"The industry trained us for this."
I thought it a few nights ago, thumb already hovering over the button to skip a cutscene.
In Shadow of the Colossus.
I played it on the PS2. Back then it was the most realistic thing I'd ever seen. And it left me with something almost no game has left me with since: the feeling that I was doing something wrong.
The first colossus doesn't come looking for you. It just minds its own business. I caught it from behind and never gave it a chance. All it did was twist and shake to throw me off.
Every time I drove the sword in, I felt like I was killing something that hadn't done anything.
Recently I put it on again. I'd just dropped RoboCop (too flat), the girls were asleep, and I wanted something that wasn't too complicated.
And I caught myself playing on autopilot.
Cutscene, skipped. Sword up, find where the light gathers. Colossus, weak spot, back to the temple. Next.
There were a lot of colossi left. And I was going through them like a grocery list.
That's when the line came out. The industry trained us for this.
And it's partly right. Years of map arrows, icons, objective markers. Some of that sticks to your hands.
But Shadow of the Colossus has none of that. No arrows, no icons, no daily rewards. Same horse, same silence as twenty years ago.
Nobody was rushing me there. I'd brought the rush from home.
And this after writing a book about it. There are still nights I fall for it.
Until one of those nights it hit me: I was stressing about finishing.
I'd picked this game for those vast landscapes, for that overwhelming silence. And I was playing to get colossi off my plate, not to enjoy it.
So I slowed down. If I saw something beautiful, I stopped.
And I saw a giant waterfall, ringed by cliffs, from the top of an even higher cliff.
I just stood there looking at it. No idea how long. No sword, no colossus, no next.
The knot in my stomach came back too, with every stab. Not as strong as on the PS2, of course: I know what's coming. But that feeling of doing something wrong came back.
The colossi were still there. Not one of them went anywhere while I took my time.
If you've ever caught yourself ticking off a game you loved, in chapter 2 of my book I show you how I catch that clock before it steals my night:
For when…
…you just want to be a cat: Stray. A lost cat in a city of robots. You jump, you sniff around, you meow at the press of a button, and you stop wherever you feel like it.
You can pause whenever you want, but there's no manual save: it only saves when you move the story forward, not while you're exploring. The pause menu tells you when it last saved, so check it before you switch off. And if you come back weeks later, being a cat comes right back to you.
Not for you if you tend to get up mid-session without looking: you can lose all the time you'd spent poking around. It's on PC, PS5, Xbox and Switch.
Stray rewards stopping to look. Play it ticking off areas and you'll miss half of it. And if you want your hour to be yours again, not one more to-do list, here it is:
P.S. Tell me which game left a knot in your stomach the first time you played it. I read every reply.