Post of the Day: Sylph Talks About Shadow of the Colossus

So today was a weird day. I spent the first two hours of the day watching pones while I downloaded Fallout 4, followed by taking my fiancée out for an early Valentines Day. We spent most of the day out and about before she told me to go to Game Stop. There she bought me Shadow of the Colossus. I was super excited to play it because I remember playing the shit out of it as a kid. I remember Agro-launching my way to death about a million times and launching off colossi and just spending hours doing absolutely nothing in the vast world that’s in that game. It was amazing and I loved every minute in that bleak and beautiful land.

The remake absolutely grabbed me and it absolutely looks beautiful (and while I haven’t actually tried Agro-launching in the hour that I played today I can only hope it still exists) but it leaves me reminiscing. And that brings back a lot of old memories and gave me plenty of time to think in between killing the four colossi I managed to get to. It let me think about all the stuff I’ve done to end up here, with so many great people supporting me and giving me all of these great experiences. I didn’t have that great of a time as a kid, which is what lead to me spending so much time in the land of video games, and while playing this game has brought back so much of the good memories it also brings out a lot of the bad memories that I had honestly forgot.

And this leaves me torn on the way to feel while playing this game. It’s fun and amazing and I love it. But it feels tainted by all of these memories I’ve tried to get away from. It’s got a sense of nostalgia and yet a feeling of melancholy that wasn’t there when I played the original. Despite how much brighter and clearer the game is compared to the original, it just feel even more muddier and sad. It helps with the overall motif of the game since you’re murdering these large magestic creatures but it leaves me with a feeling that’s really hard to describe with words, which is ironic since using words is supposed to be the one thing I’m good at.

I guess that’s all for today, I just spent the last twenty minutes writing this and struggling with how to put down what I’m feeling. It’s weird, that’s about the closest take I can get on all of this. It’s really, really weird, being back in this place in my head that I haven’t visited in so long. I’m going to go back to watching pones now.