Back in 2005, a certain game called "Shadow of the Colossus" came out on the PS2. It broke down the formula of traditional action-adventure games such as "The Legend of Zelda" into just two gaming concepts: world exploration and boss battles. No towns, no sidequests, very limited storyline, barely any dialog, and only a handful of characters. It was an incredible gaming experience, not perfect*, but still cited as one of the few true examples of video games that are works of art. Sadly nobody ever cites "Wind Waker" or "Yoshi's Island", despite both being equally as beautiful and more fun, but that's not really the point. I saw "Lost in Shadow", with its stark emptiness, single-minded platforming gameplay, and even its pretty blatant copying of "Shadow of the Colossus"'s art style as another entry in the "art games" category. Plus the central idea was incredibly interesting.
Unfortunately, I gotta admit this one is one is pretty mixed. The basic gameplay works, the puzzles are okay enough, and the art style is impressive, but the story is so poorly explained it completely blows the experience. There is no satisfying ending tying up the game's mysteries. And worse, this game is too long, way too long. Oh well... It was fun at least.
The game begins in "Shadow of the Colossus" fashion with no explanation for anything that's going on. A young boy is captured by some robot in a cloak and is stuck on a pedestal at the top of a giant tower. His soul is ripped out and turned into a shadow, then the robot throws him off the side. You land on the ground as the shadow of the boy, and now have to climb up the entire giant tower to get your body back. What is this tower? I don't know. Who is the boy? I don't know. What's the deal with the robot dude? Don't know! The only character that is ever named is a Companion Fairy who works for the robot, Spangle. There is not a single line of dialog in the entire game. What exposition you get is from the occasional cutscene and small bits of purple haze scattered around the world called "Memories" that contain a bit of text.
Gameplay more or less is regular "Super "Mario Bros" 2D platforming. You jump up on the shadows of objects in the gameworld, fight enemies with a small sword, and solve basic puzzles involving switches. There are some fifty or so levels, but you can't simply run to the end. No, first you must uncover three magic Keys throughout the level so that you can leave. Naturally this causes about a quarter of the game to be backtracking, since you'll inevitably miss a key pretty much every level. There's RPG leveling up as well, which only really seem to boost your attacking strength. By finding memories, you boost a cryptic stat called "weight" - that's actually your health. You can grow all the way up to twenty-one grams, which is thought to be the actual weight of the human soul according to early 20th century pseudoscience**.
Since the levels are convoluted with movement in all directions, it is often very difficult to tell what falls actually lead to bottomless pits and which lead to the Keys. You only lose a bit of health from falling off, but the enemies in the level come back. However, the enemies are easily the most pressing issue in the game, causing 99% of deaths. Combat is stiff, with your attacks limited to just a three part combo. You can't run and swing your sword, making things ever harder. Plus enemies almost always have a longer reach than you - and can block, which you can't. The WORST part however, is when enemies are standing over ladders, because for whatever reason the controls go a bit crazy when you're next to a ladder, leaving you helpless if you try to climb up. Then they knock you down and you have to climb back up only to get hit again. As for the other traps, its all basic video game fair: spinning blades, fire walls, buzzsaws, and Thwomps.
Most of the game is honestly really simple Zelda puzzles, stuff that rarely becomes much of a problem. Of course, I don't mind having really easy puzzles, and a few moments of this game really had me stumped. If it only were a few hours shorter. The core gameplay wasn't perfect, but it passed, and was fun enough.
Really for most of the game, the entire shadow mechanic is purely a visual effect, but its an impressive one at least. Your character is able to run along straight lines as the background falls back in depth, meaning that he walks across multiple layers going far and close to the camera. A really cool effect is when the "wall" that your character is running across is actually the floor of the real world. Suddenly its an mindbending twist of your expectations. If you ignore your character's shadow, it often appears that there is no characters at all on-screen, making the already stark game look at much more empty. You learn to ignore the real details, and instead focus upon only the shadows, meaning that you often miss the many cool details of the game world, such as the fact that you can find yourself walking across a power line's shadow. Unfortunately most of the game is just the same factory imagery and the entire game just runs together for me. None of the "worlds" are particularly distinct, its all just the same dry empty world, with the same silly fog effect in front of the camera the entire time. Another thing you can do is to change the lighting angle so as to move the platforms you're standing on, but this feature of gameplay is honestly underused. Instead the game seems to prefer old cliches like floating platforms.
Halfway through the game you do gain an ability that let's you turn into a white ghost character that can walk in the real world briefly. This makes the game infinitely more interesting, since now it has some classic Zelda twin worlds gameplay. Suddenly the foreground real world structures are no longer merely scenery but actually an explorable location. Unfortunately the game mostly uses this innovation for brain-dead block puzzles. My favorite levels by far are the ones where you backtrack in the real world over spots where you traveled as a shadow. Its the closest I know of turning M.C. Escher's "Relativity" into a gameplay feature. The larger the 3D areas of exploration, the more exciting the game is, since previously you've been limited to just two planes of motion. The main problem with this mechanic is that you have absolutely no camera control of any kind.
The only major break-up between the regular gameplay is a small portals that litter the levels that look like the album cover to Metalica's Death Magnetic. These take you to small shadow worlds where you have to climb through a short obstacle course to find the ending. It isn't that different form regular gameplay. Here you can rotate the world to change things up. However, rotating is a horrible mechanic, since you only have a straight-on perspective of the objects you're standing on. There's no way to know what kind of effect it will have, so it can only be a trial and error puzzle. Half the time your character gets crushed by the shadow. Luckily the game doesn't punish your health for this. Basically the Death Magnetic puzzles are only good for mid-level save points, nothing more.
One of my favorite parts of this game are the times that a giant shadow chases after you. This creature is a ball of black evil with arms stretching out in all directions. You can't fight it, you can't even stand near it without getting hurt. So you just have to run as fast as you can to escape this horrible nightmare being. By the way, I actually have had nightmares about this creature - it always eats me in the end. It doesn't even do that much damage to you, but the very presentation forces me to fall into a mad panic to escape.
As for the whole game experience, its way too drawn out. The tower you climb isn't that bad, only fifty-five floors, and levels often encompass more than one floor. But when you reach the top, the game suddenly decides that instead of finding your body, you have to collect six items scattered across the tower in an annoying fetch quest worthy of comparison to the Triumph Forks portion of "Wind Waker". Then, when you've done that, you have to climb the tower's shadow. Then you have another three levels in some garden. THEN you finally fight the final boss - which is also the only boss. By that point you won't care because you just want the game to END END END END, WHY WON'T YOU END?? What the heck is all this? The game rightfully should be over when you reach the top of the tower, or at least the shadow tower. It just keeps on going for no reason. The last few levels are by far the best too, but the pacing ruins them. Even the seemingly endless "Persona 3" finally concluded when you reached the top of the tower.
For whatever reason I'm finding lately that games that include towers as their main location always seem to go on too long. What's with that?
Worse the game never actually explains much of anything. You never find out what the deal with the robot dude is, aside from his identity as the master of the tower. You do find out that he turned you into a shadow to deal with the giant shadow monster, but you never get revenge on him. There is a good twist, but I won't actually tell you what it is because I'm a horrible evil person. As for the robot dude, he just throws your body back to you when you beat the final boss and you kinda just... go home. The game ends with a bizarre shot showing that the entire world is full of more Hell Towers, meaning... something. I have no idea. "Shadow of the Colossus" had an understated storyline, but it all made sense. Here's a tip game devs, if you make your game hours longer than it needs to be, make sure your ending is properly satisfying. And the final boss battle is such a generic video game boss that its almost too painful to describe. Hudson did not even try to use their shadow concept there in any way, which is frankly sad.
"Lost in Shadow" was a game I really wanted to recommend, but once again I've found a game that just doesn't quite work. So then what's the point? If this game was three hours shorter, I'd be glowing here. But the way it is now, I'm left with nothing. The shadow concept I feel was wasted on a "Shadow of the Colossus" wanna-be, which ironically was the whole reason that I bought this game in first place. I feel as though this game could have been so much more if only it had a living world with living people inhabiting it. Why did the tower have to be empty? Why couldn't the little shadow boy have explored, say, a town with people, animals, and cars in it. I know the whole point Hudson was making here was a feeling of isolation, right down to the lack of music aside from the wonderful main theme. "Lost in Shadow" is a stark land and the atmosphere is frightening, but those details shouldn't come at the expense of world building or storyline. There are a lot of good ideas, the visual style is refreshing, but... that's it. I don't think that's enough.
Ultimately I'm forced to conclude that "Lost in Shadow" would have worked better as a dual-worlds mechanic in a Zelda game. But most games would do better if they were Zelda games.
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* By "not perfect" I'm talking about that horrible horse. Yeah, I know a lot of people liked him, but I sure did not. I hated that thing! It would never run in a straight line, it just constantly tore left and right, perhaps as a foolhardy attempt at realism. This creature must be Epona's evil twin. It was the worst in tight canyons, where that evil horse seemed to be magnetically pulled towards the walls. I don't think there was a single rock in that entire game that I didn't crash into. That horse made exploring the game world a wretched experience, the hateful thing.
** Dr. Duncan MacDougall was the originator of the twenty-one grams theory, which he discovered by weighing a handful of TB patients before and after their death and finding an average of twenty-grams difference. Later experiments "proved" that dogs do not have a soul, because their weight did not change. Its suspected that Dr. MacDougall poisoned the canines to get his test results. Even at the time it was thought that Dr. MacDougall's theory was complete bunk, with the change of weight coming merely from the body sweating, which dogs don't do. Under any circumstances, his sample size was ridiculously small, and Dr. MacDougall's scale wasn't even that well calibrated in the first place, so I think we can be sure that we're not carrying twenty-one extra grams of soul juice.
And its obviously fake because everybody knows that dogs have souls. Don't know about people.
Yeah, I hated that horse too, and the exploration in the game was a load of trash even if you subtract the horse from the equation.
ReplyDeletei think they should have translated the dialogue in shadow of the colossus into english,they didn't talk much so it wouldn't be very hard.
ReplyDeleteThe game seems to borrow more from Ico than SotC. I was thinking of picking it up after seeing general reactions, but it looks like I'm better off waiting for that Ico and SotC collection to come out on PS3 (and of course The Last Guardian, but it was delayed 'till later this year).
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