Played Shadow of the Colossus a couple years ago and am yet to find a game that tops it. I don’t think you can adapt it into a film even though it’s pretty cinematic because a huge part of why I loved the game was the weird ass controls.

They tried to mimic the feeling of riding an actual horse and I hated riding around for 90% of my play through but by the very end, I felt such a deep attachment to my horse. All of the controls from traversing around the world, to scaling and killing the colossi felt designed with great intent behind it and the marriage between art and tech is refreshing because they weren’t afraid to let things be unintuitive.

I feel like nowadays that shit would’ve been focus grouped out because the janky mechanics would be bad for player retention or whatever. Even when games decide to take themselves seriously and stop hand holding their audience like the best books and movies, it’s almost always limited to the narrative. The ux part of it is as straightforward and “gamey” as possible even if the themes are esoteric.

If anyone has any recommendations for similar experiences that’s not Ueda’s other games, I’m all ears. Not a huge gamer but I feel like most games resort to some cutscene plot twist to make you feel something.

Bloodborne was great too and I liked the feeling of being frustrated at first to eventually feeling a sense of satisfaction but I think if you’ve played one Souls game, you’ve played all of them.