Scratch that - two words will do: giant killing. You could distil the entire game into a sentence. Anything to be able to play something this good.Īnd yet, Shadow of the Colossus is easily one of the most straightforward videogames imaginable so refined is its vision. Stuck in a whimsical state of mind like this, it seems entirely worth the pain of slogging through 14 identical corridor-based FPSs, seven stealth-me-do's, and 11 pimp-my-ride-a-go-go's. Cutting to the chase really isn't that easy when you're staring wide-eyed into the middle distance lost in the memory of what just played out on the big screen TV you bought to enjoy games like Shadow of the Colossus in all their utterly magisterial glory. The cursor blinks irritatedly at you with the rhythm of impatient drumming fingers, but you lose focus. Sony Interactive Entertainment provided GamesBeat with a copy for the purpose of this review.It's hard to know exactly where to start when you've just spent the last two days playing your favourite game of the entire year. Shadow of the Colossus launches February 6 on PlayStation 4 for $40. But, more than anything, I’m just happy to play it again. I hope that more people get the chance to play it now and that it goes on to inspire a generation of indie developers. We’re lucky to live in a world with Shadow of the Colossus. I miss that ethereal look even if the new game is technically marvelous. Where the world once felt like a dream, the remake gives everything a crisp, clean look. This isn’t a major problem, but I think Bluepoint lost something special about Shadow of the Colossus during its transition. I didn’t notice them until some fans pointed them out during a stream. It made the horse smarter and easier to mount. And it really is stunning.īluepoint fixed the bow so that it is useful now. Anytime you ride past the vista overseeing the waterfalls.īluepoint reworked the visuals into something that looks modern and also supports the power of the PS4 Pro. The moment that the flying colors first take you into the air as the wind rips through your hair and the monster’s feathers while the musical score changes to match the change in your altitude. The first time you walk your tiny hero alongside one of the beasts and get a sense of the scale. The first time you ride your horse across a field. I’m trying to pick a single moment from my time with Shadow of the Colossus to demonstrate its beauty, but it is brimming with examples. It doesn’t have that endlessly replayable loop that you find in a lot of open-world games today.įor a time, however, Shadow of the Colossus made us think that the biggest publishers were going to pour their time and money into cinematic action-adventures that were simultaneously thoughtful and introspective. 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.
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