It takes place in a fantasy setting and follows Wander, a young man who enters an isolated and abandoned region of the realm seeking the power to revive a girl named Mono.

The player assumes the role of Wander as he embarks on a mission that might entail Mono's resurrection: to locate and destroy the colossi, sixteen massive beings spread across the forbidden land, which the protagonist traverses by horseback and on foot.

The team sought to create an outstanding interactive experience by including a distinct visual design, an unorthodox gameplay template, and non-player characters with sophisticated artificial intelligence such as the colossi and Wander's horse, Agro.

He has a small group of warriors at his command, and is pursuing Wander to prevent the use of "the forbidden spell", the rite that involves the destruction of the sixteen colossi and the restoration of Dormin's power.

[31] The colossi are armored, most often enormous creatures with forms ranging from various humanoids to predatory animals, and live in all manner of surroundings and environments, including underwater and flying through the air.

Over time, the signs of Wander's deterioration from the gathered essence start to appear: his skin becomes paler, his hair darker, and his face is increasingly covered by dark veins.

Wander appears back in the temple soon after, the signs of his corruption readily apparent: his skin is pallid, his eyes glow silver, and a pair of short horns have sprouted from his head.

[51] Ueda believed that the boss sequences of those games could be streamlined if the player character was able to approach and climb the oversized opponents to kill them with a close range weapon.

[55] One of the challenges issued by Kaido involved the creation of "organic collision deformation", a term that alluded to his concept of realistic character physics in relation to the movement of the colossi.

[54] Publisher SCEI gave the project a greater amount of development time, funding and creative freedom in comparison to the resources of the Ico team, measures that arose from the company's recognition of that game's critical success.

[43][55] From a pool of five hundred applicants, ten were subsequently enlisted to work on the game;[43] however, Ueda felt that only one or two satisfied his criteria, as he expected every facet of the title to be as well-crafted as possible.

[55] Kaido's concern during production was to guarantee Team Ico's ability to meet their schedule and budget commitments while ensuring that they had the opportunity "to create everything Ueda was aiming for within the amount of time we had".

His rationale was that the necessity to transform the hand-drawn artwork into polygonal shapes in the latter case would cause the reproduced assets' level of detail to be vastly reduced from that of the source images.

[29] Environmental designer Kouji Hasegawa noted that the scenery graphics were drastically reworked on several occasions because Ueda urged him and his colleagues to reinforce the light tones in the coloring of the areas and to accentuate "the brightness and the saturation of the textures".

[47] The game engine utilizes elements such as desaturated colors, motion blur and partial high dynamic range rendering; and it places heavy emphasis on bloom lighting.

[4] After the inclusion of the player character's ability to perform climbing maneuvers, the team enabled the game to alter his physical response to instances of falling from a moving colossus; the reaction would vary depending on the distance that the protagonist's body traveled to the landing point.

[58] To choose the colossi that were negligible, Team Ico estimated their level of completion at the time and the degree of overlap between the anticipated method of defeating a given entity and a strategy reserved for another enemy.

[62] Other omitted elements of the game included a two-player gameplay mode, excluded due to insufficient development time,[61] as well as a simulation of a full day cycle and weather variations, excised because of problems that Ueda attributed to the PlayStation 2's memory capacity.

[55] Kaido commended the staff's dedication in retrospect, as he believed that their output allowed Team Ico to "[stick] to the schedule in the end", despite the reductive alterations that the game had undergone over the course of its production.

[62] In late 2004, following two years of development during which NICO was listed on Sony's internal schedules for forthcoming products under that respective name, Team Ico changed the game's designation to its final Japanese title.

[69][71] Also in May, the same version of the game–estimated by a Japanese online news source to be at "60 percent of completion" by that point[72]–was exhibited at E3 2005,[71] and, according to Edge, attracted "heavy crowds, all clamouring to get their hands on and heads around its sheer enormity".

[74] Ueda later admitted the existence of several flaws in the design of Shadow of the Colossus;[17] at the same time, he had asserted that the staff's adherence to the central ideas that they had envisioned meant that the game's elements eventually coalesced into a coherent product.

[77] The modeling of the game's environments, whose arrangement stemmed from independently constructed battlegrounds tied to each of the colossi, followed a pattern that Kouji Hasegawa described as "a repeating cycle of creating, testing and tuning".

[62] After researching several visual arts genres,[18] Team Ico crafted a distinct graphical style that utilized both grayish and light color tones to underscore the game's ambiance,[32] identified by Ueda as "firm-feeling".

[84] Inspired by the opening theme from Silent Hill,[83] Ueda also intended the soundtrack to reflect a melancholic ambiance as well as the history of the game's setting, based on the narrative's elements of death and resurrection.

[45] Otani began work on Shadow of the Colossus at the time of its inception as NICO, and Ueda characterized the soundtrack's development as difficult due to the protracted creation of its associated game.

[80] Following a July 15, 2005 news release where SCEI confirmed the publication date for the Japanese version of Shadow of the Colossus,[87] the company divulged details about the limited first run edition of the game, which players could only acquire by pre-ordering, on August 19 of that year.

[89] The companies launched a promotional campaign: consumers who pre-ordered the game at one of the 7-Eleven's retail outlets would receive stylized bookmarks whose designs incorporated artwork from Shadow of the Colossus.

The updated re-release of Shadow of the Colossus features high-definition (HD) graphics, content previously missing from the North American release, PlayStation Network Trophies, and 3D support.

[154] Ueda had since left Sony, but provided a list of recommended changes to Bluepoint for the remake; he stated that he does not believe many of them will be implemented, nor would they add any of the colossi that had been cut from the original game.