All right how about this, for something to talk about: the morality of Shadow of the Colossus
Shadow of the Colossus was originally released for the Playstation 2 in 2005
and re-released in high definition for the Playstation 3 in 2011.
Serving as a loose prequel to 2001's Ico, the game places the player in control of Wander, a young man
who has brought the body of a young woman named Mono to a temple in the far off Forbidden Lands,
to petition an entity known as Dormin to resurrect her.
Dormin agrees to Wander's request, but first, tasks Wander with destroying the 16 Colossi that hold
Dormin captive, and the rest of the game unfolds from there, as the player first locates the various Colossi,
figures out their weakness, and slays them.
Shadow of the Colossus has rightly received praise from many
for its emotional complexity and moral nuance.
Now, it's important to remember going into this that, as with all narratives,
our interests are instinctively aligned to those of the protagonist.
Even when those goals are bad or evil, we are emotionally predisposed
to share the protagonist's desire to achieve those goals.
So much of what we will focus on, are the counter-implications to the otherwise self-evident
emotional value of fulfilling Wander's quest.
Wander's goal is one that is entirely congruous with typical fantasy video game narratives,
Essentially, it's just a remix of slaying the dragon and rescuing the princess.
Slay the Colossus and resurrect the doomed girl.
But this quest is tinged with uncertainty.
Wander's superficially virtuous goal, leading him to do things that are... questionable
The 16 guardians of Dormin's power are hulking monsters of earth, fur and masonry,
with a design aesthetic evocative of architecture.
A palette of materials and shapes that makes them look like some ancient forgotten watchtower come to life.
They are fearsome, imposing and often wrought on a scale that makes them difficult to comprehend.
While Wander must mount or ride all of the Colossi
in order to slay them by attacking their literally magical weak point,
most still fit into something approaching a human scale, being the size of a large animal or small house.
But a few are so large that they become terrain.
The game presents the Colossi in conflicting emotional context, of fear, and empathy.
The first of these contexts, fear is the easy one.
Given their scale, their alien composition, their seeming indestructibility,
it is easy to frame the Colossi as opponents, to present them as adversaries to be bested in a contest of skill,
to show them as a hostile opposition to your protagonist-centered-righteousness.
They are large, they wield weapons of massive proportions, their silhouettes are frightening and jagged,
and many of them are outright deadly.
However with each one, the designers have carefully crafted a story
that begins here with fear and intimidation,
and progresses towards empathy and sadness.
More often than not this is a story told literally from bottom to top
as the most common pattern for engaging with the various Colossi is to approach from the ground,
find a way to climb onto the Colossus and then work your way to the head for the killing blow.
The story of each Colossus then is told from the feet to the face.
Armored hooves, stone spikes, and wrought-iron give way to leathery skin
and fur that, although just a digital simulacra,
one can't help but imagine as bristly and not altogether unpleasant like a camel or a bear.
From there the player directs Wander to the head where the camera swings around
to frame Wander along with the Colossus' face.
The eyes which looked small, beady, and mildly sinister from the ground,
here look plaintive, curious, almost playful.
Up-close, many of the Colossi have faces that are more than a little silly and childlike
A favorite of mine being the monkey-like Gaius.
From the ground, Gaius is a menacing thing, an unstable knight on ball feet,
that tries to crush you with its massive stone sword, until you climb to its round silly face
and are expected to plunge your own sword into its head.
The game however doesn't rub this in.
There is no grand moment of pathos– a single-tear-in-the-rain shot,
there is only your own self-doubt in the correctness of Dormin's quest,
your own sense of right and wrong debating if it's the right choice to destroy something as majestic as Avion.
Part of how the game sells this complexity is by not simply playing the same notes over and over.
This is to keep the gameplay feeling fresh, keeping the puzzles from getting too repetitive and formulaic,
but it also serves to effectively muddy the moral waters.
Some of the Colossi are simply horrifying in their design, unlovable bodies of menace and blades.
The tortoise Basaran is a literal ball of spikes and is highly aggressive,
sieging Wander with its projectile attacks.
Basaran is as barren and unlovable as the blasted wasteland it lives in.
The sky serpent Phalanx is impressive, daunting, but also utterly alien.
The water-bound Pelagia has a crown of teeth ringing its head.
The three smallest Colossi are also three of the most aggressive and deadly
Two of them–Celosia and Cenobia–call on primal fears, their design evoking a pastiche of lions and wolves,
ancient human predators,
however, even then there are moments of humanity injected.
Celosia fears the fire and recoils when Wander wields a torch in its face,
driving it backwards until it falls from a cliff shattering its armor and revealing its weak spots.
Similarly the fight against the terrifying skeletal horse Phaedra is punctuated by a moment
where Wander must stab Phaedra in the back of the neck to make it seized up in pain
so he can deliver the killing blow to its head.
All of these storytelling mechanisms are brought to a climax in the ultimate fight
against the 16th Colossus Malus.
Setting the stage for the encounter,
Wander must travel to the far South,
leaping across a rickety bridge on the back of his horse Agro.
The bridge collapses, Wander is thrown from Agro's back and Agro plummets into the ravine.
Deprived of his last living companion,
Wander must ascend to the top of the plateau to face his final challenge.
Malus is enormous. Towering over the southern plateau,
Malus is the tallest of the Colossi by almost double.
It is also the deadliest of them all,
firing bolts of energy that home in on Wander sending him skittering across the ground.
The arena in which you engage Malus is a battlefield, littered with barricades and trenches,
almost as though whatever ancient people built Malus found themselves laid siege by their own creation
until they were able to bolt the Colossus' feet to the ground
leaving it abandoned and stationary, at the edge of the world.
Approaching Malus feels like stepping into Armageddon.
A rain-soaked plateau still scarred from some ancient battle.
However even through all that, as Wander nears the end of the puzzle,
he is brought face-to-face with the final Colossus where he is inspected like an oddity.
Malus' eyes switch from the aggressive orange high alert state to the passive teal.
Even this, the final moments, there is pause.
The approach to the final sigil could just as easily have been framed and executed
as it so often is in the god of war series.
Another set of games from the same era concerned with the main character
crawling on gigantic opponents in order to slay them.
But no. This was not a technological limitation.
The game is already full of so many impressive moments of transition that this pause,
where Wonder stands and is inspected by the being he will soon kill, is a conscious decision.
They had the power to do almost anything they imagined and they chose this.
Wander is tasked by Dormin with slaying 16 beings,
none of which truly bear any ill will towards Wander even as he poses a threat to their very existence.
Beings who aren't mere automatons, but inhabit some space in between construct and living thing.
They are stone and metal animated by magic but also flesh and fur
and they cry out in pain when Wander plunges his sword into them.
Critical to building the complexity of the game's emotional landscape,
is the composition of the end of each Colossus' life.
As Wander climbs each Colossus the music swells with heroic energy,
the kind of blood-pumping soundtracks you would expect to accompany great deeds.
But, with that final blow, the music turns sad, grieving.
Wander has his moment of heroic victory as the Colossus crumbles around him,
before the black tendrils of Dormin's power escape, and surge into his body,
leaving him unconscious on the ground.
The anthropomorphization of the Colossi, the injection of human qualities to evoke empathy,
is played out in reverse on Wander.
With each Colossus he destroys, his physical form degrades,
his humanity withering away until he's left a husk to be possessed by Dormin.
It is not built to guilt the player but it is still made to feel tragic.
The game makes no commentary on choice, however,
because at the end of the day, while Shadow of the Colossus is a participatory experience,
it is not about that participation.
Shadow of the Colossus is definitively Wander's story.
Even though the game world is open with almost the entire area accessible from the very start,
the player is not given the opportunity to alter Wander's ultimate path,
Nor is the player impelled with the notion that they can make a different choice, perhaps even the right choice,
by turning off the game or putting the controller down.
The player's participation is not in complicity but in reenactment,
the story projected as myth, the game as retelling.
The player ultimately inhabits the role of Wander in the same way an actor becomes Macbeth
without assuming the guilt for Duncan's murder.
Like a performer, the player experiences the game simultaneously as participant and observer,
aware of the external context of the story even as their participation makes it real.
The brilliance of Shadow of the Colossus' emotional landscape
doesn't truly come together until after the final showdown.
Throughout Wander's journey, he is pursued by the shaman Emon and his entourage of soldiers,
who finally arrive in the Forbidden Land just in time to witness Malus' idol in the temple
shattering with Malus' death.
There is a standoff between Wander and Emon
that results in Wander's body being fully possessed by Dormin,
though only the masculine component of Dormin's voice remains.
Emon flees, casting a powerful binding spell that traps Dormin long enough for Emon and the surviving soldiers to escape,
collapsing the bridge out of the Forbidden Land behind them.
Dormin recedes, leaving Wander, his body broken and frail,
to resist the spell's pull, but in the end it is irresistible and he is pulled into the void.
When the dust has finally settled Mono, the dead girl,
wakes up from the altar as a wounded Agro limps into the temple.
Together they inspect the pool where the Dormin-possessed Wander was entombed
and find an infant boy with curious horns growing from his head,
aft-shadowing the titular main character of the team's previous game Ico.
The three of them silently wind their way together up the temple to a hidden garden.
Dormin, in all their ferocity and animosity towards the shaman,
through their manipulation of Wander to their own ends, is still a god of life.
Dormin is caged because Dormin is troublesome. Dormin complicates the hierarchy.
Very little of their character is actually demonstrated, and what is demonstrated always exists in duality.
As shadows gather around Wander, doves gather around Mono.
What we are told of Dormin comes almost entirely from a proven adversary,
Lord Emon, a man who was himself willing to ritually sacrifice Mono to unknown ends.
Wander's actions are tragic, lamentable even,
but the consequences of those actions are not nearly so clear-cut.
The final moments with Mono in the garden are framed as peaceful, serene, a moment of hope and rebirth.
What comes after that, the threads that connect Shadow of the Colossus to Ico,
are left largely to implication and innuendo, mythical gaps to be filled by speculation.
But the one thing that is clear is that this is not the end.
Dormin's release does not trigger Armageddon.
By the time of Ico, things appear to be in disrepair but those events, that world,
is separated from Mono in the garden by hundreds, perhaps even thousands of years.
Such is moral complexity, events with upsides and downsides in both the present, future, and far future,
The ultimate judgment of Wander is left to you, the observer, to decide based on your own values.