Each time I battled with the camera and controls, I imagined the creators of this new Colossus considering niche theories on restoration that you’d expect from a city zoning board trying to protect a historic building. This isn’t a restoration - the team isn’t simply retracing the lines and rejuvenating the colors - and yet it sets out, intentionally, to reproduce the source text, warts and all. Taken together, the two games exemplify the medium’s cyclical nature What a relief to play a game that demands neither more money nor time. In 2005, Shadow of the Colossus’ world was, compared to the colorful worlds of its contemporaries, solemn and lonely. Colossus’ emptiness feels commercially brave by today’s standards, when games of this size are stuffed with filler and filching: countless side quests and in-app purchases to recoup investment by bleeding players of their resources. On the other hand, Shadow of the Colossus’ focus - you have one goal: slay the beasts - stands in contrast with how modern games have changed, distancing themselves from their predecessors.
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The original’s bare-bones interface would rapidly be replaced by a decade of open-world games loaded with minimaps, health bars and countless on-screen prompts telling you precisely what to do, how to do it and when - only for that minimal interface to return to fashion again in the past year. On one hand, the two games, taken together, exemplify the medium’s cyclical nature. But even the latter, for all its purity, is imperfect: As Microsoft boasts about backward-compatible games on Xbox One, your favorite Xbox and Xbox 360 games will run better than they did before.Īre games disposable? Are they drafts that will be revised and revised?
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Are games disposable? Are they drafts that will be revised and revised, fulfilling some trend established by creators like George Lucas, who believe a story is timeless, but visuals, not so much? Is there a right way to preserve games? In recent years, we’ve seen high-definition re-releases, full remakes and backward compatibility on new consoles. If this is the only way people experience Shadow of the Colossus, that won’t be a sin against art, though it will raise questions among those of us who obsess over preservation. Ultimately, the reboot will, without question, expand the game’s audience, if for no other reason than Sony has pushed 70 million PS4s into homes and offices across the world, and this is the company’s big exclusive game of the season. If given a choice between the original and the remake, I can’t imagine that a young person, unfamiliar with or simply uninterested in game history, would choose the comparatively blurry classic. I suspect, in terms of accessibility, they may be right. Naturally, the company brass would assume a classic could be improved upon, or at least made more accessible, with a flashy paint job. This belief, that better graphics make better games, has for decades been central to big video game publishers it’s a belief that Sony itself extolled alongside the announcement of the PS4. There’s a conflict between what’s seen and what’s felt Where the original is drawn with straight lines and rough edges, a collection of empty valleys and barren caverns, the remake is lush and vibrant, brimming with detail, light trickling through branches, seafoam lapping against the shoreline. What appears to be non-essential to the original game - that is to say, what can be heavily modified or outright reimagined - is visual fidelity and graphical detail. Taken as a whole, we’re left with a conflict between what’s seen and what’s felt.Īs a result, the Shadow of the Colossus of 2018 makes a statement (intended or not) on what its creators deem fundamental, even foundational, to a video game. The scale of the land, the beasts, the emotions - it still stands above the majority of the competition. What’s stunning, today, is that Shadow of the Colossus retains that sense of inventiveness, magic and awe. Of course, this familiar “feeling” isn’t all bad. To call the quality-of-life improvements subtle would be an understatement. Even a slightly revised control scheme (no longer must you push two buttons to perform a simple dodge roll) feels anachronistic. The remake purposely retains the mechanical defects that were inescapable in the era of its predecessor. However, you still feel - in the stuffy controls, the fussy camera, the unforgivable usage of the Papyrus font - the Shadow of the Colossus of 2005.
This Shadow of the Colossus is its own uncanny thing
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