Shadow of the Colossus Review

Sixteen bosses, no other enemies, and a landscape deliberately emptied of content. Team Ico built a game whose structure is a single moral question asked sixteen times, and the emptiness is exactly what makes each answer land. The colossi are architecture that moves, so every encounter is a climbing problem before it is a fight, and the grip meter turns hanging off a stone shoulder into a physical negotiation you can lose.

Agro behaves like an animal rather than a vehicle, which is frustrating roughly as often as it is convincing. The renderer pushes the PlayStation 2 past what it can hold, with bloom, motion blur, and fur across geometry that large, and it pays for that in a frame rate that dips whenever the spectacle peaks and a camera that loses the target at the worst possible moments. Those costs are real, and they still do not touch an ending that indicts everything you were praised for doing.