Since Grand Theft Auto III revolutionized open world design in videogames, developers have leaped at the opportunity to create vast, open-ended environments littered with tons of activities, side quests, and collectibles. There was a time around the PlayStation 2 and original Xbox era when every open world game by design was immediately labelled a Grand Theft Auto clone, from the campy nature of Saint’s Row to the underrated True Crime series. It didn’t do justice to these games as their own individual experiences, unfairly comparing them to the greater competition at the time. In the heat of this trend, along came Team Ico’s Shadow of the Colossus, a game that promised yet another open world adventure. However, there was something quite different about the world in this unassuming game about slaying giant creatures; something empty but extraordinarily whole.



Shadow of the Colossus takes place in a world ominously known as the forbidden land. As the tragic hero Wander, you arrive in this desolate realm with your dead lover in arms, believing the mystical land to be able to magically resurrect the dead. After encountering Dormin, the overruling god-like entity of the forbidden land, you are tasked with traversing the world in order to slay sixteen gigantic colossi possessed by mysterious dark spirits, before you can bring your fallen lover back from the dead. It’s a simple yet powerful, fairy tale-esque story that reaches incredibly poignant emotional heights, and a large part of this just happens to involve the world itself.

Team Ico were no strangers to grand-scaled, desolate world-building, as their 2001 debut game, Ico, painted an absolutely stunning picture for us. They carried this momentum over to Shadow of the Colossus and outdid themselves. The open world design here is far from the gimmick that plagued most titles that shared the same principle game design at the time. Unlike its counterparts, the game had no collectibles, side quests, or random activities to prolong the amount of things to do. It was simply you, your trusty horse, a bow and arrow, and a sword that emitted a beam of light, guiding you to each new location to fight the next colossus.



When I first played Shadow of the Colossus, I was taken aback by just how lonely the world was. You would occasionally encounter some small form of wildlife such as a lizard or bird, but the world felt like an enclosed space, entirely void of any semblance of reality. It was a grandiose fever dream of a land that soaked in its own dark mysteries; an absolutely perfect setting for the isolated, terrifying giants that freely roamed around. After finally defeating my second colossus and riding off to find my third kill, it all clicked with me. I found myself soaking in the astonishing scope of the world; the hazy hills and dense forests, the ruined castles and rolling dunes, the deep lakes and dark caves. Everything about the game design suggested that this was a world intentionally created to haunt you with its emptiness.

Some might mistakenly see this as shallow or pretentious world-building, but it leaves a remarkably profound impact on you with every colossus slain. I often found myself lost in the vast stretches of land without any direction or light, yet I was absorbed in the moment; absorbed in the powerful atmosphere that pressed down on the world like a heavy blanket. The tranquility had an almost meditative quality to it, but whenever you came closer to the location of your target, the exhilaration of the quest would kick back into high gear and you’d suddenly be off on an epic adventure unlike anything you’ve ever seen before.



Team Ico knew exactly how and when to overwhelm and subdue the player with the greatest weapon in a game designers arsenal: complete immersion. In a dark room on a Saturday night at 3AM with nothing but the sound of my PlayStation 2 and the gentle hum of anxiety as I discovered a new location, I realized that this would be a truly unforgettable game world that many like-minded players might want to get lost in for years to come. The immersion came at the cost of mundane tasks being thrown into open worlds by the truckloads these days, but as a result, it managed to craft something I can safely call an outstanding work of art. With developer Bluepoint’s remaster of Shadow of the Colossus on the horizon, it’s time we jumped back into the forbidden lands and let this incredible world sweep us away once again.