Directed by Fumito Ueda and published in 2001 and 2005 by Sony for the PlayStation 2 console, Ico and Shadow of the Colossus have acquired what passes for canonical status among video games, the twenty-first century’s popular art form. Guillermo del Toro, the director of “Pan’s Labyrinth” and a devoted gamer, told the British magazine Edge in 2008, “There are only two games I consider masterpieces: Ico and Shadow of the Colossus.” Jonny Greenwood, the lead guitarist for Radiohead, as unimpeachable an institution as currently exists in popular culture, has written that Ico “might be the best” video game of them all. And when Roger Ebert, writing at his popular blog for the Chicago Sun-Times, argued in April of last year that “in principle, video games cannot be art,” readers clamored for Ebert to try Ueda’s games. In the more than forty-five hundred responses to the blog post, they mentioned Shadow of the Colossus more than three hundred and fifty times and Ico more than two hundred and fifty times.

View more

Partly to capitalize on this affection—as well as to increase the anticipation for Ueda’s next game, The Last Guardian, which is expected in 2012—Sony has now published The Ico and Shadow of the Colossus Collection. It’s a disc for the PlayStation 3 that includes remastered, high-definition versions of both games, as well as an optional 3-D upgrade. The games look better than ever, and the 3-D effects are interesting, if not always an improvement. The colors dim noticeably, but at least you don’t have to pay a five-dollar surcharge for the privilege of another dimension.

Besides, the power of these games does not come from the visuals, which are beautiful but dated, even in high definition. (Ico takes place in a castle whose walls are built of stones that are perfect squares, as if the building were drawn on graphing paper.) “Finding a way to make the mechanics of play our expression as creators and as artists—to me that’s the only question that matters,” the influential game designer Clint Hocking says in Tom Bissell’s “Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter.” Ico and Shadow of the Colossus are exemplars of how the best video games accomplish this, evoking empathy in the gamer through the play itself, rather than through dialogue or animation.

The primary action performed by the protagonist—and therefore, by the player—in Ico is simply to reach out and hold a girl’s hand. A boy, ordinary except for the two horns that grow out of his head, is taken to a ruined castle and left to die. He finds a girl, ghostly in a white dress that flutters in the breeze, and together they do what any two children in an enchanted castle would: they go exploring and try to escape. To take the girl with him, the boy extends his hand when the player depresses a button on the controller. The act feels more intimate than that sounds. My first time doing it gave me goosebumps: I am with her. I am not alone.

There are no points in Ico, nothing to collect, and very little to kill. There is also very little dialogue, and nothing that a movie lover would recognize as romance. But it is a love story. The boy’s motivation—and therefore, yours—is to help the girl. Sometimes the boy is attacked by shadowy, globular figures and he must fend them off with a stick and, later, a sword. If he fails to do so, the girl is pulled into a void. The prospect of losing a fight evokes feelings of guilt and sadness in the player, rather than panic and self-preservation.

The game’s pleasures are cerebral, not kinetic. Truth be told, the button-mashing is a little dull. But clambering through the castle with Yorda (that’s the girl’s name)—helping her by lending a hand when, for example, she must climb up to a short ledge—attaches the player to her, even though the boy and Yorda almost never speak; in fact, they do not know the other’s language. There are puzzles to solve along the way, and they can be difficult. (At one point I was stuck, unable to deduce how to walk across a chasm; to figure out that I needed to take a bomb-like device from another room and plant it near a fallen chandelier, I had to cheat a bit and resort to an online walk-through.) There is very little music, mostly the sounds of the wind and the ocean and the birds outside the castle. For five or six hours, your fingers reach out to Yorda and pull her along with you. For once in a video game, your princess isn’t in another castle.

Compared to Ico, Shadow of the Colossus is more ominous and, on the surface, more familiar. Ueda has said, at times, that Ico is not a video game, but he makes no such provocations about Shadow of the Colossus. In the introduction, a man travels to a distant land, a “place at the end of the world,” riding a horse and bearing the body of a dead woman. He asks a godlike voice to bring her back to life. Like a mythological hero, he is warned not to meddle with the realm of the dead, that “the price you pay may be heavy.” To get his wish, he is asked to kill sixteen beautiful creatures, known as colossi. These are the first of many intimations that the warrior’s motivations may not be pure and that he, meaning you, may not be righteous.

The colossi are towering beasts, seemingly one hundred times the warrior’s size. The young man—who has slender, feminine features and long hair—kills each colossus by climbing onto it and stabbing its weak spots with his sword. The creatures vary in form; some are giants on two feet, others look like a dragon, or a dog, or a bull. But they have a consistent aesthetic, typically brown fur mixed with wooden armor that you can grasp and cling to. The result is sort of Chewbacca crossed with the Trojan Horse, or Brad Bird’s “Iron Giant” on the set of Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil.” Often the warrior grasps a creature’s furry hide while being tossed to and fro in the air, swaying like someone hanging from a helicopter in flight. These are long encounters. Sometimes it takes an hour or more before the colossus falls.

Each time the man sets out to find a colossus, he must search for it—across fields and canyons and desert and forest, around lakes and sometimes under them. In another game, these journeys would be punctuated with smaller enemies, little challenges that lead up to the big, climactic battle. But the world of Shadow of the Colossus is seemingly empty, except for the colossi and the warrior. Until you reach a colossus, there is no music, leaving you alone with your thoughts and the sound of your horse’s hooves. No enemies jump out to attack, it occurred to me on one of these rides, because I am the one on the hunt. The natural order of a video game is reversed. There are no enemies because I am the enemy.

Yet even with that knowledge, the battles rarely failed to evoke the sense that I was embodying an epic hero, hiding behind a column like Perseus dodging Medusa, or riding a slithering sea dragon like Sinbad. The exceptions occurred only when the controls became frustrating, when the warrior didn’t do what I wanted him to do. After fifteen hours of play, I still could not get my character to reliably climb into his horse’s saddle without first leaping into the air a few times. This is one way that interactivity undermines fiction. What kind of hero can’t get onto his steed?

Yet the act of killing each colossus is exhilarating. Whatever ambivalence I felt at the beginning of the quest faded as I found myself engaging in a fist-pumping celebration of my foe’s destruction. But then the creature’s eyes dimmed, the music turned mournful, and it seemed pretty clear that a wrong had been done. That never stopped me from directing the warrior to head out to kill the next beast. This dissonance—kill, regret, and then kill some more—makes the game more than merely an interactive summer blockbuster.

Sometimes my frustrations with the controls dovetailed happily with the game’s themes, as when a particularly exasperating colossus battle led me to stab the beast’s head with genuine anger. Ueda, in a 2006 interview with Computer and Video Games magazine, described Shadow of the Colossus as a game about “my way of cruelty.” My moment of fury followed by the complicit feeling upon the creature’s fall is what, I presume, Ueda had in mind. Shadow of the Colossus is the most successful video-game tragedy that I know of. When you have killed all sixteen colossi you feel loss rather than triumph.

Ico and Shadow of the Colossus are often quiet games, and they are often slow. They are not filled with the Skinnerian rewards—whether coins or points or dead bodies—that lead some people to describe games as “addictive.” I was drawn to these games, and I was seduced by them. But they never felt like compulsions. And not a minute of the time I spent inside them was wasted. They did not leave me feeling empty, because they are not empty. Back in 2005, a certain film critic wrote that the point of art is to “make ourselves more cultured, civilized, and empathetic.” Playing Ueda’s games has precisely these effects.

As video games have become more and more popular, the medium’s defenders have developed a misguided tendency to point to the ways that games are useful, practical, functional. I do not know if Ueda’s games will make you smarter, or improve your vision, or promote world peace. I very much doubt, in fact, that they will do any of those things. Emphasizing the ways that games are tools for instruction—whether intellectual, physical, or moral—is an unfortunate residue of their origins as children’s playthings. Abandoning it will be the sign, maybe the last one, that this new form of storytelling is all grown up.