Top five shadows in gaming

A new Ubisoft open world game has just arrived. Assassin’s Creed Shadows finally takes the stealth-action-RPG behemoth to feudal Japan after many years of community requests to do exactly that. The resulting implications are thus: a faint sense of nostalgia for the days when vast titles like this seemed to drop every three months, a kind of existential dread about where you’ll find the time to actually play it, and many browser tabs about how to find all 390 feathers or sea shanties or whatever doohickey this latest one torments the completionists with.

And listen, cards on the table, reviewing these games is a nightmare because they’re absolutely vast. So while we stall for time, here’s a list feature about the best shadows in gaming.

Taking the premise literally, which title has the most realistic, high-fidelity shadows? Games have become increasingly obsessed with ray tracing and its cooler older brother path tracing lately, so this category is hotly contested by the likes of Half Life 2’s recent RTX release, Black Myth Wukong, and Alan Wake 2, the latter two deploying path tracing for super-realistic light and shade.

But this one’s got to go to Cyberpunk. Particularly after its path tracing update, wandering around Night City isn’t just impressive, it’s enough to have you constantly touching your screen for reassurance that yes, you’re playing a videogame, everything’s fine.

Rumour is it took developer CD Projekt so long to make it because their slavish devotion to visual realism saw them create a 1:1 simulation of our known universe during production. Further unsubstantiated but highly credible speculation posits that during the game’s infamously buggy launch, our own universe and the simulated one accidentally flipped, and that’s why olive oil now costs £20 and Nvidia’s worth more than Amazon and Google.

It’s been well over a year now since that trailer dropped. GTA VI is your mate in the holiday WhatsApp group who reacts with a thumbs up to the first message detailing the plan, then goes radio silent ever after. Are they actually going to turn up? Have they paid? Both of these remain a perpetual mystery and over time you start to resent them for it. 

It’s Homer Simpson sliding back into the hedge. It’s the two floating cartoon eyes in the dark. Since December 2023 GTA VI has existed entirely in the shadows, watching on as we try to pretend we’re not all on constant tenterhooks for it to re-emerge.

Also, Rockstar’s games tend to set the technical standard for the rest of the industry for years to come so if you want to be a bit more literal then yes, its actual in-game shadows will probably look decent too.

Unquestionably, the greatest shadow that gaming has ever known is that of the Colossus. First released for PlayStation 2 in 2005 and then returning in HD glory to PS4 in 2018, Fumito Ueda’s incredible soft-touch storytelling, an awe-inspiring world where giant beasts roam and puzzle-like boss battle mechanics combine to form an inimitable, haunting, and - really, though - emotionally affecting experience.

If we’re talking actual shadows, it doesn’t get much more hair-on-end thrilling than standing in the world-swallowing shadow of one of this game’s titular colossi. It’s the only game we’ve played that made us feel almost unbearably guilty about ‘winning’ boss fights, and years before FromSoftware gained notoriety for presenting lore-rich worlds with zero exposition, Ueda’s Sony Japan studio pioneered that principle with masterful subtlety.

How this one surprised us all when it turned up in 2014 at the height of the open world RPG epidemic. “We’re making one too!” said Monolith and Warner Bros, to a reception of barely detectable nods and copy-paste press release news stories. “It’s set in Lord of the Rings!” Yep, ok mate. Have fun with that.

And then it arrived, marrying familiar staples like a massive world map, parkour and rhythmic third-person combat sequences to a life absorbing new mechanic called the Nemesis System. Here’s how it worked: there was an Orc army after you. The army had its own hierarchy, with individuals promoted when they killed you or replaced by a low-ranking rookie when you killed them. Lose to them and they get stronger, beat them and the whole army gets slightly weaker. Simple. Clear. Utterly compelling.

The stories it generated. The way we all babbled to each other about what happened when Gizmoth the Nose-Picker defeated us and then became immune to stab attacks. The hours in bed, awake, scheming, devising elaborate plans to take down characters who now felt impossibly real. It was so good that Warner actually had the system patented to prevent other games from pinching it.

As for the shadows, they were absolutely fine. This one’s all about the title, really.

And finally a word on an innovator who doesn’t get enough praise and adulation. Thief wasn’t the first stealth game when it arrived on PC in 1998, but it was the first that used light levels and noise as the basis of its stealth system. As you don the cowl and cosh of Garrett the master thief, you’re keeping a constant eye on where the safe, dark spaces are and the different surfaces underfoot. Looking Glass had no business making such a detailed system within the constraints of late Nineties tech.

Everyone from Metal Gear to Dishonored to – and this is really clever because we’ve brought the feature back full circle – Assassin’s Creed Shadows owes something to Thief: The Dark Project.  

We’ll get back to playing it now, promise. Review to follow.