Tears of the Kingdom is saving me from my checklist obsession

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdomjust like its predecessor Breath of the Wild, is a huge game packed with an incredible amount of things to do. It’s supposed to be overwhelming — but in a twist, it’s actually helping me break one of my most compulsive habits.

I’m busy. Not abnormal – probably no more than you are – but life just fills up, you know? I have a to-do list for work and a to-do list for everything that doesn’t work. I have very little time for myself and a million things I want to do with it; I have huge lists of things to watch, read, and play that I will never keep track of. I have apps for logging movies and TV and games and books. I feel compelled to optimize. I’m min-maxing my free time.

Some of these habits are bred through gaming. Think of the sprawling open-world games that break up their massive maps and epic stories into a digestible structure of objectives, checklists, and collectibles. (My friend calls them “UbiJobs” after the context of the latest Assassin’s Creed games.) My beloved World of Warcraft is basically an infinite to-do list in the form of a video game. It can feel like work, but it’s also fulfilling, and it gives you a sense of achievement and mastery – so you try in life. The designers of gamified apps for micromanaging everything from spending money to watching movies have certainly learned from this design school as well.

With me, the habit of making a checklist of everything started with consuming games that do not encourage appearance. Until recently it was the big game in my life Octopath Traveler 2, a classic RPG with eight parallel storylines that is light on sub-goals and tracking systems, and leaves a lot of freedom to the player in how to approach it, aside from the need to keep up with the leveling curve. Still, I found myself making lists for it in my notes app: an optimized order to tackle the quests, dungeons sorted by recommended level, items to hunt, and so on.

None of this bodes well for my time with The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. But, just like I did six years ago with Breath of the WildI’m amazed at how much the game encourages free-form, organic play, real exploration, and real adventure.

In the evening I fire it up with maybe two or three goals in mind – mop up some shrines I’ve seen, move on to the next temple, explore a new part of the depths. Three hours later, I’m only halfway to my first goal, having had several surprising adventures and made several surprising discoveries along the way. I’ve done things I didn’t have on any list: shoot down a Battle Talus disguised as a Bokoblin post (and turn its heart into a hammer), enter a skydiving competition, chase fragments of shooting stars, clean up stuffed seals. I’ve followed my nose, playing in a naturally investigative, experimental, free style, and haven’t worried about progressing. I’ve allowed one side road (like exploring a cave) to meander delightfully into another (like building a vehicle to propel a stranded Korok to its friend), taking me far off the planned route strayed. I have just been present in the amazing world that Nintendo has created. As hectic and fun as Tears of the Kingdom you could actually call it mindful.

Image: Nintendo EPD/Nintendo

How did the Nintendo team led by Eiji Aonuma and Hidemaro Fujibayashi do this? I wish I knew – like many game designers, I’m sure. Breath of the Wild is often referred to as influential, but over the past six years there has been a notable lack of games capable of imitating it, especially in this regard. Few open-world AAA games can successfully hide the spreadsheets they’re built on. If it were easy, we’d have more games that could make us feel this way. But there are a few clues.

Tears of the KingdomThe world map of the world feels effortlessly natural, but it’s designed with a relentless focus on sightlines: there’s always a view, and within that view, there’s always something to look at. This is accompanied by a visual design that emphasizes readability from a distance, with clear silhouettes and colorful highlights to grab attention. With all its clever physics systems, it feels like a teeming, living world, but it’s just as important that it looks like it too, which is where the meticulous craftsmanship of Nintendo’s artists comes into play. Breath of the Wildand all this is doubly emphasized by the amazing verticality of Tears of the Kingdom‘s tripartite world of surface, sky and cavernous depths.

Then there is the variety of that world and the level of craftsmanship in its construction. Unlike so many open-world games, this one doesn’t feel like a landscape populated by a box of cookie content types. Each enemy encampment, minigame or cave system is unique and seems to grow organically out of the landscape: those Bokoblins wheeling a treasure chest across the prairie in a cart look like they have somewhere to go. I wonder what they’re carrying? Why is that sky island shaped like a giant spiral? You are drawn to these sights not by a map marker, but because they look interesting; you’ve never seen one like it That for. Even in this context Tears of the KingdomThe grindiest collectathons, like the Korok seeds, don’t present themselves as a to-do list, because they ace (in the hundreds!) engagements.

Image: Nintendo EPD/Nintendo

The new cave systems are a brilliant example of how Tears of the Kingdom constantly leads you astray. Their inviting entrances aren’t portals to mini-dungeons that will dump you back at the start upon completion. Instead, they lead you down winding underground paths, mostly away from wherever you went. At the end you climb to the top of a new hill, with a new view and new things to investigate.

If you want to delve further into Tears of the Kingdom, the Spartan Pro interface removes most HUD elements. In its standard form, Tears offers a lot of information – but other than one pulsating quest marker on the minimap, it’s not all about what to do next. There are map pins that you placed yourself (perhaps using your telescope to scan the landscape), there are the time, the weather, the temperature, your health, your abilities and your moving coordinates. The quest tracker, meanwhile, is fairly rudimentary and only visible in the menu.

This tells you something Tears of the Kingdomthe developers find important: where are you, what are the conditions and what tools do you have at your disposal. Not what you should do. That, as with so much in this beautiful, unpredictable engine of discovery, is up to you. Through their artistry and playfulness, the developers have given me permission to stop optimizing, stop performing, stop ticking things off my checklists, and just experience the game they’ve created.