

Playing this game back in the day was a revelation, a new twist on the open-world approach to video game design that hasn’t really been repeated or nodded to since.Ĭolossus in HD is similarly revelatory, but for entirely different reasons.

Our heroes are Wander and his horse Argo, who journey together through the largely empty landscape with the intent of bringing down the game’s colossal bosses, waking Wander’s lady-love from a magical sleep in the process. Shadow of the Colossus stands in contrast to Ico as a large, open world filled with enormous beings compared to the older game’s tight castle corridors and chambers.

As a bonus for North American gamers, this is a port of the European version of the game, which means that completing it unlocks a two-player cooperative mode (local only). The colors are more vibrant, the fine details in the game’s art design stand out better and the various visual effects are much more convincing. This isn’t a full-blown re-skin, but everything feels much sharper.
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While Ico is still very clearly a PS2-era game in its PS3 appearance, the high definition treatment very effectively makes it feel new and fresh once more. You can rescue her using the meager weapons Ico is equipped with, but there’s no defeating these creatures they always come back for more. They can’t harm our nimble hero - only a fall from a great height can do that - but they will grab Yorda and drag her off to a horrible end if she is left alone for too long. Our duo’s journey is complicated by the presence of shadow creatures throughout the castle. The game twists your typical platforming challenges with the addition of this second character Yorda is not nearly as capable as Ico is, rendering each of the rooms they pass through as a puzzle in which creating new routes is just as important as clearly environmental obstacles. It’s essentially a massive escort mission, as Ico’s journey involves leading a young captive girl named Yorda out of the castle to safety. Players step into the shoes of the titular young boy as he explores a large, abandoned fortress.

Ico is the older of the two, an action-platformer released in 2001, early in the PS2’s life. This pair doesn’t need to be remade, simply preserved. The games themselves are entirely unchanged, barring the technical upgrades, which is just fine. There’s some bonus behind-the-scenes video content too, but I couldn’t seem to find it on the game disc.
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Sony’s Ico & Shadow of the Colossus Collection HD brings the two titles to PlayStation 3 for the first time (older backwards-compatible consoles notwithstanding), adding a new 720p widescreen display to both, as well as 7.1 surround sound, a 3D mode and PlayStation Trophies. I’ve spent the past few weeks following through on the first part of that. You just thank your lucky stars that it’s your job to journey through these fantastic experiences once more and then tell everyone all over again how they shouldn’t be missed. How do you review games like Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, two relics of the PlayStation 2 era from Fumito Ueda that to this day stand among the best that the medium has yet seen.
