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Shadow of the Colossus
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This is totally off-topic for a horror blog, but I'm going to post it anyway.
Resident Evil 4 was clearly game of the year for me until last month when I started playing Shadow of the Colossus. Colossus isn't a horror game; if anything, it's probably closest to a platformer. Created by the team behind ICO (Fumito Ueda et al), Colossus demonstrates that even simple platforming mechanics can become an emotionally substantive experience when put in the correct context. I started this site because I find horror games to be the only genre of video game to consistently focus on emotional manipulation of the player, but Ueda and his team have shown (twice now!) that gripping and emotionally relevant games can come in any package. Tycho from Penny Arcade explained the core of the game's power extremely well:
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... Shadow of the Colossus feels like an indictment of gaming as usual in many ways. There are elements of the story that are ambiguous from the outset, not because the story is being told poorly but because the situation you find yourself in and the powers you come into contact with are not drawn with absolute clarity. So while you go through the ordinary motions that we associate with videogames - discern objective, eradicate opposition, return for reward - you're engaged in a series of acts whose moral virtue is by no means assured. The supposed hero is assaulting majestic, sometimes docile, sometimes curious, sometimes sleeping creatures. They're almost all portrayed in a sympathetic light at some point, and it's hard not to feel disgusted at times for iterating Hollow Game Mechanic X by rote without any sense of the moral spectrum the acts inhabit.
The game needs to be seen by every conscious organism on planet Earth. (source)
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The game is epic, unique, and thought provoking. I'm highly recommending it to you, despite it being in no way, shape, or form a horror game. |
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