Finally got around to finishing this bugger. It was a diamond-in-the-rough find in a mom-and-pop used video game store in Newport a while back. I had been playing it at the pace of one colossus a month until recently I finally sat down and dropped the last four in quick succession.

It’s a beautiful game, and it definitely will be a citation for those in the “video games as art” camp, but it’s not flawless. The controls definitely could have been tighter, and the framerate dipped frequently. However, the “puzzles” in each fight are top-notch stuff, and I’m very impressed that they managed to keep almost all sixteen fights entirely unique. It’s games like this that have that proper software engineering shine–you come up with a core idea, then your gameplay elements, and then you build your art and interaction mechanics around it, and not the other way around. Then you iterate to refine it all down to something amazing. Sometimes developers get too caught up in a pretty picture or idea and forget to actually build a game. The magic really happens when you get a solid, immersive gameplay experience to enjoy the pretty pictures and soundtrack with, and this game delivers on all fronts.

To look at another example of excellent design, I was pleasantly surprised by the “hidden corners” there were in the world. They obviously put a lot of thought into where you are going to travel and where you won’t, and all you get to guide you is a simple beacon of light to point you in a single direction. I didn’t accidentally “stumble” onto any of the wrong lairs, and I suspect most players won’t because the game world is so intricately designed.

Sounds kind of frustrating to the modern gamer, doesn’t it? There’s no minimap, no big, pastel-colored arrow hovering over your objective, no signposts saying “Colossus this way!” That’s the beauty of it though–the whole progression, from travel to combat, is very laissez-faire. The player gets a few nudges in the right directions but that’s it. You don’t have autoaim holding your hand or play on rails to get the right approach. I believe an attentive gamer, when going back to a more “traditional” action-adventure game after this one, might have a more critical eye to these artificial elements, the things that give accessibility at the dear cost of immersion.

The impact of this game can be summed up in three simple words: advancement through regression. That is a wonderful thing.