The loneliness of the long distance slayer.
By Matt

Q: If a Colossus falls in an empty game, does anybody hear it?
A: Define ‘empty’?

This is a game that divides opinion – you could argue that it's a triumph of style over substance, that there's nothing to the game but a series of boss battles. And you’d be right – but you’d be asking the wrong question.

Stunning. Just stunning.

Everything here - from the opening intro where the flight of a lone bird sets the pace of a long, foreboding journey whilst simultaneously keeping a sense of promise and hope – makes it quite obvious that the game has had a fantastic amount of attention lavished on it. The artwork, design sensibility and atmosphere pervades every moment, every detail, of the game. This really is a labour of love - you can feel it more every minute you spend playing.

The game proper, and every Colossus battle, starts at a temple. This giant building sets the sense of scale for the game, and on venturing outside with your trusty stallion the game reveals an astonishingly large world waiting to be discovered. It can feel a bit overwhelming actually, as the landscape must be one of the largest seen in any game. Look beyond the initially clumsy controls and marvel as the landscape is streamed around you.

Once you've mastered the slightly odd controls that steer and move your horse around, you set off to the first Colossus and see what the game is really about.

The journey to the first Colossus doubles as a cunningly disguised tutorial - allowing you to learn horse and player control as well as the finer arts of climbing, jumping and rolling. Depending on how good your navigating is, using your sword as a sort of way-finder, your trip to the first encounter will take anywhere from a few minutes to an hour or more. If you think it's taking too long, then you’re still asking the wrong question. (Oh alright then - try using the map, it's there for a reason and don't be afraid to deviate from the direct route to the direction you are going in.)

You don’t get technology like this on a horse.

After the sedate travelling, upon reaching the Colossus, the moment of revelation of each of these giants is quite something! The loneliness of your travels only serves to accentuate exactly how impressive these monsters are. The game mechanic, such as it is, is simple - find, analyse, climb, possibly fall off, stab and repeat. But bringing it down to its bare essentials is, again, asking the wrong question - at no point does it become tiresome. There are so many memorable moments during the David and Goliath sized battles that it becomes less about the mechanic and more about the feeling – the feel of diving into the water as you watch the a shadow pass silently overhead, or trying to peer through the ripples in the water as a colossus' tail suddenly smacks you right in the kipper. These aren't set pieces, they aren’t scripted and you won’t get bored by repetition – these are user controlled game experiences; events feel entirely driven by your actions and by the environments that bind you and your adversaries.

The difficulty curve too is set at just the right level. The puzzles (how to climb the Colossi basically) are pitched at you perfectly, and each one will take any halfway experienced gamer about thirty minutes without rushing. Doesn’t matter. You’re still asking the wrong question. Each Colossus offers a different challenge, even though the goal is the same. We're kicking ass and taking names, here.

Hello little horse, my name is Henry. Will you be my friend?

The thrills here, as with many great games, can be found in the periphery – exploring the landscape, seeing how long you can ‘surf’ your Colossus just taking in the view, or something I call "the tentacle game". Let me expand on that. After slaying a Colossus, and witnessing it falling to the ground in the most spectacular, and melancholy, of fashions, you get a scant few seconds during which it dies and is covered by some spooky black stuff. Then, a bunch of tentacles come out of it and grab you and transport you back to the temple. I use these final few seconds to try to get into as interesting a position or as far away from the Colossus as possible, aiming to be mid-leap when things finally get wrapped up. I think I need help.

So, if you're concerned about the looks of this game or the lack of variety in things to do, I'm at a loss and you're losing out on a great game. Sure, it could be longer, but you’re still asking the wrong question – 8-12 hours doesn’t seem much, but eighty hours wouldn’t be enough. After all, should you really put a price, or a time limit, on a work of art?

Let us know how it feels to you.

December 2005

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