Right. It's Myst without the puzzles, interrupted by boss battles. The fact that a generation of nerdy gamers spent half their lives trying to find out if there really was something more does not alter that. I'll defer for a moment, though, and say this: My experience with Shadow was sitting through an intolerably long cutscene, riding across nothing, hopping and climbing and doing other things that were entirely too dependent on timing and entirely not dependent enough on game mechanics, and then attempting to fight some big golem thing that not only meant me absolutely no harm, but that could kill me in two blows. And the learning curve - the lack of reward - the incredibly BAD camera tracking Made it a terrible gaming experience. Hated that game.
That it was. Know what I dig? Know what you do in Journey? Stuff. Not a lot of stuff. Very little stuff, in fact. But for not doing a lot of stuff, you also don't have to learn a lot of commands, figure out a lot of arbitrary shit, or die over and over and over again because you pressed square-circle up up instead of circle-square up up.
To be fair, the camera tracking and frame rate were awful in SotC, but so were most games on the PS2. It ain't far to compare the graphics to Journey, which came out seven years after. PS2 games had to take a different approach when they wanted atmosphere; pixels weren't just handed to the devs on a shiny SDK platter back then!
It definitely used way too many polygon landscapes when it could have gotten away with with a simple matte background. But, hey, my experience is extra clouded by an extra-terrible emulator that put horse-riding around 10 fps. Look at what you can get away with when you make things 2D!Yeah, but to be fair, Myst looked pretty dope. Okami was dope. Metroid was dope. All of them use less horsepower than SotC.
