Shadow of the Colossus review

What do we call Shadow of the Colossus, the soup-to-nuts update of Fumito Ueda’s 2005 masterpiece of the same name: a reboot, a remaster, a remake? The project from Austin, Texas-based Bluepoint Games warrants all of those labels on paper, at least. In action, though, this Colossus is very much its own uncanny thing. Like dreaming about a childhood vacation, it feels real, and yet, slightly askew.

Sure, the Shadow of the Colossus of 2018 isn’t technically the same as the Shadow of the Colossus of 2005, but it comes so close — what’s the harm of preferring the newer, prettier version?

Image: Polygon

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The story, fairy tale-like in its concision, hasn’t changed. A young man wishes to save a slain maiden from her cursed fate, so he sets off on horseback to a forbidden land. Within a decrepit castle, the young man finds a mysterious being with the power to revive the dead. Man and spirit make an agreement: In exchange for the maiden’s resurrection, the man must kill the kingdom’s lonely inhabitants, 16 ancient colossi — some as tall as towers, others as powerful as battering rams.

Bluepoint Games/Sony Interactive Entertainment

As you ride into this quest, you immediately see a video game from 2018. On a PlayStation 4 Pro, you can play with a silky frame rate that complements the wind rushing through valleys covered in tall grass and the viney hair of the humongous beasts. Or you can opt for a lower frame rate, with a resolution suitable for a new 4K HDR TV.

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. The remake purposely retains the mechanical defects that were inescapable in the era of its predecessor. Even a slightly revised control scheme (no longer must you push two buttons to perform a simple dodge roll) feels anachronistic. To call the quality-of-life improvements subtle would be an understatement. Of course, this familiar “feeling” isn’t all bad. Far from it, in fact. What’s stunning, today, is that Shadow of the Colossus retains that sense of inventiveness, magic and awe. The scale of the land, the beasts, the emotions — it still stands above the majority of the competition.

Taken as a whole, we’re left with a conflict between what’s seen and what’s felt.

As 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. 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. 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.

Bluepoint Games/Sony Interactive Entertainment

Comparing the two versions is like comparing paintings of the same object, one done through the lens of impressionism, the other through realism. Like an impressionist work, the original Shadow of the Colossus is a study in light; its colossi are silhouettes, their hair drawn with thousands of thin but artificial brushstrokes, blurry with movement. The Shadow of the Colossus of 2018 is tangible, lived in. The characters feel less like flagrant metaphor, and more like living beasts. The art calls to mind the fantasy epics of the 1980s, like The Neverending Story and The Dark Crystal.

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. Naturally, the company brass would assume a classic could be improved upon, or at least made more accessible, with a flashy paint job. I suspect, in terms of accessibility, they may be right. 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. 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 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. 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. 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.

Bluepoint Games/Sony Interactive Entertainment

Whatever the case, I’m glad this oddity exists, along with all the other strange remakes, reboots and remasters. I think the two games, 2005 and 2018, work best as a pair, a rare creative experiment in which they don’t merely serve as art, but as criticism of the industry during the years between their release. (The original Shadow of the Colossus can be played on a PS4 via the PlayStation Now streaming service, although it’s a PlayStation 3 HD upgrade of the PlayStation 2 original.)

On one hand, the two games, taken together, exemplify the medium’s cyclical nature. What’s old is new again. 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 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. 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. In 2005, Shadow of the Colossus’ world was, compared to the colorful worlds of its contemporaries, solemn and lonely. In 2018, it’s like a quiet vacation. What a relief to play a game that demands neither more money nor time.

Bluepoint Games/Sony Interactive Entertainment

It’s easy to get lost in these thoughts playing Colossus, particularly on the long rides to battle colossi. As the navigational sword steers you down the wrong path for the umpteenth time, leading to a long ride back from a dead end, the mind wonders about the philosophical conversations had at Bluepoint Games about this weird object. As far as I can tell, it doesn’t have an obvious precedent in art other than, say Gus Van Sant’s bizarre shot-for-shot recreation of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, a notorious critical and commercial flop.

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. 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. How much of the bad stuff must be kept? Where a classic building often retains the exterior, the answer for a classic game appears to be all interior.

Perhaps the precedent I’m vainly searching for is literary translation, where the translator’s responsibility is to accurately capture the feeling of the text. There’s a balance at play between changing something as essential as the language of the text, while maintaining the integrity of the original author’s intent. One-to-one translation is impossible; the translator inevitably informs the translation. There’s a beauty to these lenses, which can be additive — that’s why a new translation of Homer or Proust can inspire celebration in certain circles.

Bluepoint Games/Sony Interactive Entertainment

And that’s where I land with this Shadow of the Colossus. I’ve come to appreciate the realistic look of Colossus, which felt crass at first, but has over time expressed a warmth that I never quite felt from its predecessor. But it’s still respectful, recognizing that, however great the visuals, the magic is under the surface.

In 2013, after the PS4’s unveiling, critic John Teti wrote this of Sony’s obsession with graphical horsepower:

Creativity thrives under limitations. People who love games understand this implicitly, since the best players find the most creative ways to succeed within the confines of the rules. The Great Train Robbery is a masterpiece not in spite of its limitations but because of them. [...] Expanding the technological capabilities of our game machines is not inherently bad, but treating new tech as a magic bullet is a self-destructive delusion (if a familiar one). The reason that so many games suck is not because the technology is too modest. The reason that so many games suck is because so many games suck. Making art is hard. No microchip changes that.

What better evidence of this than the fact that, five years later, Sony’s big PlayStation exclusive of the season is this recreation of a PS2 classic. As wonderful a game as this is, the lesson mustn’t be that we need more games that look like this Colossus — rather, that we need games that feel like it: a decade later, pushing against what we expect from games, warts and all.

Shadow of the Colossus was reviewed using final “retail” PS4 and download codes provided by Sony Interactive Entertainment. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here. All screenshots in this review were captured on a PS4 Pro, using the game’s Performance setting.