You want to jump across – but if you do the wind will blow you off. But then there’s the mad dash across her wings, which are volatile, narrow platforms. For fear of the wind, you might spend almost all the fight clinging to her hair, moving in a crawl. It’s what we call a “friction”: a real, tactical, tactile, simple-yet-deep consideration for the player.Īvion is shaped to make the most of the wind. There’s a particle effect that helps back up that feeling, but it’s important that it’s not just an aesthetic effect, not just something happening in a QTE. It feels as if you’re operating with a powerful wind on you. If you jump while you’re on her, her body will move beneath you. She soars through the air with great speed. The fight is fair, because she’ll seldom take you by surprise: her movements are slow and weighty – appropriate given that she’s made of stone! Her body and orientation changes significantly with every turn, flap, and swoop. I believe Avion is the surface that moves in the most splendid ways.

If we want to learn anything, we have to look at these bodies’ movements in great detail. It comes to be fun by being challenging but fair, balancing simplicity and complexity. Individual colossi present us with variation in the way these surfaces move: they’ll distort, morph, tilt, vibrate, and sway. Shadows of the Colossus is about balancing and transporting your avatar around on moving surfaces.

Avion can teach us huge amounts about good design. Extraordinary things can happen when you fight her, and even more extraordinary things things will happen when you speedrun the battle. It’s zesty and generous, elegant and dangerous. Today we will examine one of the game’s finest moments: the fight with Avion. There’s no talk about the excellent gameplay and level design… They bang on about the story, the music, the art direction, the way the colossi flail when you kill them. And yet, from the way people talk about the game, you’d think that it wouldn’t make a difference. It’s one of the best games of all time, but it would be made worthless and insulting by such a change. Imagine, if you can bear to, a version of Shadow of the Colossus in which you interact with the colossi purely in quick time events.

Shadow of the colossus pc gameplay