this bit really caught my imagination

Even now, it’s easy to understand why Shadow Of The Colossus kept so many people so enthralled. Playing through the game again, I’m startled by the sense of history that suffuses Team Ico’s landscape. Crumbling ruins lead into bleak ash plains, empty cities and stunning, temple-ringed lakes. Everything feels like a secret in the Forbidden Lands, because the game utterly sells the idea that yours are the first human eyes to cast upon it for thousands of years. On my way to visit Ozzymandias' skydiving spot I get lost, and end up stumbling upon a sparkling grotto sealed off by the mountains surrounding it. It feels like a discovery, not least because Shadow Of The Colossus is coolly indifferent as to whether you find this stuff at all.

We’re used to playing through spaces with purpose. Skyrim offers a landscape as large as SOTC’s, as well as a wintry beauty of its own, but the homeland of the Nords is utterly crammed with function and padded with lore. Every cave has a quest attached, every NPC a task. There are no secrets in Skyrim, just one epic to-do list.

But in Shadow Of The Colossus all you can do is stare at a ruined shrine in the middle of a desert, and wonder what it’s for.

i would really love to be part of a team or project that was designing and implementing a world like this, which was significantly larger than it “needed” to be for the gameplay it contained, and whose only purpose was to be explored. (i similarly enjoy sf and fantasy novels whose worlds are significantly larger than the stories they contain, even if that extra territory is not explicitly explored but just hinted at in the interstices and boundaries of the narrative. tolkien’s middle earth is a wonderful example of the worldbuilding being the main point, but a lot of other great novels are clearly backed by richly detailed universes that we never see, but which the writers have worked out.)