Shadow Of The Colossus 2: Will We Ever Get A Sequel?

If you can believe it, it's now been 15 years since epic action-adventure game Shadow of the Colossus was released for the PlayStation 2. The classic that Wired called "incontrovertibly, one of the most important videogames in the recent history of the medium" can still be played on a current system. In fact, its 2018 remake for the PlayStation 4 is also considered one of the best games on that platform. Such influential innovation and beauty definitely deserves a sequel. The question is, are we ever likely to be able to play a new Shadow of the Colossus game? Well, that may depend on what you're looking for in a sequel.

This perpetual question has a somewhat complicated answer. That's in part because the game's original developer, a studio inside Sony's Interactive Entertainment Japan Studio, no longer exists as an entity. Other factors play into the answer, as well. Here's the scoop on the likelihood of a Shadow of the Colossus sequel arriving sometime in the future.

Team Ico, best known for melancholic and minimalist games with themes of loneliness and isolation, made three titles between 2001 and 2016: Ico from 2001, Shadow of the Colossus from 2005, and The Last Guardian from 2016. They share similar ideas and may be considered spiritually linked.

Fumito Ueda, the director and lead designer behind Team Ico's games, was a touch ambiguous about the exact relationship between the three games, telling the PlayStation Blog in 2016, "The way I see it, maybe they are from the same world, or the same universe. But anything further than that is really up to the player's imagination."

Ueda had worked at Sony since 1997, but left the company in a high-profile departure before the completion of The Last Guardian, finishing the game for Sony as a freelancer after fans continued to clamor for it. Following that move, Ueda created the company genDESIGN, which includes a staff of former Team Ico employees.

Ueda was not involved in the remake of Shadow of the Colossus. That project was undertaken by Bluepoint Games, which also did the PlayStation 3 version of the game, as well.

Ueda's companies are not known for their prolific output. The Last Guardian famously took 10 years to come to fruition after numerous delays, for example. And in early 2018, genDESIGN started teasing a new game on its website and on Twitter that does not appear to bear any relation to its earlier titles. Later that year, the studio confirmed to Metro UK that it was working on a new title that was not a sequel, although it would be similar in scope to Team Ico's previous games.

In March 2020, Epic Games announced that it was teaming with three independent developers to bring out new games, and genDESIGN was one of them. So it looks like the company is working hard on this new title, whatever it is. Given that, and the fact that the group is not exactly known for working on more than one project at a time, it seems likely a direct sequel to Shadow of the Colossus is not in the cards anytime soon.

However, since Ueda has in the past confessed to a connection between his previous games, perhaps this upcoming game (whatever it is) will still satisfy fans who miss Shadow of the Colossus. In any case, it's likely to be just as atmospheric as anything Team Ico has put out to date — and there's a chance it could have a related setting and similarly deep themes.