Shadow of the Colossus’ remake has me pondering the convenience of modern game design

destructoid.com:

After over a year of the physical copy of the Shadow of the Colossus remake sitting on my shelf, I finally started playing it. I could immediately see why it was a classic — it’s simple but elegant, has some cool lore, and I can absolutely understand what made it so revolutionary at its time. But I’d also be lying if I said it felt amazing to play right from the start.

Just for some context, I haven’t really played many games that came out before 2010, so even playing the remake, the controls are much jankier than I’m used to. In the first hour, that was my biggest point of contention, and let’s just say the gamer rage took over me at some points.

Of course, as I pushed through another hour, I slowly acclimated to everything, and settled into a rhythm. That’s something I can really appreciate about Shadow of the Colossus as an older game — it makes me slow down in ways that modern games do not.

I was not prepared for how much of this game would be waiting — waiting for Agro to slowly canter where I wanted him to go, waiting for the Colossus to enter its attack animation so I could jump aboard, waiting for the Colossus to stop trying to shake me off so I could stab it; you get the idea. Whereas more recent releases seem to throw as much at me as they can to hold my interest, Shadow feels really empty and minimal, and I mean that in a good way.

Naturally, I got to talking with my roommate about my frustrations with the game, which led to a discussion about older games in general. As a gamer of a younger generation (my first console, ironically, was the PS2), I often hear people talk about how much harder games used to be back in the day. The more extreme gamers even imply that the gamers of today have gone soft, because