I.

Out of a giant list of potential games I have sitting next to me, I figure it’s best to walk back in time, starting with the Playstation 2. The last console I played prior to turning 18.

I opted to play the original version of Shadow of the Colossus because I have never played the remake. Maybe another post is warranted to see which of my criticisms change on trying it.

When playing SotC, two things stand out: traversing the large and long spaces between the Colossi, and the actual encounters with the Colossi. The game’s entire mechanical universe folded into these two salient categories of what I did as a player.

I don’t think anyone will argue against the Colossi as the intended primary element of the game. After all, what kind of game would it even be if you weren’t bashing your sword into something?¹

But it is interesting just how much crossing terrain encompasses the game’s playing time. I’d say at least half, if not more. Which means Wander-ing around is as much a main component of the playable experience as fighting the Colossi, intended or not.

This certainly isn’t a unique thing today, as modern games are expected to present massive worlds drowning in ‘content’ regardless of anything else about the game.

Nor was it terribly unique back then if you only looked at the growing market of PC games in which, also continuing today, it became a gimmick to justify sales of Nvidia hardware.

Whether a technical product of the time, the economics of console games, or just a lack of desire to push on certain design boundaries, I found SotC doing a poor job with these vast sections of maneuvering and movement and ended up bored during much of it.

II.

I could speculate a great deal about why people love doing things like camping, adventuring, and hiking (the last of which I used to do quite a lot of day-length trips). It is at least clear that they’re a fully embodied experience.²

Games as they exist today are not the “feelys” of Brave New World, for which I’ll say THANK GOD, but that directly implies that they have to mechanically present as something else in order to represent another concept like any medium.

You’re only granted up to three of the primary senses in games, and one of them has always been lagging far behind the others (touch, and yes, I know VR exists now, but have you played most of those games? They barely demand a Macarena out of you. And if you can imagine how we were all forced to do that back in grade school, you can probably imagine how uninspired that amount of motion gets after all of two seconds…)

So where does that leave things? Visuals and audio. Or one, or neither, depending on you and the game’s design inclinations and accessibility settings.

What this means is that, similar (definitely not the same as) to film, the minimum these kinds of gameplay elements can try to be in order to not end up as a bunch of filler is to become a kind of moving, atmospheric painting.

Unless you’re making a walking simulator, in which case, make that and you’re done. You’re welcome.

Video games are never going to be realistic or immersive. Nor should they be. That’s real life.

So what did a lot of games tend to do? One answer is ‘not much’. This is what SotC does.

Argo (the horse) has a design element regarding how you control movement, but it doesn’t solve much of the problem with dull looking landscapes and a lot of annoying, lengthy running around to find the next arena.³

Which begs the question… what stands in contrast to that?

To take one modern example: Elden Ring.

III.

Yes, yes, this is a review of SotC, which I’ll get back to in a moment. But let me explain why Elden Ring does better to make it clear why SotC doesn’t work as well.

There’s no easy words that come to mind for me to use here, so I’ll just say that it’s an interplay between detail maximalism/minimalism and tightness/expansiveness.

SotC sits toward both the minimal and expansive direction. i.e. vast and empty.

Elden Ring hovers toward the maximal side and maybe midway between tightness/expansiveness.

So when I say minimal, I don’t mean good application of the philosophical notion of minimal. I mean stripped down, corporate, gray box IKEA. There’s hardly anything there.

I haven’t read every interview with Team ICO, but obviously some aspects outlined by Director Fumito Ueda and what the team decided resulted in how SotC came to be what it is in terms of the open spaces along with limitations of the technology at the time (although I’m always a little suspect of the latter line of reasoning if you see both what some teams did back then and what people have figured out they can do today… I’d sooner blame economic incentives than technical knowledge, but you never know).

To contrast against Elden Ring, you, of your own volition, can choose to climb to a great many places in the game’s world “merely” to see what was clearly designed for you to be impressed by the camera’s perspective on its own merit. To the point that it was a little too on the nose that the game includes paintings of locations in the game for you to find for an additional reward (more on this later).

Why Elden Ring can capture a vista and SotC only did for a few cases I would argue comes down to this unappealing kind of minimalism. Big, open, empty space without much to anchor your eyes against.

I don’t know much about Geomorphology or Ecology, but I can say that without sufficient differentiation in the distance, things tend to look a little too similar, and lack of contrasting shape leads to disinterest, and disinterest translates to “Why bother?”.

This isn’t helped either by the fact that the PS2 original of SotC has some really washed out colors and almost blinding lighting effects. It’s a whole lot of barely green blending with the brown and gray. I’ll concede that the lighting aesthetics at least relate to the gameplay, but… it is a hard game to look at after all these years. I will admit that some of this is from playing on an LED TV rather than the CRTs of old (which were still typical of that console era⁴).

IV.

Elden Ring moves along that multi-dimensional space to something far, far more compelling and interesting. But there’s still those in-game paintings…

Another modern comparison, if only because I’ve been replaying it with my daughter:⁵ Zelda (Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom).

Like Elden Ring, there’s some very eye-catching landscape and structure in the new Zelda games that just pulls your attention toward it (if we exclude the depths which I think encounters some of the same problems as SotC, but not nearly as bad).

Which brings me to what happens when you go too far toward maximalism, and what Zelda (and that bit of Elden Ring) does to design open spaces: put an extra sub-game on top of it. i.e. those damn KOROKS.

Every single little point of interest in the game not related to some quest has a Korok in it. This isn’t a spoiler because you can predict this pattern in either game after the first few forays onto a hilltop or exploring a little copse in the nearby woods.

The paintings in Elden Ring at least have the subtlety to be something a bit more like a puzzle. “I swear I’ve seen this before. Something about it just looks so familiar.”

But Zelda just dampens the whole thing by putting these annoying creatures in your face. The sub-game of finding the Koroks completely displaces the intrinsically rewarding game of making your way around the landscape and finding those gorgeous vistas. It just cannot be psychologically taken on its own anymore when the Korok becomes the external reward. Every. Single. Time.

You might argue that Elden Ring sometimes gives you items when you find interesting locations in the game. And often times even before you get an item there’s a boss that will murder you 20 times, and then you know what the real reward was (fulfilling your BDSM fetish, as all of us Souls players know). The point is that it’s not guaranteed to be any one thing or any thing at all.

The Koroks in Zelda are not a surprise. They are a given. You know the deal the first handful of times you climb somewhere. Yep, there’s another one. Cool, here’s your rock in the face. Guess I can look forward to more of this collect-a-thon in order to have to manage my weapons slightly less (another mechanic in the new Zelda games that I’m very mixed about).

VI.

Back on SotC, you meander your way through the world, especially with the later Colossi that exist farther out from the world’s hub space, and eventually you reach what you actually care about, but I certainly did not care about any of that space in between. I’ve forgotten it by the time I have to set off from the hub again to the next boss.

In all of the mentioned games, traversing space is not a small or ‘liminal’ aspect of the game. It is a core portion of the game’s overall experience and playtime. To design as if the ‘real’ game (e.g. the Colossi) will smooth over what amounts to a pretty mediocre set piece is to ignore what’s really going on in your design.

Which brings this all around: what exactly could have been different?

Using earlier terminology, at least for SotC, a ‘tighter’ world at a minimum. In other words I think the world was simply much bigger than it really needed to be.

I get that maybe that wouldn’t have made sense with the narrative of the game (that the Colossi would have needed a lot of space to roam… except some of their arenas are wildly small compared to the overall space of the world, so…). Except it just isn’t that interesting to have a giant world if it isn’t designed with contrast (read: natural pull) to go there.

Which does not mean that the world should simply be filled with junk all over. Only that it should look like anything is different. It does risk turning into a kind of Disneyland arrangement (which is another popular way to generate more contrast over a world), but without adding all that differentiation in color, shape, etc., the world could have simply been made smaller. Many games just do not need to be so damn big.

But if you’re going to make it big, then it better compel you to go through the world.

Conclusion

In the end, I didn’t finish the replay. Which is a shame because I do fondly remember Shadow of the Colossus as a game that left an impression on me. I didn’t have it in me to keep up the main game loop on top of long bouts of running over a big map, often to get slightly confused about where to go and how everything looked the same no matter where I turned.

“It’s a product of it’s time” may be the refrain for most of the games I plan to revisit, especially in this middling era of 3D console games. A lot of inspired intention, but ultimately executed better in later eras of gaming.