Nintendo is just daring to break us The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.
I had a lot of questions about a recent hands-on demo with the upcoming open world adventure – How much has Hyrule changed? What role will the Zonai tribe play? Where the hell has Tingle been? — but my overriding curiosity was this: what did Nintendo itself learn from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild? What principles did it credit the game’s massive success to, and what principles did it build upon in the sequel? It turns out that based on 90 minutes of what promises to be a huge game, Nintendo really enjoyed it Breath of the Wildtendency to joyfully spiral out of control. And the company is even happier to tolerate chaos in it Tears of the Kingdom.
A quick note about me: I can be a bit of a leprechaun. If a game allows me to look behind the curtain, I will do so immediately. If a game promises me freedom of choice, I will use that freedom as soon as possible. If a game challenges me to take advantage of the interlocking systems, I’ll find the spaces where those systems don’t rather merge and do my best to emphasize the inconsistency. Simply put: I love to get up to mischief.
So it was with little hesitation last week that I melted an explosive barrel on my shield within the first 10 seconds of my demo. Once a Bokoblin had destroyed himself and five of his friends with an errant swing of his mace, I shot an arrow, opened my inventory, fused a bomb flower to the tip of the projectile and promptly shot a Hinox into the pupil with my improvised grenade launcher . He didn’t die, so I stuck an old flamethrower on the tip of a rusty sword and hit him from a distance with my new flamewhip. His health was failing and all it would have taken to finish him off was one normal arrowbut that’s super boring, so I threw a dollop of yellow Chuchu jelly at his feet and caused a local thunderstorm.
The storm killed me too.
It took death to snap me out of my experimental fever dream, and then I realized it Tears of the Kingdom had to tell me You can not do that. Link’s new Fuse ability allowed me to combine my arsenal of clubs, sticks, and rudimentary swords with just about anything that was not structurally an integral part of the Bokoblin camp where I found myself. Link can also throw most of the items in his inventory like improvised grenades, whether it’s an apple to stun enemies for a moment, or a fire flower to, well, start a fire. I came across a plant whose leaves had “blinding” properties, so of course I threw one at an enemy before closing the distance to knock it over the edge of a floating island. I even put a missile on the tip of a spear, threw it like a spear and saw a Bokoblin dart off in the distance. Can I still call myself an agent of chaos if Tears of the Kingdom seems so elated by all the chaos I’m causing?
And all this relates only to combat. What about Link’s new Ultrahand ability, which allows him to build vehicles from the resources, natural and otherwise, scattered across Hyrule and the floating archipelago above? What about Recall, which rewinds an item along the path it just took? What about the Ascend power, which sucks Link to a ceiling above him, after which he gracefully swims Through the surface and emerges, Danny DeVito-esqueefrom the ground on the other side?
My overall goal during the demo – and it’s a testament to the captivating nature of Tears of the Kingdom‘s experiments I only now touch with what I was supposed to do – was to reach an island in the sky above me, using several other islands as stepping stones. As we saw back in March in longtime producer Eiji Aonuma’s gameplay presentation, Link can reach floating islands by standing on top of falling rocks, throwing Recall at them and riding them up like elevators. In my demo I discovered another way to access the sky realm, but I won’t spoil it here. (Nintendo’s embargo restrictions don’t allow me to do that either.) Needless to say, getting to the first island was easy enough.
From there, my options opened up: I chose to use Ultrahand to connect several Zonai fans and missiles (which Nintendo graciously included in my starting inventory) to a giant floating block. Hitting one of the fans activated any nearby Zonai item, gracefully sending my ad hoc ship to the next island. I got out, placed my Travel Medallion (which returns from Breath of the Wild‘s Master Trials DLC) on the ground in case I fall back to Hyrule at any point, and glance at the next island, confident in my engineering skills.
At this point I hit a snag: The next island was about 300 feet higher than my current elevation. I could make another ship, with its missiles and fans rotated to account for the steep angle, but the Zonai items might run out of battery (a meter that can be increased during a playthrough) on their way up.
Instead, I decided to aim my second ship (which I Ultrahand-ed with items scattered around the new island) straight ahead, at a giant stalactite-like rock tower hanging off the underside of the elevated island. My plan was to climb it to the top, stamina permitting, and climb the outer rim to reach the surface.
However, as my ship hurtled toward the stalactite, I had a revelation: Use Ascend, idiot! In my rush to equip the ability, I blasted past the island and blasted further into Hyrule’s great blue expanse. At this point I could have opened my map to quickly travel back to the medallion I placed on the previous island. But instead I opted for the flash method and cast Recall on the ship. It paused in its trajectory, then rolled back along its flight path; Halfway through, on tense nerves, I rested Ascend, aimed at the underside of the massive spire and sucked Link up into the interior. He swam the full length of it in real time, giving me a chance to catch my breath and marvel at the ways everything went wrong.
This is the kind of game where you have such a handy array of groundbreaking superpowers that you regularly forget to use one or two for long periods of time. At one point, a duo of Bokoblins rolled a spiked ball down a ramp toward me, Indiana Jones style. Encouraged, I ran towards the danger, fused it with one of my spears, and frightened the perpetrators with the same weapon they had tried to use against me. Hours later, at dinner, or maybe in bed, I realized I could have thrown Recall onto the ball and sent him back up the ramp, into those Bokoblins’ faces. I imagine we’ll lose a lot of sleep one day over retroactive revelations like this one Tears of the Kingdom has been released.
I won’t detail how I got to the last island in the demo, due to the experimentation process is the game, and to go on at length about my trial-and-error jokes would be to discover the joy of it Tears of the Kingdom. Suffice it to say that the method I found – which may or may not be the one you stumble upon – a slingshot, a rickety airplane and the realization that there is a far simpler solution for me all the time. But it does not matter; I somehow got there.
It’s this freedom to play with a game’s systems that first attracted me to immersive sims in the early s, sparking my interest in games made by Arkane Studios, IO Interactive, and the late Looking Glass Studios, which helped the genre make it popular in the first place. Breath of the Wildwas itself an immersive sim by most accounts: its alchemical concoction of crafting, cooking, weather effects and stealth, all wrapped in its nuanced physics system, still results in new Rube Goldbergian discoveries seemingly every week.
As I write this, I think back to my short time with Tears of the Kingdommy mind races with the things i not attempt. Few games have met my goblin tendencies goblin tendencies so confident. My impending concern is whether the abundance of tools Tears of the Kingdom can be overwhelming in the long run. Besides, how much persistent prodding can it take? At what point could I look behind the curtain to see something Nintendo didn’t intend for me to discover? Tears of the Kingdom seems intent on allowing chaos to thrive, and that’s a dangerous game to play.