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Thursday 21 February, 2008
GAMEPLAY
Only got two Colossi this time, mostly because the bird presented a step up in challenge: this one actually came close to killing me, and threw me off after I climbed on it - both more than once. It was the first colossus that wasn't effectively a puzzle - before the bird, once I figured out what was necessary, it was trivial for me to accomplish it. I also got a much better feel for the horse. Unlike most game vehicles, the horse in this game mostly steers itself. This is especially evident when riding through narrow paths - the horse will make the small adjustments necessary to navigate a crooked stone bridge on its own, and attempting to steer through them manually will only slow you down.
DESIGN
By description, Shadow of the Colossus at first seems to be a string of boss battles separated by games of hide-and-seek. However, the bosses are more like levels than boss battles, as their bodies constitute an environment which must be navigated in order to reach a goal point. A puzzle element precedes the core navigation which constitutes the meat of the game: reaching the navigable portion of any given Colossus' hide is not a simple matter of running up to its leg and jumping on. There is an automatic hint system, which has thus far delivered genuinely helpful advice after giving me a reasonable interval in which to figure things out for myself, not a trivial design accomplishment by all accounts.
I haven't mentioned the presentation side of things at all yet, but since it appears that from the sixth Colossus on finding the fight is no longer trivial, I have to in order to make a gameplay related point. Shadow of the Colossus was made to be a beautiful game, and it is, but the aesthetic chosen for this purpose was very realistic, and so has fallen to the common fate of all realistic games: the relentless march of technological advancement has dated it. Therefore, the forced delay between battles, which was designed to show off the world, is far less justifiable than it may have been at launch. Worse, if one gets lost, the only hint available is the sword's ability to point you towards the next target, which doesn't even work in every area (it requires sunlight).
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