we had to shelve it because it didn’t deepen
the game experience. Thinking about it in retrospect,
it’s kind of funny, because canning a level just because
it’s fun is one of the most counterintuitive things you
can do in game development.”
These days, the idea that games can be more than
just fun is something I take as a given. And with the
meteoric rise of independent games, the risk is much
lower for a game to tackle something personal or pro-
found, more interested in commenting on the human
condition than shooting things (not to say that they’re
mutually exclusive, but sadly in gaming they usually
are). Shadow was one of the first big-budget mainstream
games to take these risks, helping in some small but
important way to imbue countless games with more
humanity and less cynicism.
••••••••••
I’m exploring a stretch of rolling lime green hills, stop-
ping to chase lizards. I’m lost, but it doesn’t matter—the
lizards’ crafty AI is keeping me plenty busy. I climb to
the top of each save shrine I see to take in the landscape
and get a bird’s eye view of where its accompanying liz-
ard may be skittering below me, but it still takes another
few minutes of cat-and-mouse with each before I pin it
down with an arrow. For a time I’m the giant, hunting
my tiny foes while they elude me in the ruins.
I’m still lost, driving Agro across blinding sands,
between circular canyons, and through desolate ashen
forests. I find that if I simply hold down the X but-
ton after tapping it twice, Agro will find her own way
through tight turns, navigating even more smoothly
than she would if having to guess my intentions. We
finally find the hideaway of my seventh foe, past low
ruined walls and across a long dilapidated bridge over
water, not unlike Avion’s lair. Again I must leave Agro,
leaping to climb a tall lookout tower, from which I can
see my foe resting just under the surface of the water
below me—a long, snake-like form, buzzing with blue
electricity.
Hydrus is something between an eel (as he was
referred to during development) and a Chinese dragon,
long whiskers and short fins trailing alongside his body.
A beautiful shot from deep underwater shows his sil-
houetted form beneath the bright sky, a long, sinuous
shape curving slowly in the water. He’s likely the most
obscured colossus, with an air of mystery all his own.
85
After I nervously paddle Wander nearby, Hydrus cir-
cles deep below before coming up to make a more delib-
erate pass at me. His head cruises past, followed by three
orange protrusions, one at a time down the length of
his body, each crackling the surface with electricity as it
passes. Finally, his mossy tail splashes up for a moment
before dipping under, wide like a whale’s, allowing me
to grab on the next time he comes by. When I do, he
pulls me underwater without hesitation—the begin-
ning of a peculiar battle in which we’ll both be forced
out of our element.
Lengths of Hydrus’s body surface long enough for
me to run down it in spurts, always stopping to cling
on fiercely before he dips back underwater, pushing
Wander’s breathing capacity to its limits. His orange
spines are useless above the water, but when submerged
they light up with electricity, sapping large chunks of
my life bar away if I’m nearby. Each spine has a failsafe,
though—a small glowing “off” switch of sorts directly
behind it that’s disabled with a quick stab of my sword,
turning it black and useless. I barely manage to take
out the first two spines between running breaths when
Hydrus has had enough and dives deep below, return-
ing to his more peaceful state and leaving me desper-
ately kicking up towards the surface. I almost drown
twice this way, eventually luring Hydrus back up to the
surface to finally disable the third spine.
There’s a sad moment when Hydrus becomes espe-
cially hard to see underwater, and I realize that it’s because
I’ve rendered him fully powered down and harmless, and
I want nothing more than to leave the fight. A beautiful
water dragon, alone in a misty corner of the world, less
of a threat than ever. Isn’t this good enough? Why am I
killing these hapless colossi when it makes me feel bad?
Why am I even playing this dumb game?
I must finish what I’ve come for, though, and this
time I make it up to his head before he can dive deeply,
planting a few swift stabs as he tries to buck me off with
his final movements. I want him to succeed, to dive
deep and never come back up, but perhaps he needs to
breathe as well. I hold tight, and my sword finds pur-
chase a final time. Hydrus’s body sinks, bending in a
U-shape as his weight pulls him deep below, tendrils
shooting up to find me at the surface. The music may
tug at my heartstrings, but the deeper storytelling lies in
my actions—someone is manipulating me here, and it’s
not clear whether it’s Dormin, or Ueda. Or both.
87
A SHADOW THAT
CRAWLS ON THE WALLS
The Los Angeles-based gaming collective The Arcane

Kids have a great line in their development manifesto
that I think about often: “The purpose of gameplay is
to hide secrets.” It’s a game design ideal to live by, and
one that feels particularly apropos for Shadow’s deeply
enigmatic milieu. Even at face value, Shadow is a game
that drips with mystery, a result of stirring players imag-
inations with a refreshingly minimalist narrative that
requires extrapolation, no baseline historical knowledge
of anything in its world save for Wander’s core moti-
vation, and a very un-video-game-like embracing of
empty space and unfinished ideas. The mood that the
game creates is that of the uncharted; each colossus is
a treasure to hunt, and a puzzle to unlock. Even their
origins are obscured until the end of the game. But what
true secrets is Shadow’s world still hiding? Beyond the
intrinsic mystery of its aesthetic, is there anything left
to be discovered?
89
A dedicated community of fans have been looking
for almost a decade now, making exponential progress
since 2009 thanks to the work of a few key people, led
in recent years by Michael Lambert, a.k.a. Nomad. An
Australian graphic designer by trade, Nomad has spent
countless hours of his free time cataloging every corner
of the Forbidden Lands, both through thorough explo-
ration as anyone else could with enough time and skill,
and through the aid of computer software that allows
him to “hack” an emulated version of the game (as well
as earlier unfinished versions), systematically combing
through every nook, cranny, and line of code.
Nomad’s discoveries are innumerable, all docu-
mented in excruciating detail both on his blog and
through a series of accompanying YouTube videos
(which have a mysterious quality all their own since
Nomad never speaks). I’ve never seen a piece of media,
or really anything I can think of, broken down as thor-
oughly as Nomad has done with Shadow. And with a
game whose few overt answers only introduce more
questions, no theory feels too crazy to pursue, and
Nomad has backed several of them up with fascinating
evidence. Some of my favorites include the idea that
previous wanderers have been through the Forbidden
Lands before (due to several of the colossus arenas hav-
ing traces of previous battles), the many overlapping
elements between Ico and Shadow (the relative timelines
of their stories, the intriguing but unstated connec-
tions between their characters), and the now infamous
Intersecting Points Theory. Postulated on the Official
PlayStation Forums in 2007—in the same “Quest
for the Last Big Secret” thread that would later ignite
Nomad’s search—users pieced together what seemed
like clues from the game’s script with symbols found
throughout the game world to yield a set of coordinates
on the map which lay directly over the eleventh colos-
sus’s lair (coordinates seemingly also supported by lay-
ing the game disc’s artwork over the in-game map). In
the back of that lair lies a closed doorway, and if players
could only find a way to open it it would yield some-
thing special… or so the theory went. It doesn’t really
matter what that something is, as anything likely would
have sufficed for a community so deep down the rabbit
hole together. As Nomad told Eurogamer in 2013, “It
was the search that was the thing… I like to say it’s like
a Rorschach test, people imprint whatever hopes and
beliefs they have onto the vast empty landscapes and
see secrets that aren’t there—they just hope they are.”
Nothing lies beyond the door, as user Radical Dreamer
would later prove conclusively using game hacks, but it
hasn’t stopped the community from further theorizing
about the intersecting points.
The other half of Shadow’s air of abstruseness lies
in what was cut from the game. Ueda originally envi-
sioned the experience with 48 colossi, but quickly real-
ized that wasn’t doable and cut it down to 24. Work
then began on all 24, as they were modeled in 3D and
ascribed different attacks and weaknesses. The team still
91
had concerns about maintaining their quality within the
timeframe of development, though, and instead settled
on the sixteen that ended up in the final game. In doing
so, elements of different colossi were combined along
the way, making the remaining ones more interesting
and also salvaging as much of their work as possible.
While it may seem like a drastic reduction in scope, it
fits right into Ueda’s design sensibilities as he explains
them: “I have the tendency to ask myself whether or not
something makes sense and whether or not it’s elegant
in terms of game design. Like pruning tree branches,
it’s necessary to cut things out in order to improve the
quality of a game.”
With so few elements core to the experience of
Shadow and such a breadth of beautiful colossus
designs, it’s no wonder that the eight cut colossi have
been a topic of such fascination by both fans and the
gaming press. And unlike most cutting room floor con-
tent, Team Ico has embraced their existence, with Ueda
speaking openly about the specifics of their design. Sev-
eral pages are dedicated to the lost colossi in the beauti-
ful Japan-only official Shadow art book. All eight colossi
were seemingly functional to some extent when cut,
and although all we have is still imagery to appreciate
them, it’s a treat to see what could have been: a towering
phoenix, a charging boar, a strange sandworm, a soar-
ing roc, a spindly spider, a stalactite-swinging monkey,
a creepy devil, and a noble griffin. Nomad has painstak-
ingly researched where these colossi would have been
found on the map, matching sparse environmental
details found in early screenshots to similar bits of land-
scape that ended up in the final game, even comparing
rogue textures left in the game code.
The art book shows sketches of even more creatures,
like a gaunt sloth, a finned fish, a winged insect, and
a gargantuan warthog. The final lineup of colossi has
an impressive cohesion that I take for granted at this
point, and while it’s interesting to see a glimpse of what
almost made it in, I’m not convinced that another year
of development would have necessarily changed the
colossus count. “The intention was to choose the six-
teen best Colossi and focus on making those ones even
better,” Ueda told Edge in 2013. “I think we were half-
way through production when we decided to reduce
their number. Oh, there’s certainly leftover test data and
half-edited [areas], but it’s a bit like the Minus World
in Super Mario Bros.: I think it holds more romantic
appeal if you don’t know the specifics.”
•••••••••
The location of the eighth colossus feels more concealed

and exciting than most, and typifies much of the sense
of mystery that lies at the heart of Shadow’s experience.
It starts familiarly enough, through canyons and across
fields… and then deep into an echoing cave, where
Agro trots gingerly across narrow walkways of stone
while the sounds of a nearby waterfall fill the caverns.
93
Deeper still, the cave opens up widely, letting sunshine
in from above and illuminating a stunning dilapidated
temple at the center of a shallow lake. Swimming across
the lake, I encounter a relative bounty of life: long carp-
like fish, one of which takes me on a brief ride under-
water when I swim close enough to grab on. It’s a bit-
tersweet moment coming so soon after Hydrus’s death,
but an undeniable treat, a rare burst of wildlife in an
often desolate world. When I climb up on land, Agro
splashes across the water to join me on a walking tour of
the temple’s exterior. It’s one of those places that’s hard
to reconcile as something created by an artist, a per-
fectly organic balance of light, overgrowth, and crum-
bling architecture. It’s one of my most treasured spots in
the game. I must go deeper still, though, remembering
Dormin’s clue:

A tail trapped within a pail deep within the forest…
A shadow that crawls on the walls.”
Forced to leave Agro behind again, I climb through

the temple’s sole doorway, heading down, down, deep
beneath it, to a cylindrical chamber that holds my next
foe. Kuromori lurks at the bottom of this chamber, the
smallest colossus yet, but still a fairly large Komodo
dragon-like lizard, called the Gecko during develop-
ment. He reminds me of an anteater too, with a broad,
flat tail—maybe a touch of skunk, or even pangolin,
a beautiful armadillo-like creature found in Asia and
Africa that’s sadly endangered. Kuromori radiates with
yellow electricity from within, shining out from between
fanned platelets down the length of his back, and light-
ing up his forearms and forelegs from within. I catch his
attention with an arrow, and he spews forth a burst of
electricity in response, zapping a pillar right beside me
before swelling into a crackling cloud of harmful toxins.
The exterior of this arena is multileveled, with five or so
ringed floors connected by staircases between them. I
run down a few levels, and poking my head out into the
open I notice that Kuromori has climbed up near my
previous location, filling the upper floors with deadly
electric gas. His glowing limbs are clear beacons, and I
draw my bow. One shot to his front leg disconnects it
from the wall, dangling, his whole body precarious now.
A second shot lands true, and my foe tumbles to the
bottom of his pail and lands squirming on his back. I
scamper down the rest of the way and up onto his belly,
the telltale blue glow of a sigil calling for my sword. I get
a few stabs in before he rights himself, and I run back
upstairs, climbing high to be sure I lure him far enough
to create distance for his next fall. Like clockwork, I lure
him up, shoot him down, and finish him off with just
another two stabs. He rears up with my final blow, lean-
ing into it before collapsing back to the ground, eyes
extinguished.
Kuromori’s battle is a clever cat-and-mouse dance of
hiding, luring, positioning, and seizing the moment. It’s
95
also a battle inseparable from its arena, fitting perfectly
with the colossus’s unique attack and a means to expose
its vulnerable underbelly—Kuromori is a lizard through
and through.
And while this was a colossus that gave me trou-
ble the first time I tackled him years ago, I remember
exactly what to do now, with negligible time spent
experimenting and improvising. I’m cold and effective,
and the fight is over in only a few minutes. I’ve finally
hit acceptance in my grief over these colossi, and in my
numbness I’ve become ruthless.
•••••••••
Mono’s ethereal voice in the white tunnel is almost audi-

ble now as I find my way back to the shrine somehow.
Things are different this time, though, a break from the
expected routine. A curious dream plays, grainy and
skipping like worn-out film, a vision of Mono waking
up on her altar, looking somehow different, darker. I’m
ripped away from it just as quickly, back to Wander’s
reality, as Kuromori’s statue shines, bursts, and crum-
bles. Wander wakes, looking more battle-worn than
usual, and walks to Mono, putting a hand on her cheek.
WHERE TREES
NARY GROW
I recently had a minor epiphany about what Shadow

means to me. In large part, Shadow represents nature,
the outdoors—a childhood spent exploring the fields
of a summer home in Michigan, and the forests of a
summer camp in Wisconsin. Shadow is the mystery
in the woods—or rather of the woods—somewhere
lonely where you can feel completely in the moment
while being a part of something far bigger than yourself,
something ancient. There’s a certain danger, but also
space for possibility and discovery. Shadow is a place of
sylvan mysteries, turning over logs to watch tiny crea-
tures scamper off into hidden burrows, or lifting up
fallen leaves to find tiny mushrooms reaching up from
a moist forest floor. It’s far away from civilization, and
its scenery evokes a spectrum of emotions that I don’t
otherwise encounter in my largely urban existence.
“I played a lot outdoors when I was a child,” Ueda
told me when I asked about his relationship with nature.
“But now I’m more of an indoors person. What we call
97
‘nature’ is really a mass [a katamari, he calls it in Japa-
nese] of information. Every time we have nature right in
front of us, we’re shocked at how much of this informa-
tion is lacking in ‘the natural things’ expressed in video
games.” For all the sparsity of Shadow’s expanses, Team
Ico did an amazing job of capturing just enough of that
“information” as to provide a vital, if not totally real-
istic expression of nature. I find great comfort in that
naturalist aesthetic, a fictional world that’s beautiful in
largely the same ways that the real world is beautiful.
That same comfort is why I get distracted staring at
the clouds while driving home from work, why walks
around the neighborhood are at their most magical just
as the sun is setting. These are moments that I can feel
truly alone in, forgetting any stresses at hand while get-
ting lost in the majesty of the cosmos.
••••••••
Riding west across the Forbidden Lands feels like riding

into a storm, as clouds of dirt swirl high into the sky,
blotting out the brightness that often pierces through
the cloud cover. After a time, I reach the edges of a dis-
colored basin of rock stretching off into the distance
and across a winding crevasse.
This corner of the world is mineral and raw, pow-
erful geysers of water intermittently erupting from the
ground under darkened, misty skies. I find a smatter-
ing of trees near the mouth of a large cave just past the
geysers from which my next foe soon emerges, his small
but bright eyes shining out from a massive form in the
shadows.
Basaran lumbers out of the cave, a gargantuan tur-
tle colossus (unsurprisingly called the Turtle during
development), propped up on strangely long legs that
sprout straight out from its body before angling sharply
back down towards the ground. He moves slowly but
steadily, as a creature of such mass would. In a 2006 talk
at the Game Developers Conference, Team Ico charac-
ter animator Masanobu Tanaka spoke about the pursuit
of realism in Shadow’s animation above all else, which
was primarily driven by an attention to the colossi’s per-
ceived weight and energy levels. If the colossi were to
move too quickly, they would feel weightless, expending
an unrealistic amount of energy. This is also cited by
Ueda as the reason that the colossi are different sizes,
giving them the freedom to move at different speeds and
therefore providing more variety. A similarly thoughtful
approach is taken with Wander’s animations, building
in a slight delay before each jump (to crouch) or sword
swing (to wind up). “We don’t think responsiveness
to a button means good control,” Tanaka explained,
unabashedly flying in the face of conventional wisdom.
Barasan’s immense weight includes that of a broad,
spiky shell that tapers off into a fiercely armored head,
one that starts pelting Agro and I with bursts of electric-
ity—a rapid and more deadly evolution of Kuromori’s
attack. I ride between Basaran’s wide legs as he circles
99
the barren basin, periodically rearing up before crashing
down hard on the ground. He manages to nail us with
an electric blast, a scary moment that sends Wander fly-
ing off of Agro as both tumble to the ground in a violent
spill. Basaran is aggressive, a disgruntled giant awoken
from a timeless slumber. And like the turtle he’s pat-
terned after, he has one reliable, characteristic weakness.
••••••••
Ueda has spoken of his love for monster movies, and

there’s no doubt of their influence on Shadow’s stirring
menagerie. The design of the colossi scratches a certain
itch in my mind, a lifetime preoccupation with giant
creatures. I’ve always loved images of whales shot from
above the water, massive forms looming in shadow. I’ve
had endless visions of towering monsters cresting the
horizons of hills, city skylines, and oceans. I had a recur-
ring dream when I was younger, set on a small island in
an endless sea, with train tracks encircling the perime-
ter and a mountain in the middle. I sit atop the train,
going around and around the island. In the distance, a
Godzilla-like beast appears, slowly walking through the
water towards the island. Every time I circle the moun-
tain and my view becomes unobstructed, the beast is
closer than the time before. The second it reaches the
island, the dream ends.
••••••••
Basaran is imposing, but the visual clues throughout

the arena help to inform my plan of attack. The geysers
springing up from the battlefield every so often draw
my eye towards his underside, and it’s clear that I have
to flip him onto his shell (a lesson also recently learned
from Kuromori). I lure him over a momentarily stilled
opening in the ground, and sure enough the geyser that
shoots out knocks him sideways, so that he’s balanc-
ing precariously on two feet. Thinking back to the bull
colossus Quadratus, I plant two arrows in the exposed
pads of Basaran’s feet, and he comes tumbling the rest
of the way down. I run as fast as I can around his huge
kicking body, looking for something to grasp, until I
spy the massive furry wall that is his stomach. I grab
on and start to climb, and just as he starts to flip back
over I crest the top, dropping onto his shell as he rights
himself. From there, it’s a reliable routine of making my
way to his head (through valleys of rocky spines) and
clinging on long enough to get a few good stabs in.
Basaran, betrayed by both his own lair and the obvi-
ousness of his design, remains nevertheless majestic
in death. As much as I place value on Basaran’s fate,
though, the concern is not reciprocal—he wouldn’t
have thought twice about snuffing out my life, had I
not bested him first. There’s a terrible, age-old tension
between the dispassionate enormity of nature and the
very human impulse to conquer it.
101
ITS GAZE IS UPON THEE
“Gamers of Reddit,” began a 2015 discussion thread,

“what game do you think is a masterpiece of art?” Over-
wrought question aside, Shadow dominated the first
page of responses. “After seven years,” began another
thread, “how is it that Shadow of the Colossus remains
so unique?”
For an experience that resonates with me in a way
that feels so personal, it’s always odd to see the wider
gaming community talk about what Shadow means
to them. But I suppose that’s true of all great art: We
ascribe meaning and value to it within our own lives,
and feel like it was created just for us. It’s also a game
that could only exist under the very specific circum-
stances of its release—a time when the only way to play
console games was to buy them on discs and in stores
rather than downloading them. And because they could
be sold for $49.99 a copy, they could also be granted
relatively large development budgets. Large publishers
simply don’t fund that scale of project for a new intellec-
tual property anymore, at least not ones that are so dis-
tanced from commercially reliable gaming conventions.
103
Including an online multiplayer mode is one such
convention, shoehorned into countless modern games
to help round out a checklist of expected features and
dissuade players from trading in a game as soon as they
finish its main story (creating a commercially undesir-
able secondhand market). Perhaps ironically, Shadow
was originally envisioned to be an online multiplayer
game, a cooperative battle against a gauntlet of colossi.
Back then, the project was called “Nico” (a portmanteau
of the Japanese words for “two” and “Ico”), and you can
even find an early concept trailer for it online—a group
of horned riders can be seen taking down a large Qua-
dratus-like bull colossus together. An idea of that scale
was untenable at the time, and ended up as merely a stop
along the way of development, but remains an interest-
ing “What if?” It’s also curious to see the massive world-
wide success of the Monster Hunter franchise, a similar
concept (of cooperatively fighting monsters online) that
first launched a year before Shadow. Imagine a world
with countless Shadow of the Colossus installments across
every platform, each with a few new colossi and iterative
features. Personally, I’d rather not.
•••••••
While Shadow may have been scaled back on a macro

level during development, the content never feels
scant. And there’s plenty to enjoy on the micro level
as well—I’m having some genuinely funny interactions
with the wildlife on the way to the tenth colossus. I go
lizard-hunting for a while, scouring each save shrine I
see, where some of the lizards find a way to elude me
for minutes on end, despite only being able to hide in
one of a few different spots. If I stand still, the lizards
sometimes run right up next to me, but by the time
I’ve readied my bow they’re off again and out of sight.
I’ll turn the corner of a pillar and run headlong into
a lizard heading the opposite way, startling both of us
and spooking off my prey. Agro’s been a real character
recently too, reining up alongside me for no apparently
reason, or charging off into the distance as soon as I
look away. Riding aside a crevasse near the shrine, I leap
from Agro to grab a hawk swooping low, and I catch it!
Expecting a sightseeing trip across the landscape with
my new friend, I instead weigh us both down, sinking
into the crevasse until it eventually drops me to my
death. (Though near the next colossus is a particularly
large and special hawk—dubbed “Loki” by fans—able
to support Wander’s weight for an airborne tour for as
long as he can hold on.)
Headed west from the shrine (where Wander is res-
urrected after death), I follow a circuitous route until
I eventually spy the mouth of a cave on the opposite
side of a valley. Inside, I find a wide sun-lit chamber,
oddly filled with sand (we’re still a ways away from the
coast) and punctuated by a few stone columns and rock
formations.
105
I ride Agro into this quiet place, and soon my foe
makes his presence known. Dirge is a massive worm
colossus, nicknamed Naga during development, after a
being in the form of a great snake in Hindu and Bud-
dhist mythology. He swims through the sands of this
arena, patrolling it in wide arcs. Like Hydrus, Dirge
is tough to get a good look at, beyond a long, ridged
serpentine body with a few spines poking out. I ride
Agro near his route, and suddenly it’s a chase, one that
I’m not fully prepared for as Dirge is fast—just as fast
as Agro, if not faster—and aggressive. As he closes the
distance between us he peeks out of the sand with huge
owl-like orange eyes on an elongated face, before rear-
ing up out of the sand, wide mouth agape and glowing
from within. Dirge looks particularly innocent in some
moments thanks to those eyes, but he’s much less tol-
erant of my trespass than most other colossi have been,
and seems to be actively trying to eat me. His attack
knocks us over, almost killing Wander, and I scramble
to mount Agro again before Dirge circles back to finish
us off.
This fight is all about trusting Agro. She’s both your
means of escape and your offense, and you need to rely
on her own sense of preservation to succeed. I lure Dirge
out once more, but this time I spin the camera around
to lock my focus on him, trusting Agro not to slam us
into a wall or slow down. Up to this point, I’ve always
felt protective of Agro in battle, but I’ve never asked
her to protect me quite like this—to ride in a direction
I can’t see, and to be reliable in a way that’s tough to
expect from any creature, real or artificial.
It’s an anxious moment, a massive beast charging
towards me, spraying up sand in its wake as I strug-
gle to keep my bow’s reticule near Dirge’s face as Agro’s
top-speed gallop keeps both of us shaking. Dirge sur-
faces to glare at me once again, seconds before attack-
ing, and after a few haphazard arrows ricochet off of his
face I land one successfully in his eye. He slams it shut,
blinded, and I cut away at an angle from the path of
his pursuit, letting Dirge continue straight into the cave
wall. He crashes headfirst, ripping the length of him up
out of the sand, and his writhing body gives me a brief
window to stage a counterattack. I gallop back to him,
dismount, and hustle up and across his furry back to
a sigil near his head. I only get one stab in before he
throws me off and burrows back underground, to start
our routine all over again.
So much in Shadow is gained through repetition—
not simply the act of repeating something for the sake
or challenge of it, but rather to grant you opportuni-
ties for reflection, or to subtly change the context of a
repeated action over time. This is effective on an emo-
tional level, as much of your relationship with Agro is
developed simply by spending time together—you can’t
very well walk the entirely of the Forbidden Lands your-
self, but what starts as a working relationship evolves
into true companionship. Shadow and Ico aren’t the
only noteworthy games to use time spent together as
107
a means of cultivating an attachment—2007’s Portal
approached it more literally, giving players a Compan-
ion Cube to bring along to aid in their puzzle-solving,
before (spoiler!) forcing them to destroy it near the end.
The whip-smart comedic writing made the interactions
soar, but it was the simple, repetitive act of dragging
the Cube through your trials that created a meaningful
attachment.
Visual and behavioral repetition is equally effective
in Shadow—despite its wide and varied world, there’s
conscious repetition in the architectural design of the
save shrines scattered about. Waking up at the Shrine
of Worship after a battle, the same few things need to
happen: You need to locate Agro, mount her saddle,
find a spot of light to unsheathe your sword, and use it
to locate the next destination. Other elements of your
routine are incremented slightly over time: One more
idol destroyed in the shrine, one more shadowy figure
standing over Wander before he wakes, one more dove
hanging out near Mono, one more beam of light pierc-
ing the sky. Your effect on the world is more overtly
evident over time (as is the toll it’s taking on Wander’s
increasingly darker, disheveled appearance), but it’s up
to the player to decide what to do with the informa-
tion. Do you go right back into battle, continuing your
increasingly unsettling mission? Do you let yourself get
distracted and go exploring, just to buy time? Within
the battles themselves, these same questions arise: Now
knowing Dirge’s weakness, do I simply exploit it again
to finish him off? And what happens after I kill him, in
those final moments?
•••••••
Nick Fortugno is responsible for bringing the

immensely popular Diner Dash into the world. He’s
also an adjunct professor at Parsons School of Design,
where he teaches a class called Narrative & Dynamic
Systems in which Shadow is prominently featured. “It
was this indisputable line that was passed where I could
point to something that was a tragedy in games,” For-
tugno tells me of Shadow’s narrative impact. “A tragedy
in the sense of what we mean by a Greek tragedy—a
story about someone whose tragic flaw leads them to
make stupid decisions that destroy the world around
them and eventually destroys them. And we are sup-
posed to feel catharsis from that. […] In a literal sense
[and] in an Aristotelian sense, and I think that was an
accomplishment for games. I don’t think there are any
games before [Shadow] that do that, or certainly don’t
do it as elegantly.”
Fortugno also wrote an amazing essay for the Well
Played series, called “Losing Your Grip: Futility and
Dramatic Necessity in Shadow of the Colossus.” Within
it, he questions—as others have—whether the player
agency inherent to video games undermines the drama
used in more traditional non-interactive narratives and
art forms. Using Hamlet as an example, he explains how
109
if the play were instead a game, having control over
the important parts of the story would eliminate the
tension between the audience’s desire and an inevita-
ble outcome—a tension referred to as “dramatic neces-
sity”—which would cause the story to lose its emotional
power. Despite that conclusion, he argues that a similar
dramatic power can still be achieved in games, through
a trope that he dubs “futile interactivity,” with Shadow
as a shining example. This trope can be experienced
most clearly after the cinematic death of each colossus,
when the player is given back control only to be inescap-
ably chased down and lanced by the tendrils. Fortugno
explains, “By constructing interactive scenes where the
player is led to believe that he can succeed when the goal
is in fact mechanically impossible, the game uses multi-
ple moments of futile interaction to give the tragedy its
emotional power.”
While the first time the tentacles kill Wander is a
shock, the repetition of that experience and the even-
tual resignation of the player robs them of their agency,
and gives them time to reflect on that moment. The
scene will always end the same way, regardless of what
the player tries to do, making good on the designer’s
intent rather than the player’s objective. Shadow is an
outstanding illustration of this trope, which has become
an oft-used tool in providing memorable moments in
modern blockbusters: the nuke scene in Call of Duty 4:
Modern Warfare, the microwave corridor crawl in Metal
Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, even the (oft-maligned
but narratively effective) “Press X to Jason” sequence in
Heavy Rain. Striking moments of inevitability delivered
in a way that only video games can, providing weight
and consequence in the context of the larger experiences.
•••••••
The second time I blind Dirge with an arrow, I’m ready

for what comes next. I’m already driving Agro full speed
toward him when he crashes into the wall, and some-
thing within me remembers how to stand up on Agro—
an instinctual remnant from previous playthroughs—
and I launch myself from that standing position high
up onto the worm’s thrashing body, and it’s thrilling. I
have more than enough time to finish him off, and he
crashes lifelessly to the sand. Sometimes I try to cele-
brate the victory, but really I’m just proud that my skills
at my favorite game have gotten better over time, not
worse. But what does being “good” at Shadow say about
me, several playthroughs in?
The tendrils find me particularly quickly this time.
111
IT KEEPS THE
FLAMES ALIVE
Celosia—called both Leo and the Lion during devel-

opment—lies across the desert to the north, just east
of the main bridge. Its lair is an enticing, hidden place,
a temple at the bottom of a canyon that isn’t visible
until I’m right up against its precipice. Whereas most
of the other colossus locales are wide arenas at the end
of winding, secluded paths, this one is simply at the
bottom of a hole in the desert. It’s a surprise when the
light of my sword points lower and lower in the earth as
I ride closer, but it’s far from the last surprise that this
encounter holds.
••••••
There’s a fantastic Netflix documentary series called

Chef ’s Table about world-renowned chefs and their
differing philosophies towards food and life. The third
episode focuses on Argentine chef Francis Mallmann,
trained in French cooking but forever jet-setting across
113
South America, bringing rustic, almost primal cooking
techniques to his restaurants. He cooks primarily with
fire, from small wood-burning ovens to massive out-
door pits fueled by wood from the surrounding forest.
The episode spends time at a tiny island home of his in
the wilds of Patagonia, a stunning corner of the world
surrounded by a misty lake, ringed by snowy mountains
across the horizon. He talks about the elemental subtle-
ties of cooking with fire, how it can be used on a full
scale from one to ten, with every integer having a differ-
ent property and application. He catches fish out of the
lake, stuffs them with lemons, and bakes them inside a
thick shell of clay that he dug out of the very same lake.
It looks insanely delicious. Mallmann’s connection with
the elements is something that I strive for in the rela-
tively little time I spend outdoors. I find myself deeply
drawn to these open-air fantasies, of living off the land
and blurring the line between my urban materialistic
present and my agrarian ancestral past.
Shadow plays into these fantasies—I can gallop
across wide-open spaces under the warmth of the sun,
crunch leaves underfoot while creeping through hushed
forests, all the while clinging to my magnificent horse.
The yawning deserts of the game often bring about
these feelings—less pastoral than the rest of the land,
but even more majestic and remote. On the way to
Celosia, I find a small burst of bright green palm fronds,
a vibrant tropical contrast to their barren surroundings
and a plant that I curiously haven’t seen elsewhere in
the game. And shuffling in the sand nearby… tortoises!
Another creature that I haven’t yet seen anywhere else.
What a glorious little spot! The tortoises are smart
enough to trundle around me when I stand in front of
them, and when I step a foot up onto one’s shell Wan-
der tumbles over comically as the tortoise tries to walk
away. It’s a playful scene, and I again drift to wonder-
ing about its creator’s intent. Why here? Why tortoises?
Why make them smart enough to walk around me?
Have they hung out with the turtle colossus Basaran
before?
I rein up Agro at the edge of the desert hole that
holds my enemy somewhere down below. Looking
across the gap, there’s a series of hairpin paths carved
into the sheer wall of the canyon, which leads me pre-
cariously down to the bottom, leaving Agro to patrol far
above. There’s a small lake down here that I plop into,
and not far from the shore, another sheer canyon wall
with the mouth of a temple carved into it. Somewhere
within, I can see heated air shimmering and a yellowish
glow—a fire is burning, despite the loneliness of these
lands. I climb in through a back entrance and head
towards an empty room at the mouth of the temple,
flanked by two burning braziers on each wall and a pre-
cipitous drop at the far end. As soon as I set foot within,
Celosia reveals himself, leaping down from the rafters
with a roar. He’s a shockingly small colossus, roughly
a tusked lion statue come to life, but with an intensity
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and hostility that simply can’t be matched by the larger,
more ponderous creatures.
The reveal of Celosia is a startling moment that I take
for granted now, but in a game of escalating grandeur
he’s quite the anomaly at this point. Whereas the other
colossi tend to serve as the levels themselves—which
reminds me of the best marketing line for the game:
“Some mountains are scaled. Others are slain.”—this elev-
enth encounter feels almost like a more traditional boss
battle, while still building on Shadow’s efficacy at word-
less instruction.
Celosia lunges at Wander, bludgeoning him uncon-
scious, who then lies still on the ground for a few
moments before being given the opportunity to stand
up and run away. The closest hiding places are in the
narrow gaps between each brazier and its adjacent wall.
I climb up towards the flame at the top of a brazier, caus-
ing Celosia to charge its base. This knocks Wander off
his feet, but more importantly it knocks a flaming torch
down to the ground nearby—as shown through a brief
cutscene, clearly telegraphing its importance. While
there’s no precedent for new items to interact with, I’ve
been picking up fruits and lizard tails for hours, and I
snatch the torch up off the ground. Celosia stops in his
tracks, cowering from the flame—odd, for a guardian
who “keeps the flames alive” as Dormin hinted—and
slinks backward away from it step by step, ever closer to
the drop at the far end of the room.
This is one of the more tense moments of the game, a
strangely elemental dance. Fire can only be found in one
other spot in the world (and there it’s only decorative),
and its rarity gives it power. The already small Celosia
feels even smaller as he shrinks away timidly from the
glow, though resting the torch even for an instant puts
Celosia back in charge, swatting angrily at me.
I hang on, though, and we reach the edge as my
torch begins to sputter. Celosia loses his footing and
goes tumbling backwards, down to the bottom of the
canyon far below, shattering his armor off in the fall and
exposing a furry, vulnerable back as he lies dazed. From
there, the objective from ten previous missions kicks in:
get to that fur. I leap down after him, landing nearby (a
better jump would have landed me on him), and I’m
able to get a few stabs in while he’s still dazed. Celosia
regains his wits before I’m done, but from there it’s just
a matter of finding elevation, jumping onto his back,
and finishing him off.
Celosia makes for a fairly complex fight, but Shadow
leads me through it carefully, one action at a time.
There’s a great mixture of surprise, innovation, and
familiarity to the encounter, a self-contained narrative
arc that feels all the more intense and intimate due to its
speed and scale. I’m not a flea on a giant anymore; I’m
a lion tamer.
117
A SILENT BEING
WIELDS THUNDER
Shadow is much more than just my favorite game—like

other impactful art and media, it’s helped to shape who
I am. I always think of my favorite line from the (also
formative) film High Fidelity (2000), spoken by John
Cusack’s character Rob Gordon: “…what really matters
is what you like, not what you are like… books, records,
films—these things matter. Call me shallow but it’s the
fuckin’ truth…” I’ve long defined myself by the media
that I love—I’m happy to be characterized by the mov-
ies and video games that I own, and I have no problem
letting my iTunes collection speak for me. I’m much
more than what’s on my shelves, of course… but at the
same time, I’m not. They serve as CliffsNotes of what
I value in life, albeit through the intent and expression
of others. I regularly wrestle with existential quandaries
about what my own contributions to the world should
be, if any (or if a fulfilled, happy life is enough to strive
for on its own [or does true fulfillment come from a
meaningful contribution to the world?]). Shadow has
119
become an integral part of my personal culture of inspi-
ration, a creative palette to draw from as I find my own
way through the world.
•••••
I awake in the shrine as always, Celosia defeated and the

clue to my next target ringing in my ears:

Paradise floats upon the lake…
A silent being wields thunder…
A moving bridge to cross to higher ground.”
Agro comes galloping up to me from somewhere

outside the shrine. I hadn’t thought about it until now,
but where is she returning from? Is she just arriving
back from where I last left her at the scene of battle, or
has she been exploring the lands as Wander slept? How
much time has passed? This simple decision to have
her enter from offscreen each time, rather than already
be standing next to Wander as he awakes, imbues the
moment with mystery and a sense of momentum—
there’s no time for rest on this journey, and the moment
you wake it’s time to get moving again. It also subtly
implies Agro’s innocence in this quest—whatever mys-
terious forces bring Wander back to the temple each
time, they are tied to his fate and burden alone.
Heading northeast across familiar territory, I scale a
save shrine to the top and take in the best view yet of
the striking main bridge—offhand, it’s the largest object
in any video game that I can think of, which makes
it all the more impressive considering Shadow’s age
(and Moore’s Law). The bridge also grounds the scale
of the other colossi; they’re often huge, but would still
pale before the bridge, access to which is restricted to
all but those of a more human size, through the shrine
beneath. Ueda often uses scale to great visual effect,
something Another World creator Eric Chahi is particu-
larly appreciative of, “Without the horse I felt like I had
lead in my shoes, distances became infinite. I love the
way Ueda stretches distances, how he plays with scale,
and the emotions associated with that.”
I head across a much lower land bridge and into an
opening on a cliff face, which takes me deep into yet
another shaded forest glade, buzzing with the sound of
cicadas, as white butterflies dance between the trees. It’s
a perfect sort of place. Following a rough path back out
up another cliffside path, it takes me to the mouth of a
massive waterfall, bursting forth from the end of a wide
lake flanked by carved stone columns. Forced to leave
Agro, I scoot around a column and move deeper into
the lake area, where I must swim to follow the light of
my sword any further. After a time I find a set of ruins
dotting the water, and pulling myself up onto one of the
ruins triggers the introduction of my next foe. Pelagia
stirs in the depths and crashes up through the surface, a
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bizarre creature with a mammalian body reminiscent of
Quadratus or Phaedra, a shell similar to that of Basaran,
and a massive armored face with no clear eyes, nose, or
mouth, but anchored by two huge tusks.
Pelagia is an awe-inspiring, memorably specific
colossus, and while intimidating, he isn’t scary. Perhaps
it’s the lack of facial features or his graceful gait through
the water. Though just as soon as his introduction is
done, his tusks start buzzing with electricity and a sub-
stantial blast of energy is delivered in my direction as I
dive into the water to escape. Curiously, his tusks glow
blue and orange depending on his temperament, similar
to the eyes of the other colossi. Ueda speaks to Pelagia’s
unique design in the art book: “This Colossus was called
Poseidon. On top of its head are shapes that resemble
teeth, but at first they were horns. There were also eyes
in the beginning. During early development, I imag-
ined the player using the bow to defeat it by shooting at
its weak point.” In the final version of the game, none of
the colossi can be bested with Wander’s bow—it’s sim-
ply a tool, used for furthering some battles but never
ending them. The deed has to be done with the sword,
with the intimacy of steel into flesh—or what passingly
resembles it—a visceral understanding of my actions.
The result of those visceral actions—giant creatures
toppling over in the throes of death—lends Shadow
some of its most memorable imagery, and also serves
as the basis for its highest profile pop culture appear-
ance: as a supporting plot device in the 2007 film Reign
Over Me. The film is both drama and dark comedy,
about a lapsed dentist named Charlie Fineman (played
by Adam Sandler) who has lost his entire family in the
9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, and his for-
gotten dental school roommate Alan Johnson (played
by Don Cheadle) who tries to bring Charlie out of his
shell. Charlie has receded from the world into his apart-
ment, in denial that the tragedy ever happened, and
spends much of his time watching old films and playing
Shadow—a game about giant objects collapsing.
The visual metaphor is very much intentional, an
inspired script suggestion by co-editor Jeremy Roush
(who also had to sell the idea to director Mike Binder,
Sandler, and ultimately Ueda for approval). Roush’s
father was a veteran of the Vietnam War, left mentally
disabled by post-traumatic stress disorder and unable
to work. To help pass the days, his father spent his time
repeatedly watching Aliens (1986). Speaking to Kotaku
in 2007, Roush explains, “Aliens is a thinly veiled kind
of Vietnam veteran kind of story, and watching it is a
way of thinking about it without telling yourself you are
thinking about it. […] You could see where someone
who was dealing with 9/11 would be engrossed by a
giant that keeps collapsing over and over again.” Shadow
is featured in a few scenes, including a nice montage of
Charlie teaching Alan how to play, one of the first times
that Charlie opens up to him. “It’s more like another
dimension. You take a journey and discover yourself,”
Charlie explains. The montage ends with a thoughtful
123
transition from footage of Avion’s death to a beautiful
real-life shot of a statue in a park, a mounted rider with
a sword set against the sunrise of the following morning.
Whereas most films put about as much thought into
what video game a character would be playing as what
type of sandwich they would be eating, Reign Over Me
integrates Shadow far more thoughtfully. As Kotaku’s
Brian Ashcraft puts it, “Reign Over Me must be one
of the first Hollywood films, if not the first, to deal
with games thematically and intelligently. While other
industry pundits try to figure out how to take the latest
blockbuster game and turn it into a movie or vice versa,
Reign Over Me already has an insightful leg up: Let the
games speak for themselves.”
•••••
I swim through the arch of Pelagia’s armpit and around

him before scaling the grassy hills of his back up out of
the water, huge waves spraying up as he thrashes, while
I cling on with two fistfuls of fur. I reach the top of his
grassy head, which is oddly flat, save for a broken ram-
part-like semicircle of the “teeth” that Ueda mentions
(Poseidon’s crown, as it were). I clang on one of the teeth
with my sword and it reverberates like a tuning fork,
sending Pelagia lumbering through the water in the
direction the tooth was facing. It’s a strangely subservi-
ent moment that contrasts with the dynamic that Wan-
der typically shares with these wild and strong-willed
creatures. It also rings of a fail-safe embedded in some of
the colossi, and their exposed sigils. Why did their cre-
ator give these guardians a clear method of destruction?
I direct Pelagia to the two-story ruins nearby, and
leap from his head across to the top level. I duck down
behind a knob of stone that juts out of the middle as
it’s blasted with electricity. Pelagia has lost track of me,
though, and he rises imposingly out of the water on
his forearms to have a better look, huge cylindrical
hooves crashing down nearby as his elbows bend. This
exposes his furry chest, the blue light of a sigil glowing
beneath, and suddenly I’m running and hurdling the
gap between the ruins and Pelagia, landing dead center
of the fur with my sword poised to strike. I get a cou-
ple of stabs in before he crashes down (destroying the
ruins as he does so), forcing me to repeat the process
by redirecting him to adjacent ruins before I attack his
chest once again and finish him off. He rears up, push-
ing out a final rumbling roar before collapsing back into
the water from which he emerged, waves spraying up to
meet the inky blood that gushes from his wound.
I’m through three quarters of the colossi, and I can
feel myself getting closer to resurrecting Mono, even
amidst the grief and regret of what is now clearly a mis-
guided mission. And I’m rewarded with a rare bit of the
greater story in a cutscene before being taken back to
Wander: Riders are coming. Several men on horseback
rein up at the edge of a forest, led by the masked elder
who spoke to Wander over a fire so long ago, warning
125
him not to come to these lands. “Only a little more to
go,” he tells the other men, and in the distance they can
see the tops of the stone structure that leads to the great
bridge. While time feels endless and near-irrelevant in
the Forbidden Lands, this revelation puts a subtle time
pressure in place, a splinter in the mind of the player.
Riders are coming, the thunder of inevitability. Are they
coming to help you? To stop you?
THOU ART NOT ALONE
Southwest across the plains, through a forest, at the end

of a canyon trail lies a vast, blinding desert. A scattered
few ruins dot the landscape, as do a series of strange
half-buried stone rings (curiously the only objects in the
game found to have been reused from Ico). It’s a thirsty
place, the air alive with sand particles, the bright hori-
zon melting between sand and sky. And until my distur-
bance, there’s absolutely nothing else happening there.
So much of Shadow’s appeal, its essence, can be
laid at the feet of its “subtractive design,” as Ueda calls
it. Most commonly mentioned in the context of fine
art—such as the paintings of Piet Mondrian—subtrac-
tive and minimalist design is an aesthetic in its heyday.
It can be found in websites, architecture, industrial
design, music, Apple products—basically everywhere.
In Shadow, subtractive design was the process of cut-
ting out everything inessential to the vision, leaving
only that which was absolutely necessary. Whole game-
play mechanics were excised, huge swaths of the map
trimmed off—if it didn’t serve the central ideas and
127
themes of the game, it didn’t belong. Ueda elaborates
in the art book:
When I’m deciding whether or not to put some-

thing in the game, I’m always looking for meaning
behind it, no matter what. Like, does it make sense
to put smaller enemies in the game just so you can
get items and experience points? I wouldn’t have
been able to forgive myself if I’d had a Colossus you
wouldn’t be able to beat without some item you’d
get defeating smaller enemies. […] I had the idea
of being able to warp through the use of an item,
for example, but the huge field would have become
pointless. There are two ideas central to the game:
Colossi you have to climb and defeat, and an enor-
mous field. I think that once we kept the overall
consistency in mind, it was inevitable that the game
would turn out like this.
Interestingly, many of these design lessons have

become the norm in some circles of modern develop-
ment, specifically in mobile games and in smaller-scale
digital games on consoles and PC. Game development
is more technologically approachable than it’s ever been,
and small or even solo studios have put out many of
the more unique, memorable, successful games of the
past decade. While Minecraft is a cultural juggernaut
and exception to every rule, it was nevertheless created
mostly by one person, and at its heart is a fairly simple
experience. It gave players a toy box for crafting and
creating in a 3D space, and became the Lego of the
millennial generation. Mobile game blockbusters like
Flappy Bird and Crossy Road are laser-focused on sim-
ple interactions of tapping or swiping, with an elegant
learning curve and “just one more try” stickiness that
feels skillful rather than exploitive.
Andy Nealen, an expert on minimalist design and
an assistant professor of computer science and game
design at New York University, regularly uses Shadow as
a reference point in his classes. He’s also the co-creator
of Osmos, a serene puzzle game (and early App Store
success) about colliding with smaller objects and avoid-
ing larger ones in a visual Petri dish. Nealen tells me via
e-mail, “Minimalism allows a designer to have a strong
vision, but not describe it in every single detail, thus
leaving the player to explore the elements, their connec-
tions, and their dynamical meaning. It also means only
leaving the best parts in the design: If one part is better
than the others, the others become a liability, and need
to be removed or radically improved. The best designs
and design processes I have witnessed have a ‘cutting
floor’ that is ten times the size of the final game.”
Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann agrees, despite
working on the other side of the coin—on massive
blockbuster hits with a team of 200-plus people. While
his studio’s game The Last of Us is dense in world-build-
ing and action, it manages (like Ico) to tell a touching
story about a growing bond between two strangers.
129
Druckmann points to minimalism as his most effective
tool. “It’s paramount to making something great. It’s
easy to come up with a bunch of ideas and just kind of
throw them in, and just get the player engaged on that,
but to create something elegant… the question I always
ask is, ‘What are we trying to convey here and what’s the
least we need to do to convey that?’ And we should do
no more than that.”
••••
I ride Agro through the perfectly empty desert towards a

set of ruins that beckon the light of my sword. Stepping
foot on them, I trigger the entrance of the thirteenth
colossus, and a line of Dormin’s clue returns to me: “A
giant trail drifts through the sky…” Phalanx is the big-
gest colossus yet by far, a worm-like cousin of Hydrus
and Dirge, though several times larger than both and
with an even more alien face (possibly inspired by the
dragon designs of the Panzer Dragoon series). Pha-
lanx bursts forth from the sand, spiraling up into the
sky, a bizarre but beautiful behemoth flying on a set
of four long, narrow wings and supported by three sets
of inflated air sacs on its underbelly. He’s not here to
attack, though—despite his war-mongering moniker,
he’s a gentle giant that will never once assault Wander.
Especially at the start of this “battle,” Phalanx simply
flies a long, lazy path around the edge of the desert,
undulating with the wind currents. I remember this
battle well, though even if I didn’t, the first steps to vic-
tory are clear. Phalanx’s air sacs are ripe for the pop-
ping, and Wander carries an infinite supply of arrows.
All three of my shots fly true, as the sacs wither and
brown upon impact. Phalanx doesn’t fall out of the sky
entirely, instead dipping lower to the ground, the tips of
his wings dragging in the sand as he continues to circle
the desert nonplussed. Another clue of Dormin’s flashes
through my mind: “Thou art not alone.” It’s true—I’m
far from alone, I have Agro. We have each other. Pha-
lanx is still moving far too fast for me to catch up on
foot, but atop Agro is a different story. I briefly watch
my enemy’s path, then I stir Agro into action, cutting
across the desert to ride parallel to Phalanx’s dragging
wings as best I can, standing up on Agro’s back in prepa-
ration for a jump. My angle is slightly off, though, and
I’m on a collision course with a wing. I jump anyways,
holding the grab button in the air… and I somehow
catch the very edge of a wing, rather than the ladder-like
handholds on its surface that I was aiming for. The
momentum is too brisk to pull myself up, though, as
Wander flaps in the wind like a rag doll. I’m not sure of
my next move.
••••
Another inspired mind influenced by Ueda’s subtrac-

tive design is that of Phil Fish, developer of the sin-
gular, world-turning puzzle adventure Fez. Fish was
131
hugely affected by a post-mortem talk that Ueda gave
on Ico years ago, in which Ueda discussed removing
every superfluous element from the game. “After that
lightbulb moment, I came at Fez with a hatchet, and
removed tons of systems, features, and environments
that didn’t actually have anything to do with the core
rotation mechanics or themes of the game. It almost
became an addiction. It was liberating to axe huge por-
tions of my game like that, knowing that it would let
me focus on what mattered.”
Ueda’s central ideas of the colossi and the enor-
mous field are the entire takeaway from the experience,
only enhanced and given context by the game’s sparse
story. This focus also gives players the opportunity to
fill the gaps in between, with just enough clues to stir
the imagination without overtly explaining anything.
“I think it’s one reason why [Ueda’s] games are set in
dead worlds,” Fish tells me. “You don’t have to show this
world at the height of its glory. You can imply so much
with just… ruins. Small hints of what this place used to
be—what it was about, were there people here? What
did they look like? The story practically writes itself in
the player’s head.”
Interestingly, the motivation at the heart of Ueda’s
focus on minimalism comes more from a desire to
eschew current trends than a specific love for the style;
in that way, the current gaming market has dictated his
aesthetic as much as anything else. As Ueda told me
in an interview for 1UP.com in 2009, “It’s my ideal to
create a game that is unique. Therefore, if the market
was full of games that had a minimalism, I would prob-
ably create games with excessive decoration and full of
explanation.”
••••
Phalanx pulls his wings up parallel with the ground,

which allows me to hoist Wander up too, and make my
way up the now-horizontal—though fully airborne—
wing and hop over to the body. Phalanx’s body is a
wild, twisting landscape of its own, though it’s simple
enough to find my target: a furry patch containing a
sigil on the wind-shielded side of a large dorsal fin that
sprouts like a sail from Phalanx’s back. I get a few stabs
in before he stops tolerating me, but he doesn’t attack
like all the others, instead corkscrewing through the air
before diving back down and burrowing fully under the
sand again, throwing me off in the process. As I get to
my feet, Agro is already running up to me, ready to go
again. (What a pal!)
I track Phalanx with the light of my sword as he
moves underground, and soon enough he ruptures
forth for us to start our waltz once more. Killing the
stubbornly peaceful Phalanx feels different from the
others—an acknowledgment of sorts that Wander’s
quest is now fully evil, or at least terribly misguided.
Wander is blinded by his desperation to bring Mono
back, and his soul is rotting. And I as the player am
133
slowly disconnecting from his selfish mission, watching
as a second-person narrative becomes a third-person
one.
CITY BEYOND
THE CHANNEL
Wander wakes in the shrine, another idol crumbled

to ruins. One more dove flutters amongst many (thir-
teen, now), and one more column of light pierces the
sky. Wander’s complexion has grown pallid, dark lines
climbing up from beneath his dirtied tunic and snak-
ing across his neck onto his face, his hands and knees
bloodied and bruised. As the colossi fall, so diminishes
the spirit of Wander.
I ride long and far, snaking my way across both famil-
iar ground and previously unseen canyons, eventually
happening upon a series of small stone columns dotting
an ancient path that leads to the mouth of a flooded
cave. I’m forced to leave Agro there (a disappointment
after our recent epic adventure together), swimming
across and venturing deeper within, eventually emerg-
ing at the edge of a series of overgrown buildings—the
remains of a small city, and the den of the next colossus.
•••
135
Earlier this year, I spent a Saturday afternoon hiking
around San Francisco’s Sutro Baths area with my girl-
friend Amber and my good friend Ben. After an entire
day and night of rain on Friday, the torrent subsided
just enough to provide a misty veil for our journey,
intertwined with a blanket of classic San Francisco fog.
It was the perfect climate to experience that place, the
overgrown ruins of what was once the world’s largest
indoor swimming establishment over a century ago,
butting right up against the ocean (and now part of the
Golden Gate National Recreation Area).
There’s not much of it left beyond the aging cement
walls of once-useful structures, embedded next to a
swampy, eerily still lake that’s only a low supporting
wall and some rocks away from the churning waves of
the sea. The area is flanked by very different, equally
curious sights: On the south side, a hillside with yet
more overgrown ruins, verdant carpets of grass and sea-
side mosses draped amongst them. On the north side,
a stark rocky outcropping of cliffs breaking away from
a misty forest, with a perfectly tunneled cave cutting
through to the other side. Walking through the cave
that day, we felt a heightened awareness of the density
of the ocean, the moisture in the air, and the feeling that
we were small and relatively new to that venerable place.
In that place, on that day, and in that moment, it
felt like Shadow. The three of us reached this conclusion
independently and easily. (It was also where I took the
photo that adorns the cover of this book.) The collision
of biomes, the vivid greenery clinging to wind-battered
rocks, the horizonless sea in the distance—it all exuded
a palpable air of mystery.
It’s easy to ascribe specific moods or emotions to a
favorite song or movie. But video games are different in
that they’re spaces to explore, and I’ve created countless
physical memories from fictional locations. Super Mario
Bros. changed moods completely when you went down
that pipe into the second level, and the music, the color
scheme, and even many of the enemies became tangi-
bly cooler and subterranean. Super Metroid felt lonely
because you were lonely—playing as a badass bounty
hunter maybe, but spending hours on end trying to
survive in uncaring and seemingly endless alien cor-
ridors. Even Final Fantasy VII, one of the first games
to make me care about its story and characters, I best
remember now for its locales and their atmosphere—
the industrial depression of Midgar, the saccharine
sheen of the Golden Saucer. Once games largely moved
to 3D worlds, that relationship to the spaces within
became that much more profound. I remember hiding
in the nooks of GoldenEye 007’s Temple level, just out
of view of my friends, and scurrying under obstacles
to hide from the guards in the opening scene of Metal
Gear Solid. Crash Bandicoot, Tomb Raider, Halo—or
maybe Uncharted, Gears of War, Call of Duty if you’re a
few years younger than myself—the list goes on. Every
gamer has their childhood worlds, spaces that at first felt
137
foreign and exciting, then more familiar and comfort-
ing over time, maybe even nostalgic now.
Shadow is particularly adroit at building memorable
spaces. While the world is large and naturalistic enough
as to not feel set in its borders, or easily memorized,
the colossi arenas are fully realized and more easily
ingrained, as are dozens of other landmarks and scenes
in between (many of which are intentional leftovers
from unfinished arenas—part of the “noise” that Ueda
left in). The ruins I now find myself in are one of those
more memorable spaces, with tall symmetrical columns
flanking single walls, overgrown stairways, and vaguely
familiar arches and aqueducts. Soon enough, my quiet
exploration of this hidden city is interrupted by its
guardian, Cenobia (called Cerberus in development).
Somewhere between a boar and a large dog in appear-
ance, Cenobia is another “small” colossus, roughly the
same size as the lion Celosia but even more aggressive.
Wreathed in armor—an ornate face mask juts out with
tusk-like points of stone—Cenobia charges towards
me on sight, and I instinctively clamber atop a fallen
column to my left, placed by the designers as both the
closest protective spot and a clever foreshadowing of the
usefulness of fallen columns in this battle. I jump to
an adjacent wall and climb higher, feeling safe for the
moment, only to be thrown flailing to the ground as
Cenobia rams into it angrily. I work my way back up
before he can catch me, and venture even farther this
time, climbing a tall ridged column near the end of the
wall. Cenobia loses interest in me, so I launch an arrow
his way and he rams the column angrily in response,
sending it toppling over with Wander still on top. I’m
scrambling again, just out of harm’s way, and the fallen
column gives me enough of a step up to reach the next
low wall and the next ridged column. In this way, I
work my way around the entire periphery of the ruins,
column by fallen column, until we crash through a wall
near where I first entered the city and into a crumbling
courtyard beneath a cracked upper level above.
The scale of Shadow shifts dramatically with these
smaller colossi, as the focus of each challenge changes
over the course of the game. The first three colossi—
Valus, Quadratus, and Gaius—are monolithic creatures
in wide open spaces that Wander must simply find a
way onto, followed by three that integrate their environ-
ment into that challenge—Phaedra, Avion, and Barba.
The following three after that—Hydrus, Kuromori, and
Basaran—incorporate more elemental attacks, and after
those first nine all bets are off, as the game dishes out a
wide variety of multi-step colossi, steadily building in
complexity until the end. On the heels of Phalanx—the
largest colossus, set in the most wide-open of spaces—
Cenobia is a particularly conspicuous contrast, being
one of the smallest colossi and set in a complex, inti-
mate environment.
I’m running across the courtyard to climb to the
upper level when Cenobia finally catches me with a
blow, sending Wander sprawling. And before I can fully
139
stand he hits me again—and again—until I’m close to
death. I finally manage to dodge one of his blows, lur-
ing him back across the courtyard and putting several
obstacles between us as I climb back around and above
him. He charges the column supporting the upper level
that I’m now on and it comes crashing down, shatter-
ing off much of his armor and exposing a sigil on his
furry back. Without his armor, Cenobia appears much
smaller, and the impact of his charges now dizzies him,
giving me a moment to jump onto his back. The rest is a
messy, violent affair, as Wander is sprayed with the black
blood of this bucking beast as its life is drained away.
He’s become vulnerable as I’ve become savage, and the
city shortly falls silent again.
There’s a sadness in Shadow’s spaces, and as thrill-
ing as they are to discover, they’re emotionally taxing
to return to. The site of That Horrible Thing I Did, a
place to bear witness to the remains of a creature that
was once sentient and is now another rocky mound
amongst many, thanks to me. In this way, Shadow’s
world becomes smaller just as quickly as it expands, the
excitement of discovering a new area dashed by the real-
ization that I probably won’t return there.
A G I A N T H A S FA L L E N
It’s truly strange that in an industry that borrows liberally

from even the most minor successes, there have been so
few attempts in copying Shadow’s formula in the decade
since its release. Despite selling more than a million
copies globally (and another million of the HD Collec-
tion), Shadow remains as singular as ever, perhaps even
more so as the big-budget side of gaming has cohered
into a series of predictable templates and formulas. I’m
grateful for the independent-focused side of the indus-
try, where innovation abounds, but even as a lifelong
fan of a good blockbuster—be it games or movies—the
big studio side of gaming rarely connects with me any-
more. And it can’t afford to even try, as the required
development and marketing budgets to keep up with
the neighbors are so astronomical that there’s seemingly
no business incentive to innovative, no reason to risk a
player feeling too challenged to continue, mechanically
or intellectually. Edges must be rounded off, character
designs focus-tested into ubiquity, investors and retail
buyers satisfied. With such inclusive ambitions, it’s no
surprise that it’s difficult to find a means of personal
141
connection in such uniform experiences. Often the best
that we can hope for is a self-aware subversiveness (Spec
Ops: The Line), or enough moment-to-moment choices
as to allow the player a modicum of self-expression (Far
Cry 4).
But even the best large development studios often
don’t have the leadership to focus on an idea as purely as
Team Ico did with Shadow. I asked Halo 3 game design
lead Jaime Griesemer how trying to make something
like Shadow would have gone over at Bungie, creators
of the Halo series and Destiny: “It would immediately
have gotten diluted. Someone would have said, ‘We
can’t have a game where nobody talks, we’re going to
add cutscenes, we can’t only have bosses, we’ve got to
add this thing.’ Because 90% of the team wouldn’t have
been on board. And at a studio like Bungie, there isn’t
somebody who can just say, ‘This is what we’re doing.
Not that I don’t care that you don’t like it but it’s not
relevant that you don’t like it,’ and then everybody goes
along with it anyway. You just see that so rarely, espe-
cially now that user testing is so popular.”
From what I’ve been told about the project, Shadow
was never once focus-tested. And to Sony’s credit
(reminder: my current employer, but these are the sorts
of reasons that I work there), they are one of the few big
publishers still putting out challenging games that aren’t
afraid to test players’ patience as much as their mettle.
Bloodborne is such a game, a spiritual successor to From
Software’s Souls series (Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls I–III),
dark fantasy adventures with brutally unforgiving com-
bat and terrifying, hostile worlds. It’s one of the few
mainstream(ish) series to have consciously and success-
fully taken cues from Team Ico, telling the bulk of its
story through its gameplay rather than beating players
over the head with it. So it’s no surprise that series cre-
ator Hidetaka Miyazaki cites Ico as a key influence from
early on in his career. Speaking to The Guardian earlier
this year, Miyazaki talked about working at an IT com-
pany after graduation when some college friends showed
him Ico. “That game awoke me to the possibilities of the
medium. […] I wanted to make one myself.” Within
ten short years, he had become From Software’s presi-
dent (a feat unheard of in Japanese corporate culture),
transforming the company into an industry leader.
On the other side of the fantasy adventure coin,
games like The Witcher 3 have become the standard,
leaning heavily on lore and overt world-building, while
overwhelming the player with places to go and things
to do, so that nary a minute is spent exploring its stun-
ningly crafted world without a task to accomplish. Iron-
ically, even the unexplored spots on its massive world
map are often announced with giant question marks
ahead of time, minimizing opportunities for pure dis-
covery. It’s disappointingly pessimistic of game devel-
opers to assume that players won’t have the attention
span or curiosity to simply explore, instead leading
them absolutely everywhere with a breadcrumb trail of
objectives.
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I don’t mean to pick on Witcher (and I’m sure it won’t
mind my critique, as a huge critical and commercial
success), but it’s an all-too-appropriate example of just
how different an approach so many modern mainstream
games take to that of Shadow’s, despite surface similari-
ties (third-person horse-riding monster-fighting fantasy
game). Where Witcher has a wide upgradeable arsenal
of weapons, Shadow has two (and the bow is more of a
tool). Where Witcher has literally infinite enemies, across
dozens of species of all shapes and sizes, Shadow has six-
teen. Where Witcher has hundreds of storylines and sid-
equests, Shadow has one. Where Witcher has countless
pages and conversations about the deep lore and history
of its world and its denizens (a 450,000-word script, in
fact), Shadow has a few brief exchanges between mostly
nameless entities. And yet even for a game that stars a
supernatural detective (of sorts), Witcher’s sense of mys-
tery still pales in comparison to even a few minutes of
riding around Shadow’s empty expanses.
••
The fifteenth and penultimate colossus, Argus, guards

an arena in a ruined castle in the far corner of the desert
under the bridge. It’s confusing to navigate, but I even-
tually crest a huge sand dune where the façade of the
castle stands imposingly before me. (Agro completes the
drama of the moment with a huge unprompted leap off
the zenith of the dune.) Leaving Agro near its entrance
I quietly explore inside, following a tall set of stairs up
to a row of columns that gate one end of a long, rect-
angular arena. The arena feels man-made and meant for
a duel, though any cheering onlookers are long absent.
On either side are multi-leveled structures supported by
more columns, two high bridges joining them across
the top. While crumbling in spots, this castle is more
modern and intact than most places in Shadow. The far
end of the arena drops off sharply into a valley between
mountains, and walking close to it triggers Argus’s sud-
den entrance.
Pulling himself up over the edge with huge, brut-
ish hands, Argus stands tall as the third member of the
“Minotaur Siblings.” Called Minotaur C during devel-
opment, Argus is another anthropomorphic giant in the
rough mold of the first colossus Valus and his bearded
brother Barba. Argus stands apart most for his striking,
expressive face mask—almost tribal in its design—and a
stone mouth stretched wide across a fiercely furry head.
He also carries a huge cleaver. After so many animal-like
colossi, Argus feels fresh again, and while he may look
like Valus, the complexity and challenge of this battle
builds on many of the lessons learned since the start.
The fight with Argus is both a complicated puzzle
and a knock-down, drag-out scrum. I run around his
feet for a while before realizing that I need to make him
stomp on a specific section of ground, raising it up high
enough to allow me to climb up one of the multi-lev-
eled structures—stadium stands, almost—along the
145
edge. I catch his attention with a few arrows until he
swings his cleaver at the structure, crumbling some
of the platforms above me and allowing me to climb
higher. I keep climbing until I’m near the top of the
structure, crossing the bridge that joins it to the other
side of the arena. Argus brings the bridge crashing down
with a mighty swing, but not before I’m able to make a
running jump towards him, landing on a soft shoulder.
He thrashes about angrily, and I’m barely able to move
before I’m thrown off. I finally realize that one of his
weak points is a sigil on the hand that carries the cleaver,
accessible only by triggering a small release point near
the back of his arm. I make my way there (climbing
back up the structure and hopping across to him for
the nth time) and give it a stab, and finally he drops his
weapon. From there I still have to position Wander at
just the right distance from him (which is difficult, since
he walks faster than Wander runs) so that he attacks
with his hand, allowing me a moment to grab onto his
palm and take out its sigil. And even after that, there’s
another sigil on his forehead that needs to be destroyed,
and his thrashing only allows for a swipe or two before
I’m thrown off and forced to scale him all over again. It
takes me more than a dozen tries before I succeed, and
by the end I’m just glad to be rid of Argus.
••
My encounter with Argus is frustrating, fidgety, and if
I’m being honest, not particularly enjoyable. The nec-
essary steps felt a bit too opaque, too finicky in their
execution. I’m reminded that Shadow can feel that way
sometimes—even if you’ve figured out what to do,
the same naturalism and looseness that adds a certain
authenticity and makes for some beautifully impro-
vised moments can conversely feel overly fussy, with an
aggravating lack of precision. When you’re a lifelong
fan of something that’s rough around the edges, it’s easy
to forget that its idiosyncrasies can be serious obstacles
for those who haven’t wholly embraced the experience.
And as much as anything, Shadow is defined by its
imperfections.
Still, it’s interesting to think about what gaming cul-
ture would look like now had Ico been the definitive,
chart-topping game of the fall of 2001—rather than
Grand Theft Auto III’s criminal sandbox, released the
following month—and Shadow the hotly-anticipated
follow-up four years later. While Ico and Shadow’s leg-
acies burn brightly amongst gaming intellectuals, both
closely associated with the artistic aspirations of the
medium, they’re far from the mainstream cultural touch-
stone that GTA3 and other chart-toppers became. But
what if they weren’t? What if more modern mainstream
games were thematically considerate? What if they told
the bulk of their stories through gameplay rather than
cinematics, and let you truly explore a space? What if,
147
sometimes, they traded explanations for mysteries, and
trusted players to enjoy figuring out the solutions?
MAKE HASTE, FOR
TIME IS SHORT
Wander lies surrounded by shadows, alone in a crowd.
“Finally, the last colossus…

The ritual is nearly over…
Thy wish is nearly granted…
But someone now stands to get in thy way…
Make haste, for time is short…”
Almost ten years later, this final quest isn’t any easier
to start. Difficult events lie ahead, and I’ve been putting
it off for weeks.
I ride south across the plains, further than I have
before, following the light of Wander’s sword. I stop
to check every save shrine along the way, hunting the
last few lizards in hopes of delaying the inevitable. The
world feels especially silent, an unseen energy drawing
me towards a mountain range on the southernmost tip
of the map. Lizards scatter across the plains and birds
dance in the air above me, but beyond the ambient
149
wildlife there’s nothing else alive in this world except for
Wander, Agro, and my final foe. I follow the sword’s light
to two closed stone doors embedded in the face of the
mountain, between which a circular seal glows, spilling
light onto a raised platform before it. I dismount, and
standing on the platform I focus the light of Wander’s
sword directly into the glowing seal. The doors rumble
and open away from me, strange synthesizers sounding,
beckoning me beyond to the final encounter.
It feels lonely sometimes, having such an intensely per-

sonal attachment to a piece of art. While Shadow has
affected so many others, no one can really understand
what it means to me. Just as I can never understand
what it means to them. Or for that matter, anyone’s
favorite anything. There’s a chemistry, possibly even a
spirituality, in connecting so deeply with someone else’s
creation. In many ways, I define my life by relentlessly
sharing the things I love with the people I care about.
But that may ultimately come from a selfish place.
Maybe it’s less about wanting others to experience the
same magic and humanity that I felt, and more about
wanting to be better understood in some small way.
There’s a save shrine shortly down the path, and I rest
at it for a time. I know what’s coming, and the inevi-
tability weighs heavily. Journeying on, I ride Agro up
several sets of broad stone stairs to a landing at the top,
overlooking a wide crevasse. The walls of a mountainous
mesa extend up from temple ruins across the gap. The
remains of a narrow stone bridge stand suspended in
between, disconnected at either end but close enough
for Agro to jump to. Coming up from the stairs, I con-
tinue Agro’s momentum, riding her hard into a leap
across the first gap, and she lands easily on the bridge.
And then everything goes wrong. The camera spins 45
degrees to show the bridge collapsing behind us as Agro
continues to gallop hard. She makes the second leap
but the landing point is collapsing too, and in a heart-
breaking moment, she understands the only option left,
bucking Wander forwards to safety as the ground col-
lapses under her. He’s thrown violently to the ground
and immediately leaps up to run back to Agro, but it’s
too late. A deft transition cuts between Wander running
off-screen and the camera panning over the edge of the
gap, as if to mirror Wander’s view of Agro plummeting
down alongside fallen chunks of the bridge, to a river
far below. He yells for her, but she doesn’t resurface.
Wander hangs his head.
In all the deaths we’ve encountered so far, the loss
of Wander’s constant companion is hardest to take by
far. Wander has sacrificed his humanity for Mono, but
it’s been his own cross to bear. Agro has been a vigilant,
151
loyal accomplice, following Wander to the forbidden
ends of the earth, but it’s been Wander’s decisions—
my decisions—that have brought us to this. The loss of
Agro is the most affecting scene that I’ve experienced in
a game, the culmination of a body of wordless relation-
ships and storytelling that began in Ico. The loss of Agro
is a loss of innocence, a wake-up call to Wander that’s
come too late.
Wander stands up slowly and heavily, hands on his knees,

before looking up to the distant top of the platform
above where his enemy waits. I’m given back control,
and there’s nothing to do but keep going, climbing the
ledges and ramps of the cliff face, higher and higher past
precarious jumps and cubes of stone carved in strange
patterns. Pulling Wander up onto a wide platform, the
howling wind drops out, and all I hear are his footsteps.
I run into a tunnel, up two staircases and back outside,
and the air is humming with debris, wind whipping
past visibly as a storm begins to churn above. Up a col-
umn and a few more ledges, Wander crests the top of
the mesa, and rain is now spattering from skies swirling
with darkness, a fitting introduction for the final colos-
sus. His development name, Evis, is a curious one. As
Ueda explains: “Because the game is focused on oppos-
ing a colossal force, we joked about it being anti-estab-
lishment. When you think ‘anti-establishment,’ you
think ‘rock.’ And the god of rock is none other than…
well, that was my train of thought when I spoofed a
certain musician’s name.”
Our rock god, known to fans as Malus, stands tow-
ering on the far side of this arena, the most human of
all colossi but rooted into the earth like a living statue.
His long arms glow brightly around the wrist, cutting
through the darkness as they crackle with orange elec-
tricity. From the waist down he’s ringed in a complex
series of platforms and ledges, several stories of dense
architecture reaching all the way to the ground below.
Far above, he looks out from the darkness with bright
eyes set between devil horns, layers of protective armor
cascading down his chest. Malus is the ultimate boss, a
fittingly imposing finale to a game structured entirely
around the “boss fight” convention. Shadow’s final
boss fight makes good on the expectation that it will
require all skills learned up to this point, and does so
with the same purity that dictates so much of the game’s
design—there are no new moves to unlock, no button
combinations to be memorized. There are simply the
lessons learned from fifteen previous colossus battles, a
relative lifetime of experience to draw from.
Shadow has been a constant inspiration in my personal

and professional existence for the past decade, and I
don’t know whether writing this book will provide
153
closure or simply deepen my attachment. I quit my job
at EB Games in late 2006 and bought a one-way ticket
to California with dreams of writing about video games
for a living, endeavoring to show others what Shadow
had shown me—that games could be not just art (duh)
but great art, that they could trust their patrons to find
their own meaning in the work. And now years later
working with independent developers at Sony, Shadow’s
artful, uncompromising spirit ever informs my own
mission: to fight for games with equal heart and vision,
that they may move and inspire others of their own.
Malus requires a harrowing approach, a desperate sprint

across an explosive battlefield, dashing between low
stone walls and ducking into trenches as he bombards
Wander with deadly projectiles. An unnervingly sub-
dued score plays throughout this battle, a slowly driv-
ing, rhythmic chanting of singers creating a gothic back-
drop for Malus’s imperial form. Looming high above,
there’s no deceiving this colossus, only staying behind
cover as often as possible while zig-zagging towards him
through the surrounding ruins. Missteps or moments of
hesitation aren’t tolerated, requiring split-second deci-
sion-making and perfect maneuvering. Climb, dash,
duck, wait… sprint, roll, duck again. I have to wait
for my health to return a few times, but eventually I
work my way around across a narrow mountain ledge
and through a series of underground tunnels, emerg-
ing from the ground beneath Malus. From there it’s a
treacherous climb up the scaffolding of his lower half,
finding the right ledge to ascend or walkway to ven-
ture as Malus shifts beneath me like a skyscraper in the
wind. Eventually I make it to his lower back, and find a
cracked furry spot glowing blue, and a quick stab causes
Malus to reach behind him to find the source of the
annoyance. I leap from his back to his furry hand (with
demonically pointed fingers), which he brings back in
front of him in a massive swooping arc. He seems more
inquisitive than enraged, and I’m able to right myself
and run up his arm, stabbing another blue crack near
his elbow and commanding the attention of his other
hand. Again I leap across to it, and he holds it out in
front of his face, simply curious, turning to look at
the creature that dares encroach upon his majesty. I’ve
barely had a chance to regain Wander’s grip, and the
next step is unclear, so I simply stab the hand I’m cling-
ing to. Malus turns it upright and I’m able to stand, let-
ting me recharge momentarily and giving me a window
to draw my bow. I fire a few pointless arrows at Malus’s
face until I spot a furry shoulder nearby, and shift my
focus. I land my next shot there, and he reaches over
to tend to it, so I leap across to his shoulder as soon as
I’m within range. Suddenly it all feels familiar, cling-
ing to the top of the world with the Forbidden Lands
stretched out before me as my foe writhes beneath Wan-
der’s feet, albeit under storming skies flashing bright
155
with lightning. I’m especially careful as I clamber onto
Malus’s glowing forehead, doing my best to avoid a pre-
cipitous fall, but the hard part is done.
My sword is driven home one final time as Malus
groans in protest, holding a huge hand to his face as
his life drains away and the strings kick in. He doesn’t
collapse to the ground, but rather sags in place, swaths
of his exoskeleton cracking off as his massive arms hang
limp. Just like all the others, his body is enveloped in
shadow as the blue-black tendrils emerge to find me.
For a moment, there’s nothing but death across the
Forbidden Lands. I think of Agro.
P O O R U N G O D LY S O U L
The riders have arrived, galloping hard across the span

of the ancient bridge. The stone door of the shrine slides
open for them, as it did for Wander and Agro so long
ago. Swords and crossbows drawn, they enter, led by the
masked elder whom they call Lord Emon. They walk
down the cylindrical chamber and past the pool at the
bottom, arriving just in time to see the final colossus
idol light up from within before bursting in a bright
flash and crumbling to the ground. They’re too late.
The scene cuts back to the final battlefield, sunny
skies shining over Malus’s still form, now nothing more
than an imposing statue. Wander lies still on the ground
nearby, when he’s slowly lifted into the air by an unseen
force, his hand hanging limp as he’s carried up.
Back in the shrine, Emon waves his hands over
Mono, reciting a strange prayer, when a noise is heard
and suddenly Wander is there with them, stirring on
the floor. Shadowy figures climb out of the ground
beside Wander as he wakes, looking much worse for
wear—skin mottled with darkness, eyes glowing blue,
small horns growing out from his head. Emon speaks
157
to Wander, the truth of his words cutting deep: “I don’t
believe this… So it was you after all. Have you any idea
what you’ve done?! Not only did you steal the sword
and trespass upon this cursed land, you used the forbid-
den spell as well… To be reduced to such a sight… You
were only being used.”
Wanders stands, shuffling towards them. Emon’s men
walk towards Wander, drawing their weapons. “Eradi-
cate the source of the evil. Look… He’s possessed by the
dead. Hurry up and do it!” One of the men launches an
arrow into Wander’s leg, bringing him to the ground as
he grunts in pain, sounding strained and otherworldly
as shadow seeps out from the wound. “It is better to
put him out of his misery than to exist, cursed as he is.”
Another man raises a sword high with both hands, hesi-
tating for a moment as he looks down at Wander, before
bringing it down hard into his chest. Surprising them
all, black, inky blood sprays up from the wound, like
that of a colossus, as Wander stands unsteadily, gushing
out darkness. Wander pulls the sword out before falling
to the floor again, soon enough enveloped entirely in
shadow. Mono lies still.
“You could call it ‘sacrifice,’ but I think it’s closer
to ‘self-sacrifice’,” Ueda says of the main theme behind
Shadow, speaking to EGM in 2005. “That of the colossi,
the main character, and even your horse, Agro. They all
have to go through a great deal in order to achieve the
final goal and bring life back to the girl. It’s not an easy
feeling to put into words.”
Suddenly, Wander’s shadowed body is growing,
swelling into something huge and grotesque stand-
ing before them. Dormin, resurrected, given form. It
speaks: “Thou severed Our body into sixteen segments
for an eternity in order to seal away Our power… We,
Dormin, have arisen anew… We have borrowed the
body of this warrior…” The shadowy figures merge
with Dormin’s legs, as Emon yells to his men to place a
seal over the entire shrine.
And so the truth of this quest is revealed, each colos-
sus a manifestation, or perhaps a guardian, of these
sixteen segments of Dormin, a great power that was
banished to this land and torn apart. As the colossi fell
and Wander took on their darkness and their burden,
Dormin was inching closer to resurrection. It’s a heart-
breaking but perhaps inevitable result, the nobility of
the quest long ceded to its desperation.
°
Shadow’s flurry of more traditional storytelling in its
ending is a welcome bookend on an experience driven
purely by the actions of its player. Its narrative form
is steeped in the same mystery as its world, provid-
ing a space to ask questions and ponder explanations.
According to NYU’s Andy Nealen, Shadow’s unknow-
ability will always be a part of its allure, “because we are
humans and because we need nothing more in our lives
than for things to be meaningful. Reducing the explicit
159
exposition in the way Shadow does only helps amplify
this desire. We simply like to interpret and project our
own lives and values into everything we see, and when
these match up—or not—we learn something new
about ourselves and the world around us.”
°
I’m given control of Dormin (and what’s left of Wan-
der, I suppose), the camera high above my back, looking
down on a familiar space where I’ve woken so many
times, Mono lying still even now. Dormin’s body is
darkened but translucent, with strange spindly legs
branching off of it, dark fur around the edges, and fierce
horns growing out from his head. For once, I’m granted
the perspective of a colossus, but it feels slow and awk-
ward, flailing my fists ineffectively as my faster assail-
ants pepper me with arrows from below. I feel confused
and vulnerable, hammering home the connection to the
colossi I’ve been killing. Emon’s soldiers grab Wander’s
discarded sword and retreat towards the entrance of the
temple, past rows of fallen idols; I give chase, slowly, but
I’m not even sure what I want anymore.
This is the first of two closing moments of futile
interactivity, as Nick Fortugno calls them. The illusion
of choice, or in this case power. I’m given a taste of the
might of Dormin, the unwanted fruits of my labor, but
in all this deception his ultimate objective isn’t clear. He
wanted to be free, but then what? The second moment
comes soon enough. Emon and his men have climbed
back up the spiral staircase, but Emon stops at the top,
raising Wander’s sword high before flinging it down
into the pool below with an order: “Be gone foul beast!”
The pool swells with light and power, whipping through
the temple as Emon heads out towards the bridge. The
power of the light from the pool sucks Dormin towards
it, pulling the darkness out from within him as he strug-
gles to fight it. He grows smaller and smaller until only
Wander remains, enveloped in shadow, and I’m given
back control.
I can see Mono lying ahead, wreathed in sunlight,
but I’m tumbling backwards, white light swirling
around me, pulling inexorably.
I can stand for a moment, pushing upstream towards
Mono, but I’m swept off my feet.
I manage to grab the bottom of a staircase, holding
on tight as the wind lifts Wander’s body off the ground.
Shadow isn’t just about self-sacrifice—it’s about love,
and hope. But more than anything, reinforced through
its narrative, its primary gameplay mechanic, and in
these final moments, Shadow is about holding on… and
letting go.
“Just as [the player] learned fighting the colossi that
one’s mechanical grip cannot last forever,” Fortugno
writes, “so too do they realize that there is also a time
when they must let go of the quest. When the player
makes that decision, Wander does as well, finally giving
161
up on his struggle, and allowing the healing of the
game’s end to occur.”
I let go of the staircase, and Wander is pulled up and
into the pool. The wind and the light go with him, and
the shrine is silent once more.
Outside, the riders are crossing back over the bridge,
but its support beams are swelling with light and disap-
pearing, crumbling one after another as the entire mas-
sive structure collapses, the riders pushing hard to stay
ahead of the destruction.
°
Mono lies still on her altar, sunlight flooding in. A long
beat passes, and she stirs, eyes slowly fluttering open.
She sits up on one arm, looking around as if in a
dream, then stands, her bare feet touching the cool
stone floor of the temple.
She walks softly down the stairs, and looks up at the
bright, silent hole in the ceiling.
She’s interrupted by a whinny, turning to look as
Agro limps into frame from somewhere outside the
temple, one of her rear legs hanging useless, but oth-
erwise intact. My heart aches as Agro stops in front of
Mono, who reaches out to place a hand on Agro’s broad
face as they share a moment of sympathy, and perhaps
a quiet celebration of life. The screen fades out to white
before fading back into a flickering, sepia-toned shot of
Valus’s body, as the credits begin to roll. In this way, like
an old film reel, I’m given a look at the body of each
colossus in its resting place. A geyser bursts up behind
the stilled shell of Basaran; the flame continues to burn
near Celosia, its guardian even in death.
Even in its ending, Shadow never stops reveling in its
quieter moments, something increasingly rare and valu-
able in a gaming culture that’s often filled with noise
and excess. Thatgamecompany’s Jenova Chen knows
something about pursuing those moments of quiet clar-
ity. “When you have 100 singers in a choir group, it’s
hell to conduct and make sure everyone’s on the same
pitch so that singing can be crystal clear. […] When you
reduce the number of singers it’s a lot more likely that
they can reach a perfect harmony, and so you can actu-
ally hear what the artist is trying to say. A lot of the AAA
games, they put out big, epic opera—it’s really impres-
sive so at that point you’re not really there to hear what
they’re trying to say, you’re just there to be impressed by
the formality and by the sheer scale of it.”
°
Lord Emon and his riders make it across the bridge
alive, stopping at the end to take in the dusty fallen
rubble behind them. Emon looks towards the temple,
remarking on Wander: “Poor ungodly soul… Now, no
man shall ever trespass upon this place again. Should
you be alive… If it’s even possible to continue to exist
163
in these sealed lands… One day, perhaps you will make
atonement for what you’ve done.”
Mono and Agro move slowly down the hallway of
fallen idols, Agro pushing through the pain of her limp.
They walk to the pool at the end, now empty… save for
a small baby lying at the bottom, perfectly human and
naked except for two small horns protruding from its
head. Mono picks it up and it gesticulates in her arms,
burbling with baby noises—not upset, just new to this
world. Reborn. (I can make the baby wiggle and cry out
on command by pressing various buttons, controlling
Wander in yet a third form.)
Much has been speculated on the connection
between Shadow and Ico, from their game worlds to
their stories. Is the reborn Wander the progenitor of a
long line of horned children, cast out from their villages
like Ico due to a fear that they might rise to great power?
Is Ico’s queen sacrificing the children to collect residual
traces of Dormin? The HD Collection presents the only
tangible bridge between them—as you select a game
from the menu, the view quickly pans across a long,
interconnected piece of artwork, across a wide ocean
in between the two worlds. Ueda has confirmed that
they exist in the same world, but beyond that—as with
everything in Shadow—it’s more fun to wonder and
speculate. I asked producer Kyle Shubel about the cul-
ture of mystery around the game: “Most mystery games
walk you through a series of puzzles and then give you
an answer. The reason why Shadow still lingers is that
they never gave you the answers… There are mysteries
in Shadow that are left intentionally unspoken. If you
ask a question enough times and you eventually get an
answer, it’s no longer a question.”
Shadow of the Colossus is the great mystery of the
woods, a sweeping dream of giants and the tragic cir-
cumstances of their downfall. It’s an expression of love
in art, wordless companionships forged under difficult
conditions. It trades on trust, and spaces to explore, and
the curiosity that engenders. And beyond being a tran-
scendent, important work of art, it’s an essential cham-
ber in the emotional heart of an entire medium.
°
Agro leads Mono and their newborn companion up the
spiraling path next to the pool, out through the recently
opened stone door at the top, and past the point where
the bridge fell—up a ramp to a garden hidden at the
top of the shrine. It’s a beautiful, peaceful, sun-dap-
pled place. A fawn appears in a clearing and walks over
to greet them, ears twitching. A chipmunk emerges,
equally curious about these strange new guests. White
doves land too, a brown hawk among them. After a
few moments the hawk departs, flying up and away
as the camera follows, leaving everyone else behind—
away from the temple, away from everything, into the
blinding sky above. The weather and time of day shift
165
as the hawk flies, time flowing in this place once again.
Just as it began, Shadow ends on the wings of a bird.
EPILOGUE
In all these years spent with Shadow, one great mystery

has ever eluded me: a visit to the garden that lies above
the Shrine of Worship, otherwise seen only briefly in the
game’s closing cutscene. With enough stamina, you can
scale a mossy path all the way up the side of the shrine
and visit the secret garden within the game itself. While
Shadow’s original release contained an exploitable glitch
whereby players could cheat their way to the top from
the get-go, I always felt that I had to earn it legitimately.
While the path one must climb is very specific, there’s
no great trick to it beyond being able to hang on for the
few minutes it requires—every colossus felled and lizard
tail gathered extends Wander’s stamina bar slightly, and
after three full playthroughs (through which stamina
gained carries over) I was finally equipped for the ascent.
For all its subtractive focus, even Shadow falls prey
to some gaming conventions, features designed to
extend the experience beyond a single playthrough of
its story. Hard Mode, in which colossus attacks do more
damage and some colossi bear extra sigils to be found
and destroyed, and Time Attack, in which players can
167
unlock special items (such as stronger swords and a
cloak of invisibility) by defeating the colossi under spe-
cific par times. These extras stand in stark contrast to
the spirit of the main game, and I’ve never had partic-
ular interest in exploring them. But the secret garden is
something different—part and parcel with the cryptic
lifeblood that pumps through the veins of Team Ico’s
entire body of work.
Starting from a vein of moss growing on the shad-
owed eastern side of the shrine, I climb straight up, mak-
ing large two-handed leaps to cover as much distance as
possible using relatively little stamina. I climb up as high
as I can, before being forced to shimmy across a hori-
zontal ledge, down another wall, across another ledge,
and then past one more set of each before a final ascent
up a long, hanging column of stone. There’s no place
to rest along the way, and I crest the top with the very
last pink pixel of my stamina slipping away. In some
ways the shrine itself feels like the ultimate colossus, an
ancient, implacable obstacle.
I stand on a walkway outside of the door that Agro
and Wander first entered in the opening cutscene so
many playthroughs ago, the massive length of the cen-
tral bridge stretching off into the distance ahead of me,
away from the shrine. Before heading up an adjacent
ramp to the garden, I run back down the entire length
of the bridge, just to experience the Forbidden Lands
from stunning new heights, alone except for the sounds
of Wander’s footsteps and the howling wind. And Agro,
of course—infallible, unyielding Agro—running astride
far below, her detail so obscured that she’s indistin-
guishable from one of the skittering black lizards. Soon
enough even the wind drops out, and in the near-silence
I feel as if I’m pushing Shadow’s world to its limits, ask-
ing it to show me things that it only half-intended, the
reward for a challenge it never expected me to complete.
At the very end of the bridge—ten minutes of running
later—an ornate temple entryway is presented, but a
fierce wind blows Wander back from its opening.
I run all the way back, this time taking the ramp
up towards the garden, through a shadowed corridor.
And suddenly I’m standing where Mono, Agro, and a
reborn Wander gathered in a cutscene relative moments
ago, at the precipice of the last great mystery, the final
unturned stone in a decade of exploring. It’s a serene
place, dotted with yawning arches and trickling water-
ways, with further architecture stretching high above in
countless other inaccessible levels of the shrine. The gar-
den is also more verdant than most areas, as large fruit
trees sprout throughout, dripping with a very curious
type of fruit—one that permanently reduces your life
bar and stamina when eaten. When I asked Ueda about
this in a 2009 interview for 1UP.com, his answer was
equally curious: “The fruit in the ancient land was set
to get you closer to non-human existence. The [secret
garden’s] fruit was set to return you to a human one.”
There’s both an odd satisfaction and an unsurprising
sadness in exploring this final niche of the world, the
169
closing notes of an epilogue that I had all but given up
on seeing. Without tangible reward, the secret garden
is a perfect distillation of Shadow—beauty for beauty’s
sake, a journey more important than its destination.
There’s perhaps a more surprising feeling, though,
in accomplishing the climb, running the span of the
bridge, and finally visiting the garden. Not quite disap-
pointment or regret, but something closer to the feeling
of growing older—there’s forever a little less mystery
and magic in the world now, and I can never turn that
final stone back over. Getting to the garden was excit-
ing, but well, having never gotten there was even better.
NOTES
I had four tabs open in a browser window throughout most

of this project: the hugely informative Team Ico Wiki (http://
bit.ly/1PJGpyd); Aria “GlitterBerri” Tanner’s Game Transla-
tions site in which she generously translates the Japan-only
Shadow art book (which I quote from liberally) and much
more (http://bit.ly/1H3FuHy); Nomad’s blog, the great-
est Shadow information rabbit hole of them all (http://bit.
ly/1kY8INS); and Emanuele “Emalord” Bresciani’s Electric
Blue Skies, a site dedicated to beautiful in-game photography
that I often used for visual reference (http://bit.ly/1kzi2rJ).
The version of the game used for this playthrough was The
Ico & Shadow of the Colossus Collection (2011) for PS3 (which
can actually be played in 3D as well—it’s pretty sweet). It
also contains some nice extras, including two developer inter-
view videos which I quote from: “Walking with Giants” and
“Walking in the Footsteps of Giants” (in which Ueda explains
the inspiration for Ico, and Jinji Horagai talks about playing
their own rock ’n’ roll).
In rough order that you read them, my other sources:
Ueda speaking about his experience with Super Mario Bros.

comes from an article on 1UP.com called “The Man Behind Ico,
171
Shadow of the Colossus, and The Last Guardian” (2011), writ-
ten by my old colleague Matt Leone (http://bit.ly/1NyH5SA).
That great Ico quote from Ollie Barder comes from “A break
from the norm” (2005) (http://bit.ly/1WUMdKZ). The first
Neill Druckmann quote comes from “How Ico Informed
The Last of Us” (2013) by Rob Crossley (http://bit.ly/1Pv-
3TIT). Official PlayStation 2 Magazine UK ran an interview
with Ueda (2002) that I found transcribed on a blog called
Cats Under a Tree, in which I learned that Ico’s concept was
partially inspired by Galaxy Express 999, its theme by Scar-
borough Fair, and its architecture by the work of Giovanni
Battista Piranesi (http://bit.ly/1Lh7XVe).
Ueda’s description of the objects he combined to create the

colossi design comes from “Giant Steps” (2005, Issue 97) in
Official U.S. Playstation Magazine.
The fan names for the colossi seem to originate on a PlaySta-

tion Forums thread (2005), found here: http://bit.ly/1kzipTf.
Kenji Kaido’s quote about Shadow coming from the heart

is from an interview in the December 2005 issue of Weekly
Famitsu, translated and posted by GlitterBerri of course:
http://bit.ly/1N5NhXK.
Bryan Ma’s “Ueda and A Boy and His Blob and A Girl and
A Horse” (2009) can be found on his blog (http://bit.ly/1L-
h8wyq). I changed the sex of Epona and Agro while quot-
ing him, since he incorrectly refers to both of them as male
(which is not really his fault in the case of Agro, since the
English release of Shadow also gets it wrong).
My great-uncle’s touching, fascinating obituary (2004) can be
found on The Independent (http://bit.ly/1Sv65hk).
Shmupulations transcribed (and/or translated?) the Great

Scene Sharing event that took place in 2011, where Ueda
and Keiichiro Toyama (Silent Hill, Siren, Gravity Rush) inter-
viewed each other (http://bit.ly/1B7q0vE). This is where the
Ueda quote about first adding sad music to the battles comes
from.
“The quest for Shadow of the Colossus’ last big secret”

(2013) by Craig Owens can be found on Eurogamer (http://
bit.ly/1SoWidB).
The Ueda quote about the Minus World in Super Mario Bros.
comes from “An Audience With… Fumito Ueda,” a killer
interview by Daniel Robson found in Edge Magazine (2013,
Issue 261).
Nick Fortugno’s “Losing Your Grip: Futility and Dramatic

Necessity in Shadow of the Colossus” (2009) is worth reading
in its entirety (http://bit.ly/20VMQnf ).
Brian Ashcraft’s Kotaku article on Shadow’s appearance in

Reign Over Me—“The Colossus and the Comedian” (2007)—
can be found here: http://bit.ly/1HNFH1K.
Oh hey, I get to cite myself! Check out my “Shadow of the

Colossus Postmortem Interview” (2009) with Ueda on 1UP,
several choice quotes from which are used throughout the
book: http://bit.ly/1X1hsir.
173
Simon Parkin’s interview for The Guardian with Bloodborne
creator Hidetaka Miyazaki (2015)—in which he speaks
about being awoken to the possibilities of the medium by
Ico—is right here: http://bit.ly/1GJG22r.
Another friend and colleague, Shane Bettenhausen, inter-

viewed Ueda in Electronic Gaming Monthly (2005, Issue 198)
for “Afterthoughts: Shadow of the Colossus,” in which he
stated that self-sacrifice is the main theme of Shadow.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks foremost to Amber Cox for her boundless

encouragement, support, and love over nine months of
evenings and weekends spent writing, and for under-
standing how important this was for me to do. I would
travel to forbidden lands and trust mysterious voices for
you.
Thanks to Jess Suttner for a lifetime of brotherly encour-

agement (and more recently, great feedback), and to our
parents Linton Suttner and Shelley Davis for imbuing
us with an appreciation for art and culture that lets us
divine our way through the world.
Endless thanks to Gabe Durham for seeing something

in my pitch and helping to shape my drafts into some-
thing just-maybe-worthy of his amazing series. And to
Michael P. Williams for being the goddamn Batman of
researchers and giving me reams of helpful/hilarious/
thoughtful feedback. That guy should write a book.
175
This definitely couldn’t have happened without Dan
Sutter, Ben Sutter, and Matt Milkowski, who under-
stand my love for Shadow like few others and who
all spent an inordinate amount of time making sure
that this book was true to that love. And also to Tom
Mc Shea, Scott Hannan, and Doug Wilson for key
moments of support/feedback/friendship.
Thanks to Michael “Nomad” Lambert for his openness,

feedback, and downright incredible documentation of
Shadow.
Huge thanks to my many inspiring, generous, bril-

liant interview subjects: Eric Chahi, Jenova Chen, Neil
Druckmann, Kyle Shubel, Jaime Griesemer, Adam
Saltsman, Andy Nealen, Craig Adams (double thanks
for the great foreward!), Nick Fortugno, Vander Cabal-
lero, Nels Anderson, Phil Fish, Michael “Nomad” Lam-
bert, John Davison, Allan Becker, Josef Fares, Tameem
Antoniades, Marty O’Donnell, Greg Off, Nao Higo,
Rich Siegel, the Acid Nerve team (Mark Foster + David
Fenn), and the Sunhead Games team (Lee-Kuo Chen +
Chia-Yu Chen). I’m sorry that I couldn’t include more
of your insights, but they will eventually live at http://
shadowbookextras.tumblr.com.
Thanks to current and former colleagues throughout

the gaming industry for encouraging me to do my thing
and for helping to challenge the status quo.
Miscellaneous but important thanks to Ryan Plum-
mer, Joseph M. Owens, Adam Robinson, Ryan Pay-
ton, Ophir Lupu, Jennifer Clark, Scott Rohde, Shuhei
Yoshida, Adam Boyes, Gio Corsi, Mena Sato, Kevin
Chung, Alyssa Casella, Mark MacDonald, Greg Off,
Shane Bettenhausen, Dan “Shoe” Hsu, Paul McGuire,
and Loretta Oleck. And to Scrivener for being awesome
writing software.
Bonus thanks to Derek Yu for making Spelunky, my

second-favorite game and the one that made me take
notice of Boss Fight Books in the first place.
And lastly, eternal thanks to Fumito Ueda for letting

me interview him twice (six years apart), and for mak-
ing a piece of art that changed my life. I’m ever in your
shadow.
177
SPECIAL THANKS
For making our second season of books possible, Boss

Fight Books would like to thank Ken Durham, Jakub
Koziol, Cathy Durham, Maxwell Neely-Cohen, Adrian
Purser, Kevin John Harty, Gustav Wedholm, Theodore
Fox, Anders Ekermo, Jim Fasoline, Mohammed Taher,
Joe Murray, Ethan Storeng, Bill Barksdale, Max Sym-
mes, Philip J. Reed, Robert Bowling, Jason Morales,
Keith Charles, and Asher Henderson.
ALSO FROM BOSS
FIGHT BOOKS
1. EarthBound by Ken Baumann

2. Chrono Trigger by Michael P. Williams
3. ZZT by Anna Anthropy
4. Galaga by Michael Kimball
5. Jagged Alliance 2 by Darius Kazemi
6. Super Mario Bros. 2 by Jon Irwin
7. Bible Adventures by Gabe Durham

8. Baldur’s Gate II by Matt Bell
9. Metal Gear Solid by Ashly & Anthony Burch
10. Shadow of the Colossus by Nick Suttner
11. Spelunky by Derek Yu
12. World of Warcraft by Daniel Lisi
é Continue? The Boss Fight Books Anthology

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What is the book about?

What is the book about?

What inspired the author to write the book?

What inspired the author to write the book?

Shadow of the

Copyright © 2015 Nick Suttner

ISBN 13: 978-1-940535-10-4

Series Editor: Gabe Durham

Shadow of the Colossus19

When I was growing up, every so often I would stumble

A massive, open world with almost nothing in it. A

There were rumors that Shadow was originally planned

Oh right, and I’m Nick Suttner, bearded indie game

Before we go galloping off across the plains of Shadow

As Shadow would do years later, Ico unfurls most of its

At the top of a huge, cylindrical room, Ico finds—and

While Yorda’s companionship provides the heart of the

Shadow of the Colossus opens on the wings of a bird,

“That place…began from the resonance of inter-

…But to trespass upon that land is strictly

Jumping back to Wander’s present, shadow creatures

In the period between having submitted Ico for produc-

Dormin explains to Wander that the beastly idols must

The opening cinematic ends as the camera transitions

I wish that I could remember the feeling of playing out

I’m given control of Wander again, who stands sternly

“Thy next foe is…

Argo paces quietly nearby. It’s comforting to see her

Traveling across the plains once more, it’s difficult to

This fight feels immediately different from the first as

Upon my final thrust into the sigil on his head, Qua-

I really take in Wander for the first time when he awakes.

Climbing out of the canyon, the next colossus seems

“Thy next foe is…

What appears to be a pile of rocks near the center of

I can only scale Gaius so far before the armor at his

Let’s talk about horses.

And now, a brief history of relevant horses in modern

As characters, Link and Epona have a similar

Since Ico, several high-profile games have involved

The fifth colossus lies even further across the eastern

My peaceful moment looking out from the save shrine

While Shadow is in part a product of Japanese culture,

I’m in the thick of an airborne battle, completely

Southwest of the Shrine of Worship lies a cool, sun-dap-

Wander is single-minded, seemingly numb to the trag-

When we started developing the game there was no

The Los Angeles-based gaming collective The Arcane

The location of the eighth colossus feels more concealed

“Thy next foe is…

Forced to leave Agro behind again, I climb through

Mono’s ethereal voice in the white tunnel is almost audi-

I recently had a minor epiphany about what Shadow

Riding west across the Forbidden Lands feels like riding

Ueda has spoken of his love for monster movies, and

Basaran is imposing, but the visual clues throughout

“Gamers of Reddit,” began a 2015 discussion thread,

While Shadow may have been scaled back on a macro

Nick Fortugno is responsible for bringing the

Shadow of the Colossus19