![]() It’s about solving puzzles to figure out how to climb a monster so you can stab them until they die. Shadow of the Colossus isn’t some obscure thing, and it doesn’t necessarily have mechanics with broad appeal. And I was convinced at the time that I was playing the harbinger of what was to come. Shadow of the Colossus was this massive, overwhelming adventure. ![]() That’s why the original had such an inconsistent frame rate.īut even as the PS2 struggled to run the game, it worked. The scale and the detail was impossible, and it maxed out the hardware. Ueda and Sony Japan Studio pulled off a miracle when it shipped Shadow of the Colossus on that console. Shadow of the Colossus wouldn’t exist in 2018, and it never should have existed in 2005 on the PlayStation 2, either. ![]() You can’t turn it into an online multiplayer game-as-a-service, and it would still require a massive budget. Even with Sony holding the torch for single-player narrative experiences, Horizon: Zero Dawn, the upcoming God of War, and Naughty Dog’s games all avoid emulating Shadow of the Colossus in almost every way. You go from one fight to another in a land devoid of not only life but also side quests, hunting, and crafting. Colossus is quiet, contemplative, and empty, and all of those elements fit together to support one another. Sony couldn’t make a game like Shadow of the Colossus today, and it doesn’t. We now know we shouldn’t kill the colossi, and we now know that no one ever made games this way again. But more than anything, it’s tragic to go back because now we know better. And while none of these are necessary to defeat any of the beasts, they provide some solid incentives to replay the fantastic encounters.So what is like going back to this masterpiece? It is still a technical marvel even if Bluepoint did blunt the style of the original director, Fumito Ueda. ![]() There are some cool upgrades that can be gained by completing the optional Time Attack modes, such as stronger weapons, different colored horses, and even a parachute that aids exploration. Likewise, having a minimal set of tools at your disposal – only a sword, a bow, and your awesome horse Agro – means that you need to master each one in order to take down the beasts. It’s this illusion that they’re living creatures that creates an internal conflict in hunting and killing them, and Shadow of the Colossus twists that knife brilliantly. I love how that initial moment of awe and terror when you first see a beast is quickly replaced by curiosity surveying a creature and learning its nuanced movements and distinctive behaviors as you map out a path to the top make it feel like you exist inside of a nature documentary. Each of the 16 colossi are puzzles in and of themselves, and they ramp up from simple as you begin to learn the controls and mechanics, to deviously challenging and complex by the end. ![]() “But overall, the classic design of Shadow of the Colossus has stood the test of time without a trace of wear. Likewise, success in a few of the encounters relies on getting the colossus to stand in a very specific position, which can sometimes be a bit like trying to get a dog to stay in a bathtub. There are still a handful of minor nagging issues that exist: for instance, the scope of some of the battles and your close proximity to a giant, hairy colossus means that the camera will occasionally get lost in tufts of fur and obscure your view at a crucial moment. Combine all of this with a flexible photo mode and a handful of new Easter eggs and this remaster made me forget that I was playing a 13-year-old game. And the new control setup remaps the jump and grab buttons in a way that simply makes more sense than the strange original configuration. You can see all the way to the horizon while riding across the vast, somber planes, revealing a sense of scale hidden in the original due to short draw distances. The frame rate no longer buckles in the presence of a particularly massive colossus, and when you set it to performance mode on a PS4 Pro it even maintains 60 frames per second with minimal sacrifices in quality. “This remaster also does a fantastic job of fixing some of the problems of the 2005 original, while completely modernizing the entire experience to our 2018 standards. ![]()
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