Today I played a game set in a mysterious world, full of wonderful hints of a forgotten past that were never clarified. I remember vividly the first time I played a game that did this – it was Team Ico’s Shadow Of The Colossus, 20 years ago, and my friend and I rode around its empty landscapes on horseback assuring each other that, since they’d gone to all the trouble of building this vast space, it must have something to say.
It didn’t.came along a few years later, I enjoyed the mechanical play but I didn’t buy the world at all. There was no lost civilisation, no buried storyline, nothing to be understood. It was all vibes to me: sound without music.
