There’s a melancholic essence of loneliness written all over that game. Everything about it feels empty but vast and significant. Most people interpret it as a game trying to tackle the cycle of violence, but to me, I think it’s mostly exploring the themes of loss and grief and how people choose to cope with them.
In spite of the prophecy foretold, trucel loses his loved one, and in an attempt to resurrect her (technically, she’s deceased, but it’s the same since she’s going to die anyway), he’s been told by some unknown entity whom he had no prior contact with before offering the girl to go battle 16 Colossi in exchange for her life.
Simple premise, executed flawlessly in depth.
Spoilers: as he progresses, he begins to lose himself. With every colossus slain, every last bit of his humanity vanishes. The plot is that the colossi were just an evil force imprisoned in these gigantic rock-like creatures long ago as an attempt to confine and prevent them, and every time he kills one of them, a fragment of them enters his body until he eventually gives in full control.
That’s where I think it’s trying to resonate with the player. The colossi you’re meant to defeat serve as some sort of metaphorical representation of your own isolation, or in this case, the player’s never-ending fight against the desolate solitude that’s suffocated him from the very moment they lost their loved one and thus became lonely. The emptiness you get hit with between the battles reflectively mirrors the void within your shattered soul; the fights mirror a more manic moment of regret fueled by rage and resentment, ultimately making it a dance between your own will to do something (as “wrong” as it may be) or just letting go.
When you lose someone or something, anything really, there's always a sense of remorse. Thinking that there’s something you could’ve done or that you should’ve done but there’s nothing, hollow, done and gone, all in vain, but you keep beating yourself for it as if it’s your fault, so much that you’ll end up falling into this pit of hate and all other forms of negativity that destroy your entirety. It’s a lot similar to our situation. We hate everyone and everything, including and especially ourselves for what’s happened to us and how they’ve treated us for things completely outside of our control, but in the end, it’ll only continue to harm us and everything around us. We’ll be blindsided by the nonexistent sense of progression, where in actuality, we’re just getting uglier and uglier both on the inside and the outside and end up losing every little thing we were left with.
Almost every videogame in existence is meant to make you feel like a badass, and it fits because it’s all fiction and escapism obviously. In this one, however, you feel like a good-for-nothing minuscule sack of shit fighting against these God-like creatures, clinging on to your last bit of hope when climbing on them, and I think it’s all intentional. It’s meant to make you feel desperate. Because it is desperate. What you’re doing isn’t morally wrong, and I don’t think the game ever hints at it this way, but it is figuratively stupid, aimless, and pointless.
At its core, it’s just an action-adventure boss rush with puzzle elements, but beneath all that, there’s something special if you’re willing to dig, and a lot of it can’t be put into words. You just have to feel them.
In spite of the prophecy foretold, trucel loses his loved one, and in an attempt to resurrect her (technically, she’s deceased, but it’s the same since she’s going to die anyway), he’s been told by some unknown entity whom he had no prior contact with before offering the girl to go battle 16 Colossi in exchange for her life.
Simple premise, executed flawlessly in depth.
Spoilers: as he progresses, he begins to lose himself. With every colossus slain, every last bit of his humanity vanishes. The plot is that the colossi were just an evil force imprisoned in these gigantic rock-like creatures long ago as an attempt to confine and prevent them, and every time he kills one of them, a fragment of them enters his body until he eventually gives in full control.
That’s where I think it’s trying to resonate with the player. The colossi you’re meant to defeat serve as some sort of metaphorical representation of your own isolation, or in this case, the player’s never-ending fight against the desolate solitude that’s suffocated him from the very moment they lost their loved one and thus became lonely. The emptiness you get hit with between the battles reflectively mirrors the void within your shattered soul; the fights mirror a more manic moment of regret fueled by rage and resentment, ultimately making it a dance between your own will to do something (as “wrong” as it may be) or just letting go.
When you lose someone or something, anything really, there's always a sense of remorse. Thinking that there’s something you could’ve done or that you should’ve done but there’s nothing, hollow, done and gone, all in vain, but you keep beating yourself for it as if it’s your fault, so much that you’ll end up falling into this pit of hate and all other forms of negativity that destroy your entirety. It’s a lot similar to our situation. We hate everyone and everything, including and especially ourselves for what’s happened to us and how they’ve treated us for things completely outside of our control, but in the end, it’ll only continue to harm us and everything around us. We’ll be blindsided by the nonexistent sense of progression, where in actuality, we’re just getting uglier and uglier both on the inside and the outside and end up losing every little thing we were left with.
Almost every videogame in existence is meant to make you feel like a badass, and it fits because it’s all fiction and escapism obviously. In this one, however, you feel like a good-for-nothing minuscule sack of shit fighting against these God-like creatures, clinging on to your last bit of hope when climbing on them, and I think it’s all intentional. It’s meant to make you feel desperate. Because it is desperate. What you’re doing isn’t morally wrong, and I don’t think the game ever hints at it this way, but it is figuratively stupid, aimless, and pointless.
At its core, it’s just an action-adventure boss rush with puzzle elements, but beneath all that, there’s something special if you’re willing to dig, and a lot of it can’t be put into words. You just have to feel them.
