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Shadow of the Colossus

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How to get blood from a stone... a huge, living, monster-shaped stone

Words: Eric Bratcher, GamesRadar US

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It starts with the game's overwhelming sense of scale. Everything here is huge except you: the vast, empty land you explore to find the colossi; the ruins they tend to inhabit; and especially the colossi themselves. The tiniest one is the size of a Volkswagen, only two are smaller than a house, and the largest ... let's just say he has his own weather. We're not kidding.

Obviously, combatants of this magnitude lead to some pretty amazing battles. Each colossus has a specific weak point (or points) you must attack, but getting to the weak spot can be a real puzzle. You'll find yourself leaping onto the wing of one beast as it soars through the air, clinging for dear life onto the back of an aquatic beast as it plunges deep into a lake, and wondering just how to get high enough to jump onto the shoulder of a stone knight taller than King Kong. The answer is always part of the environment or the colossus itself, and the battles do a wonderful job of staying both diverse and incredibly tense.

Even amid this action, the game's incredible atmosphere evokes a mood in the player better than at least 99% of the games out there. There's a tragic sense of melancholy that still feels somehow beautiful. It's hard to say just what elements give the game this ability, because there seem to be several of them intertwining and working together. One is the story, in which your character braves incredible danger with quiet, desperate resolve, accompanied only by the world's most loyal horse. The story's simplicity, in that you do what you do for love, gives it resonance and impact.

The audio is also a strong contributor, ranging from near-silent passages in which the only sounds are Agro's hooves or the bubbling of a quiet brook to a mid-battle malestrom of orchestral clashing. When one of the great behemoths falls, the battle score suddenly vanishes, replaced by the dreamy, chant-like hymn of a gothic choir.