Shadow of the Colossus by Nick Suttner: Book Review
I don’t know why I stopped reading Nick Suttner’s book the first time I tried it. Well, that’s not true, but it is an approachable and entertaining opening sentence. It makes it seem like I’m not the sort of person who’s continually reevaluating every choice I’ve ever made at all hours of the day while also just trying to exist in a continual state of perceived social, political, spiritual, emotional, and cultural isolation and navigating the shifting energies that is the clinical depression that rocks my entire being. It also sounds like I’m taking a swipe at Nick Suttner, which is ridiculous because his book is beautiful and reminded me why Shadow of the Colossus is one of my favorite games that I don’t play as often as I should.
Don’t shame me.
There are just so many Doom WADs to play man.
And until I start getting backers on Patreon, I still gotta work 40 hours a week.
Speaking of monumental obstacles, let’s get back to the book review.
The tenth book in the first series of Boss Fight Books, Shadow of the Colossus by Nick Suttner, is, simply put, beautiful. I recognise that I overuse that adjective, but that’s partly because I’m writing my essays in English which is, despite its seemingly ever expanding lexicon, a poor language that ever and always leaves me destitute for finding the most accurate descriptors. Suttner’s book bleeds an honesty and conviction about the videogame Shadow of the Colossus, detailing it’s overwhelming power to impact players emotionally, philosophically, and intellectually. It’s no small thing to say(and write) that players who approach this game with an open mind leave the game feeling profoundly altered for having experienced such an incredible work of media. Suttner manages to capture in words again and again how playing Shadow is not just playing a videogame, it becomes an overwhelming sensation that will haunt the player literal decades after they have finished climbing and vanquishing the last stone giant. Shadow of the Colossus is art in videogames in the purest sense and Suttner shows, better than most, how and why that is through his writing which often left me stopping to simply breath and process what I had experienced years ago and now seemingly relived.
This is to say, Suttner’s book owns dude.
One later passage, in which Suttner offers an interlude to his reader, conveys not only his strength as a writer, but also how Shadow of the Colossus impacted him emotionally and intellectually, after and while playing it. He writes:
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 forest 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 creatures, scamper off into hidden boroughs, or lifting up fallen leaves to find tiny mushrooms reaching up from the 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. (97)
This passage was painful to read because I didn’t write it first. Once I finished wringing my hands and cursing the heavens, I realized that the passage resonated so much because I recognised it. Or recognised the thought expressed. That’s my way of saying I immediately understood the emotions Suttner was writing about.
I was a kid who was born with a less-than-stellar immune system, and allergies to dust, mold, and tree pollen, specifically pine trees. My misfortune was aggravated by the fact that my parents settled in a region of East Texas known colloquially as “the Piney Woods.” Because of this most of my childhood was spent indoors watching Tim Burton movies, playing videogames, and, honestly, reading Calvin and Hobbes. My Mother had received several of the paperback collections of the comic strip from my Dad while they were dating in college and she would read them to me before I wound up basically stealing them and teaching myself to read through those books. If the reader has never read Calvin and Hobbes all they need to know is that it’s a series of weekly newspaper strips about a young boy who’s socially awkward, highly imaginative, and has an imaginary friend in the form of his stuffed-animal Hobbes who is a tiger.
I loved this strip because it was funny.
I also loved it because it made me feel less lonely.
While it was like most newspaper comics, built around gags, there were numerous strips that were just Calvin and Hobbes walking through the woods behind his house, or else riding his wheelbarrow down roller-coaster like trails and discussing philosophy. These books were, if I’m being honest, a kind of solace that helped me through childhood. Alongside videogames these comics afforded me a space where I could just be, or else, be away from the outside world which annoyed or frustrated me, or else a culture that seemed continually to insist that I was always not enough. While I was reading Calvin and Hobbes, or playing video games on my parents' SNES, I was in a world that was bigger than the miserable one I occupied.
It was lonely, but it was beautiful.
I’ll be honest, this quote was enough for me to recommend Suttner’s book to anyone who’d bother to listen to me rant about videogames. But this is a review damn it, so let’s talk more about Suttner’s book.
Besides its beautiful prose, Shadow of the Colossus is an excellent work of research, journalism, and history. Looking at reviews of the game, interviews with the developers, critical evaluations, and commentary by fans and videogame industry professionals, Suttner manages to show to his reader that Shadow of the Colossus has impacted the culture, and continues to have a relevance in the discourse of videogames. While many games can appear and capture the zeitgeist for a moment, Suttner shows that there’s a haunting quality to Shadow that endured because of the creative choices that went into making it.
One of them being, actually making a game like it.
The fact that the game existed at all compared to its contemporaries is nothing short of impressive. Suttner notes this when he writes:
Shadow was a Trojan horse for subtler, more mature, storytelling and emotionally challenging themes, marketed 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 green lighting meeting. (22).
This passage should be footnoted for the reader with the clarification that Shadow of the Colossus was released in 2005, and that was a time in the internal culture of videogames that was defined, chiefly, by action. Some of the games released that same year would include Resident Evil 4, Grand Turismo 4, God of War, Metal Gear Solid 3, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Star Wars Battlefront 2, and Madden NFL 06. This list is just to show that many of the videogames Shadow would compete with were continuations of popular(and profitable) series, and they were typically loud action games.
Resident Evil 4 alone would rock the market as well as influence virtually every shooter and action game over the next decade, and looking at this game in comparison to Shadow it makes sense why Sony would have been hesitant to promote Shadow outside of the Japanese market. Resident Evil 4 is about a trained operative trying to save the President’s daughter from a religious cult and bioterrorism organization from unleashing a parasite that can control the minds and bodies of its host.
Also there’s a fun shooting gallery run by the merchant.
How can you beat that?
Shadow of the Colossus by comparison is a quieter game, about a young man named Wander who’s traveled to a forbidden realm to save the life of a young woman, and must defeat 16 Colossi according to a spectral spirit/demon entity known simply as Dormin. From there Wander will have to travel across a largely empty landscape with his horse Agro to each colossus. There are no enemy npcs, only the Colossi themselves, and Wander will encounter no living organism on his journey with the exception of a few small black lizards.There is no background music outside of fight sequences, only the sound of Agro’s hoofs trotting across the soil and rock, and Wander only ever speaks a few lines of dialog in cutscenes, or else calls Agro to him. There are no guns, simply a magic sword that shines the light towards the next Colossus, and a bow.
In short you cannot find a game which contrasts so profoundly to Resident Evil 4.
In the interest of clarification, Suttner doesn’t compare Shadow to Resident Evil 4 in his book. That’s all me. I just chose Resident Evil 4 because it’s the most potent example. I could have easily picked Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas or God of War but, I’ll be honest, I’ve never really been invested in either of those franchises, and ultimately this was just to build upon Suttner’s argument that Shadow of the Colossus was a game that, while not devoid of action sequences and adventure, approached it in a more regulated tone.
The goofy, gonzo theatrics are nonexistent, and Shadow is, as Suttner notes, a game which is moving slower to create a deeper aesthetic effect.
Suttner does regularly compare Shadow to another videogame, but rather than one of the Triple-A action shoot-ups of its time, he instead uses the game’s predecessor Ico, another videogame developed by Japan Studio. Ico was similar to Shadow in terms of visual and narrative tone, and in one passage Suttner explores how the sequence of the games helped establish their lasting creative impact. He writes:
Shadows 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 present setting the steaks. The key elements aren’t too dissimilar to those an 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 tenants on a wholly different scale, never to be repeated. (23).
Again, there simply wasn’t a game like Shadow of the Colossus.
Looking back at my own experience with the game, I distinctly remember being blown away by it. While most of my schoolmates were spending their time in Halo, Gears of War, and Diablo 2 (which, for the record, are all solid videogames) I played Shadow of the Colossus and never actually beat it. My failure to complete the game didn’t matter though. I had never experienced a game like it. There was no other game that felt like it possessed such a tremendous depth, both in terms of the actual playable locations, as well as just the soul of it. Riding Agro through a valley, across the dunes of a desert created a stillness that other games just couldn’t touch.
And on the note of scenery and perspective, Suttner conveys to his reader just how memorable the visual presentation of Shadow is. He writes:
Shadows seamless, camera transitions are accomplished through a variety of methods, such as drawing the players eyes to environmental details to transform a gameplay objects, and using a different aspect ratio during cut scenes for cinematic impact before gently fading back to a gameplay perspective to keep it smooth. But primarily, Shadows harmoniousness is due to eschewing a static gameplay camera entirely. Rather than following Wander from a consistent vantage point, or cutting between simple 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. (40).
Reflecting on Shadow, and rereading this essay mid-composition, I recognise how easy it is to forget that I’m playing a videogame, and Suttner’s book challenged me to actually write a review of his work because so often I kept going back to that mindset. I’m saying it was hard to write this review. I had to remind myself constantly this essay was a review of a book about Shadow of the Colossus and not Shadow itself. But there’s the problem. Shadow doesn’t just create a memory, or at least it didn’t for me. It crawled into my head and became an embodiment of what art could be in a way that pushed past the petty limitations of genre and medium. It became an idea, an emotion, an element, an energy that seemed to take me to a place where my ego faded and I gave myself up to an experience.
And Suttner’s book deserves the same praise because he managed in his book to remind me of that.
Books about videogames are too often defenses of the medium by popular writers, or academic texts which disappear into jargon before they can offer anything substantial to a casual reader who would want more than just a rehashing of the basic history of videogames. Sutner’s book goes into the development of the game and includes interviews with the designers, and these are wonderful demonstrations of his ability as a journalist and gaming historian. But throughout the book he just disappears back into the game itself and the energy it has on his psyche and being. Reading his book becomes this beautiful repeating infection where I’m taken back to the moment of fighting Valus for the first time, watching onto Avion’s wing and riding through the sky, or quaking and crying at the high cost of defeating Malus.
Suttner has composed a book that managed to remind me why I loved videogames in the first place.
Near the end of Suttner’s book, I was struck at how well he captured in words the sadness of the game. He writes:
There’s a sadness in Shadow’s spaces, and as thrilling as they are to discover their 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 one 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 realization that I probably won’t return there. (140).
A commonly used platitude in any comment section under a trailer or playthrough of a videogame is the sentence, “I envy someone who’s experiencing this game for the first time.” It’s cliche when reading it for the hundredth time, but it rings eternal in the ear because it’s true. I wish, so much, that I could play Shadow of the Colossus again for the first time, not because I want to be younger or innocent again. I’m 35, that sentiment reeks of the idealization of youth that I’ve never understood or embraced. What I want to experience is the sensation of feeling a game overwhelm me and make me question what I thought the medium could be, should be, and absolutely must be.
Reading Suttner’s book wasn’t this exact experience, but it was close.
Reading through his book was a way of reexperiencing the initial mystery that was Shadow of the Colossus. As he recalled playing and defeating each of the stone giants I was able to recall the emotion that each destruction brought me and how beating this game wasn’t something that brought me joy. Instead it left me with a profound yet satisfactory sadness that I haven’t encountered in any other videogame I’ve played. And the ability to communicate these emotions and ideas is a testament to his skills as a writer.
I don’t believe that I’ve even begun to explain why Suttner’s book is so beautiful and so important to the medium of videogames. There’s a frustration in that. But ultimately the point of a book review is not to explain it, but to explain why it is worth reading.
So, here it is.
Suttner has produced a beautiful text that celebrates a videogame that remains a fixture of the culture, and one that has impacted the lives of anyone and everyone who has played it. There are not enough words to describe Shadow of the Colossus, but somehow Suttner managed to find the right combination of them.
And now I want to play the game all over again.
Joshua “Jammer” Smith
7.22.2024
If you want to read Nick Suttner’s book for yourself you can buy a copy on Boss Fight Books website by following the link below:
Shadow of the Colossus by Nick Suttner – Boss Fight Books
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