Vivid Watercolor Masterpiece ’Okami’ Is Back For Modern Consoles—and as Stirring as Ever
More than a decade later, the thing I most remember about Okami is how color follows you wherever you go. Released in 2006, by the now-defunct Clover Studios, the game starred a wolf-god named Amaterasu in a vibrant world inspired by Japanese ink wash painting. The folkoric Japanese landscape Ameratsu finds herself in, though, is dying—empty and colorless. The eight-headed demon Orochi has been unsealed to wreak havoc, and in doing so he has turned everything literally black and white; the world is effectively a painting with its hues all gone.
That color comes flooding back when you help the people of Japan fight Orochi. It bursts forth from Amaterasu—an incarnation of the Shinto goddess of the sun, an avatar of life and light—and fills the landscape outward. Flowers erupt from the ground. Okami's pastoral landscape sings and becomes new with each victory, each step made against the malingering darkness. It's as potent an image of renewal and redemption as I've ever seen, one of the only moments in any game to stir the religious parts of me.
Now, after a lengthy absence, Okami itself has been renewed, updated to run on modern consoles and the PC. For a game that only sold around 200,000 copies at launch, released only months before the studio that made it collapsed, it's a well-deserved resurrection. Okami deserves a place in the modern landscape; however, its return is more than a commercial boon. Meditative and warm, dedicated to an uncomplicated belief in the beauty of the natural world and the power of people to make the world better, the game is a balm—an emotional corrective in a time of upheaval.
