Shadow of the Colossus, by Nick Suttner

When I think of Shadow of the Colossus, a game I played, enchanted, when it released on PS2 circa 2005, I think of a couple of lines from the epigraph to Ursula K Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea:

bright the hawk’s flight

on the empty sky.

The game opens with a cutscene following the flight of a bird of prey. (Players catch glimpses of it and its kin throughout the adventure, and might even be able to catch a ride on one). The kite soars through the dark sky and along a ridge, swooping down just past the shoulder of a lone rider who bears a mysterious burden through the wild landscape. The bird flies on.

Beyond the literal connection of “the hawk’s flight,” the whole world of Shadow of the Colossus reflects a similar mood of contemplative awe as these lines from Earthsea. Metaphorically, it occupies a place in game history rooted in the same mythic background as Le Guin’s novel. It is concerned with light and darkness, the unnamable Tao and the power of names, hubris and sacrifice. In many ways, the game itself is a poem. It contains layers of meaning. The lyrical cutscene opens into an epic journey, which resolves with a dramatic closing cutscene and lingers in the mind long after. It is no surprise that books have already been written about Shadow, attempting to fill in if not explain away that vast open space for interpretations provided by the game.

To introduce Nick Suttner’s book about the game, my thoughts run along a further line of associations. His Shadow of the Colossus book is to the original game something like what Studio Ghibli’s film Tales from Earthsea is to Le Guin’s story: an homage inspired by its great original, on a charitable reading; a frustrating imitation inadequate to its source material, to give a more critical take. Particularly when held up alongside the other Boss Fight Books or Studio Ghibli films, these entries are more or less disappointments. But even the fact that they do stand in such company is likely reason enough for fans, at least, to give them a look.

Hopefully that tells you enough about me and my way of thinking to decide if this review is worth your time. If you’ve read Le Guin but haven’t played Shadow, or played Shadow but haven’t read Earthsea, their spiritual affinities should serve as a strong recommendation to seek them out. Both, in their own right, are classics. If you want to revisit either of those resonant worlds, and are willing to put up with some annoyances and conflicting perspectives while you do, give Nick Suttner’s and Goro Miyazaki’s respective reprises a go.

Shadow of the Colossus the book evidently arose from the combination of Nick Suttner’s work in video game journalism and his job with Sony’s indie game initiative. He has appeared on numerous podcasts about Ico and Shadow of the Colossus and has since written another book about Ueda’s work, The Last Guardian. On paper, he’s well qualified to lead readers through the world of Shadow, and in fairness he does a respectable job summarizing the game and offers some illuminating insights. My dissatisfaction with the book has to do with style as well as substance, however. Suttner’s writing and analysis here tend to be fragmentary and undeveloped. His book reads at times more like the draft or working notes for a book than a finished product. 

Sentence fragments pepper the reader from the outset. “A massive, open world with almost nothing in it. A big-budget game that’s more interested in exploring the experience of its questions than distracting you with answers.” The stray “you” veers in the next sentence to the third person “players,” and Suttner never settles on a mode of address. In short order, and frequently thereafter, he steps in and speaks from the first person: “Oh right, and I’m Nick Suttner, bearded indie game advocate.” I couldn’t come to grips with the tone, shifting as it does from the grandeur of a film-trailer voiceover to this unassuming humor schtick. Acceptable for a podcast (or a poem for that matter), his writing takes poetic license but only rarely brings out the clarity of vision that poetry demands.

Large swathes of the book are simply a recounting of what happens during his playthrough. Suttner does well to spend some time early on discussing the development team’s first game, Ico. But from there on, chapters cover, bit by bit, the spiritual successor Shadow without any consistent thematic throughline. In each chapter, we get a portion of the playthrough concerning the lead-up to and battle with a single one of the game’s 16 colossi. In each case, some attempt is made to connect the gameplay with a related concern. Suttner gestures towards the game’s development, with valuable interview material from extant sources he references, as well as new information from its US Producer, Kyle Shubel, about the game’s localization and the role played by Kenji Kaido as the team’s “unsung hero”. This in itself could have been a framework for the book, but it is dropped without further elaboration.

Or when Suttner touches on a trip he and is girlfriend took to Japan and some of his impressions, I thought he might take that cultural and interpersonal material as an organizing principle to build on, but he soon moves on. He mentions payot and beards; death; horses; The Arcane Kids’ manifesto; Ueda’s view of nature as a “mass [a katamari, he calls it in Japanese] of information”; an outing near San Francisco in the Sutro Baths area that felt vaguely like Shadow. All of these disparate threads are thrown out, but none develops into a coherent meditation on the game for more than a few pages.

Chapters do go into minute detail about the boss designs and puzzle-solving required to defeat them, but too little of the book is spent drawing out their connections or significance. There is scant analysis of the progression of the story told through these battles and their effect on the hero, Wander. The choppy structure lends a repetitive air to the writing, making it difficult to see what is at stake in the game as a whole. Particularly when Suttner mentions the creator’s original intent to have as many as 48 colossi, we would expect some sustained discussion of their types and tendencies, what is lost as well as gained by reducing the game’s scope and concentrating on a few distinct battles, but there is minimal critique along these lines. 

Again, there are plenty of rich ideas at play in the book. We hear that efforts were made to keep players from messing with the altar where Mono lies. Could this be another example, or perhaps it’s a counter-example, of that “futile interactivity” in the Fortugno essay Suttner cites? At the heart of the story is a question about humanity and agency, with an inescapable gendered quality to it, but the representations of  characters and relationships get much less discussion than where exactly the glowing sigils appear that need stabbing on each colossus. 

I could see this being Suttner’s own version of “subtractive design,” that approach Ueda has made famous and influential, and that has allowed his games to thrive in a world of GTAs and Witchers. But if so, I would want to see Suttner’s creative vision come through somewhere, even if it were only his own version of Ueda’s apprentice work of a dog running in the rain (though the interview he cites suggests it was a car. Perhaps elsewhere the dog appears, or maybe he was getting mixed with an iconic scene early in MOTHER 3?). Super Mario and Another World, Piranesi’s disquieting prisons, and games as art are alluded to, sometimes more than once. The film Reign Over Me and its inclusion of the game as a symbol finds its way into a section of a single short chapter. Muybridge’s horse, the first filmed footage, is trotted out, and the multiplying doves around Mono glow with inarticulate light. We consider, for about the space of a sentence, Dormin as a backwards Nimrod. Then there’s a brief engagement with Fortugno’s language of holding on and letting go… All the ingredients are here for a spectacular work of synthesis. But it just remains a heap of information.

Perhaps the most intriguing thought here, and the closest we get to the book’s promise, is when Suttner reflects on his motives for sharing things he loves. 

But that may ultimately come from a selfish place. Maybe it’s less about wanting others to experience the same magic and humanity that I felt, and more about wanting to be better understood in some small way.

Maybe so. But rather than breaking off the thought and jumping back into the game after a section break, he could have stayed with that idea, illustrated it with another example, a memory, something personal or imaginative, anecdotal or connected to a theory about what it would mean to be so understood. Instead we plunge back into summary, with just the briefest glance at some “loss of innocence, a wake-up call to Wander that’s come too late”.

To avoid spoiling the ending, I’ll pass over the book’s thin engagement with said ending. Suffice to say the fall and the garden (literal? mythic?) and themes of sacrifice and self-sacrifice, transformation and rebirth are present, but only discussed in a cursory way. 

Why belabor this? One main reason that Shadow is on my mind a good deal these days is because of the return of MageCast X, a collab between this site’s founder, Red, and CriterionX. Their conversation about the game ranges over many of the themes hinted at here and there in the book, but they engage with a handful of key topics, such as “the forbidden” and grieving, in depth and say much less about the individual battles. Or if you’re more interested in deep dives into the lore and fandom, a fantastic Jacob Geller video essay breaks down the “Last Secret” and fans’ pursuit of it.

This is all to say: great interpretations of Shadow abound. What Suttner does well is to hew close to the surface experience and reproduce in prose much of what happens in the game. For reflections on why it matters, look elsewhere. Let this book or another one jog your memory or whet your interest, but then play or replay the game and look within.

BROKEN PIXEL

Not Recommended

Wesley Schantz coordinates the Video Game Academy, writes about books and video games, and teaches in Spokane, WA.