There's a lot to discover out there- or, there was, at one point, but it's all been discovered since, hundreds of thousands of years before you even hatched. Games like this can offer recluse from the harsh, pre-explored reality that we live in, so it's disappointing how often Outer Wilds shifts focus away from its naturally occurring astronomical mysteries and towards its ancient alien race that has already solved all of them. It's not about monitoring the cyclones on Giant's Deep and reasoning out that some push and some pull; it's about trying to get into an observatory that houses a model of the phenomenon. It's not about sending out a drone to take pictures of an angler and realizing that its eyes are glazed-over; it's about finding the skeleton in the Sunless City and the accompanying biologists' report that says that they're blind. Of course, you can figure out any of these things on your own, but the 22-minute timer actively discourages the extensive trial-and-error that's necessary to evoke a true feeling of discovery, effectively telling you to try visiting a different planet if you weren't able to make any progress on your last loop. The Nomai are undeniably essential as a way to tie all of the cool space stuff together, and their story is certainly worth telling, but I wish their findings weren't so well-preserved. There's an important distinction between discovering and just plain learning, best illustrated here by the Tower of Quantum Trials, which feels like the tutorial level of a Portal-inspired first-person puzzler rather than a part of a wider world. The gap between what's plainly written out for you (blind fish) and how you can use that information to reach your goal (move slowly) is pretty small, and it's only made smaller by the fact that your ship log neatly summarizes all of the important bits for you. What I crave most from a game like this is the feeling of being stuck, or, more accurately, of overcoming said stuckness, and Outer Wilds just doesn't deliver in that regard, and, as a result, I was never as into it as I would've liked. I kept waiting for it to stonewall me, for that moment where I felt like I'd exhausted every possible avenue, but it never came.

And yet... the game just works anyway. Contrary to how dour that first paragraph reads, I do enjoy learning (albeit less than discovery) especially when it's done this well. Every loop brings a new revelation, and not a single fact about the universe feels forced or out of place. I'd go as far as to say this is the most consistent set of internal logic that I've ever experienced in a video game, and it knows it, considering how much joy it takes in hiding things in plain sight. Of course that fog planet you kept seeing was the quantum moon all along. Of course Ash Twin runs out of sand eventually. Of course the Tower of Quantum Knowledge can get sucked into the black hole. Of course you can't land your ship on the sun station, why do you think it's marked with the same pattern as all of the other warp spots? The amount of mileage it gets out of being a game where you can't interact, only observe (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) is staggering, and what makes many of these world mechanics effective is that they're decidedly un-gamey. Most other games would've let you know in some way when you're being properly shielded by a jellyfish in order to combat I-tried-the-right-solution-but-it-didn't-work-syndrome, but the fact that you don't get any feedback and just unceremoniously pass through the electricity barrier makes it that much more satisfying. It seems like it would be great fun to watch someone else play this game, smirking internally as they walk right past something that you already know is cosmically important, and laughing hysterically as they destroy their ship by ramming headfirst into a planet at 400 m/s. Because it's hard to imagine this game going anywhere without committing to the unforgiving physics of outer space- aside from the ship's autopilot system, arguably, no corners are cut here, culminating in an environment that feels appropriately cutthroat. Get too close to the sun and you're screwed, drift too far from your ship and you're screwed, forget to stop and refuel your jetpack and you're screwed. It's a nice reminder that we as humans (or as Timber Hearthians) have no real way to conceptualize true three-dimensional movement, and, as a result, arriving anywhere safely can often feel like a small miracle, which leads to the game's best moments. Carefully following the gravity crystals to reach the Hanging City for the first time, struggling to land on the quantum moon while simultaneously viewing a picture of it, and, of course, that final trek- replaying the end of loop music during was nothing short of brilliant. I'm much more mixed on that overly artsy indie epilogue, but getting to the Eye at last was the perfect capstone for an experience that deserves its reputation as a universal recommendation... even if my personal solar system wasn't as shattered as many others' were.

Breath of the Wild was a game I loved and I’m still very fond of. I think its weaknesses are pretty clear-cut and acknowledged by a lot of people, but the reason I still hold it in high regard is because of how cohesive it felt. Without sounding too corny or sycophantic, for a Nintendo who (especially at the time) were increasingly attached to an image of coddling and handholding, a Zelda game starting with the objective to “destroy Ganon” and declaring everything else to be optional felt like an important statement, it felt like a shift away from the streamlined, prescribed experiences of Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword and toward a vision of natural discovery, which landed for me because of how much it felt like the game was constructed around it: A breathing, living world, the sound of nature and the swaying of trees, puzzles revolving around non-discrete physics and grounded temperatures, world design intended to accentuate the simple desire to climb on top of things and jump off them, looking at something in the distance and thinking “I want to go there”. They were so committed to this vision that they abandoned the heroic, melodic field themes of the past in favour of something restrained, which was guaranteed to piss some people off. I’m under no illusion that Breath of the Wild was a perfect game, in fact, its an extremely flawed one, but as my tastes in games have aged and (hopefully) matured I’ve come to value thematic completeness over "content" more and more, which Breath of the Wild achieved, despite its flaws.

Make no mistake, Breath of the Wild had a lot of flaws. Arguably outside of that core experience of free exploration, it was a game composed almost entirely of flaws. This seemed to be common knowledge for everyone but Nintendo, who saw the praise and thought it would be sufficient to replicate its core systems verbatim. I think if you asked someone what their wishlist for a BotW 2 would have been, practically nobody would have imagined what Tears of the Kingdom actually ended up actually being: More Koroks? Identical combat? More shrines? Cooking and healing unchanged? Clothing and inventory slots unchanged? Weapon durability? Still no traditional length dungeons? I don’t think many people would ask for that. This isn’t to say that Tears of the Kingdom has improved nothing: Enemy variety is significantly better here and the world in general is much denser and has more to discover - the Elden Ring influence being obvious in the depths and caves. Bosses are also much better and even have multiple ways to defeat them, bringing them in line with the freedom on offer in the rest of the puzzles. These things were “asked for” and they’re good, but they’re very much “more of the same”.

I think the most emphatic success of the game is the new powers. In BotW, powers were rarely useful outside of the shrines that required them, whereas here so much of the experience is curated for them. Caves and ascend create this beautiful continuous flow where exploration never comes to an arbitrary stopping point, and rewind feels like it perfectly accompanies ultrahand as well as being a general programming marvel. Fuse is the one I’m most sceptical of. Doubling down on weapon durability - a mechanic which was almost universally complained about in BotW - is a design decision I respect on paper, but I feel in practice it serves to make a lot of the weapons more interchangeable. If the majority of weapon attack power comes from fused monster parts, then the base weapon barely matters, meaning getting a weapon in a chest is just as shrug-worthy as it was in BotW. That this system hasn’t been fixed by fuse is evident in the late-game, which has the identical problem to BotW in that you have so many weapon slots and so many equally good weapons that each individual weapon becomes meaningless. Ultrahand, however, is easily the star of the show and feels like this inexhaustible source of hijinks which the whole game is constructed to support.

One of my favourite reviews on this website by nrmac, a review I think about frequently, talks about how a lot of great art wasn’t “asked for”. I don’t think this game in general fits that bill but ultrahand feels like it does; something great that nobody asked for. In concept, it feels like a perfect elaboration of the ideas in BotW - drawing attention to the environment as a source of problem-solving and furthering the theme of freedom, the new crystal-fetching shrines that were integrated into the world ended up being consistently my favourites for how they encouraged building hilariously dumb contraptions. At the same time, I do have a problem with ultrahand. It seems likely to me that ultrahand is a mechanic designed with the Twitter clip in mind, something aimed toward the potential limits of play rather than the average situation. I say this because throughout the entire game I only really needed to build about 3 different things to solve these problems: Fanplanes for long horizontal distances, hot air balloons for long vertical distances, “thing with rocket” for everything in-between. Granted, I had fun building these things, it didn’t get old, but it never felt like the game coaxed me into the complex depths of this mechanic, something which the shrines should have done. This is evident in the frequently ignored building materials that litter Hyrule’s roadsides, which might be fun to build with but never actually time-efficient, why build a car when you can just fast-travel?

This creeps into one of my biggest problems with TotK. Not the shrines alone but their connection to the new verticality offered by the floating islands. The paraglider in BotW was a tool that risked breaking a lot of the experience by allowing the player to traverse great distances with little effort, but it was rationed and balanced by high places being a goal. There was this flow to exploration where mountains would invite you to climb them, then once at the top you could paraglide to anywhere you could see, it was core to the exploratory loop. In TotK, however, verticality is cheap, not only because every tower catapults you so far into the sky, but by how you can just fast-travel to a floating island and paraglide wherever you please. This greatly exacerbates the problem that shrines pose. Shrines were disappointing in BotW not just because they offered lacklustre experiences, but because they were one of the only few things in the game which offered permanent rewards, as well as permanent progress in the form of fast-travel points, which put this awkward focus on them which they couldn’t live up to. It was a necessity imposed by this that shrines were obfuscated by the geometry. If it was possible to spot shrines easily, the whole game would just be about running from one shrine to the next, which would only further highlight their problems. In TotK, however, this essentially happened. I frequently found myself jumping off floating islands, paragliding to a shrine, then fast-travelling back to the floating island to jump off to another shrine. The majority of the shrines I completed were found this way. At the end of the game, my “Hero’s Path” was very frequently just straight lines toward shrines.

There’s this point in Matthewmatosis’ BotW video, (starting at 28:28, I recommend you watch these few minutes, it’s incredibly relevant to what I’m saying here.), about how free traversal isn’t actually what leads to memorable encounters. Personally, my most memorable moment from BotW was the path to Zora’s domain, which I did very early on and felt like something special. It’s telling that in TotK, a similar setup occurs with the path to the domain being blocked by mud, trying to encourage the player to find creative ways to clean up the path before them, but whereas in BotW I was forced down that path, in TotK I simply paraglided right into the domain from a nearby sky island, which I knew the location of anyway, and so its effect was completely nullified.

Here’s the moments in TotK which I loved the most and were memorable to me: The buildup to the Wind Temple, finding the entrance to the Korok forest, and the entire Mineru questline (the least spoiler-y way I can put it). I imagine the first of these will find general agreement as the best setpiece from either of these games, but the second, to me, was this amazing eureka moment where I finally figured out how to get there. But imagine for a second if you could just glide into the Korok forest from a sky island. Do this, and it illustrates my problem with the rest of the game.

A lot of this would be alleviated if shrines were better, but they are shockingly just as bad in the exact same way that BotW shrines were bad. The introductory shrines on the Great Sky Island are the same level of complexity as all the rest of the shrines, they mostly start off with an idea that’s “very simple” and iterate on it until it’s “simple”. Many solutions are just “use recall on a thing then jump on it”, or “build something incredibly rudimentary with parts that the game gives you anyway, making it obvious what the solution is”, or “use ascend on one (1) thing”. Practically every “combat training” shrine is insulting, even to the intelligence of young children, and every demeaning jingle that played when I did something incredibly easy had me questioning whether I was in Nintendo’s target age range anymore. While BotW’s premise of “freedom” seemed to be Nintendo letting go of their coddling tendencies, shrines were evidence that they couldn’t let go entirely. I was expecting the sequel, at the very least, to develop this part of the game, or at least skip the shrines dedicated to tutorialising basic mechanics, but it still has the problem that some tutorial shrines will be found dozens of hours into the game. Personally, I found a sneakstrike tutorial and bow-bullet-time tutorial over 30 hours into my game, which would not only be bad on its own, but considering the previous game made the same mistakes 6 years ago, it’s embarrassing. I’m sorry if you like these shrines but I fundamentally think they are a bad idea; a game about discovery and exploration is at odds with the aesthetic homogeneity they offer. It’s still possible to solve them in multiple ways, but when the solutions are this easy, why spend any time experimenting?

Intrinsic motivation was an important concept in BotW, but intrinsic motivation needs to work in conjunction with extrinsic motivation in order to be compelling. A player may wander in a certain direction out of the intrinsic desire to go towards something that looks interesting, and the game may reward them with a shrine, but if an extrinsic reward is easily accessible without doing anything intrinsically interesting, the only thing stopping the player from bypassing it is their own willpower and ability to curate their own experiences. I could build a big mecha car with laser beams on it and roll into a moblin camp to commit war crimes, but when I can jump from a sky island directly to four shrines in the same timeframe, it dramatically challenges the lengths I need to go to “find my own fun”; I could spend 30 minutes experimenting with the most hilarious way to break the solution to a shrine, but when the intended solutions take about 2 minutes, it gets to the point where only the most dedicated players can make the most of the experience (again, why I think this game is designed with the Twitter clip in mind). In short, the intrinsic and extrinsic parts of this game are out of sync with each-other, or to put it in another way, there’s too much freedom.

This is starting to sound incredibly negative, but to be clear, I do think this is a good game, but in many ways it has exacerbated the problems latent in BotW, when many many other problems it hasn’t iterated on at all. It’s easy to ask for “more stuff” in a sequel, but despite BotW’s relative lack of content, it still inspired a sense of wonder in me that lasted throughout the majority of the game, some of which is lost simply by knowing where things are. When I stumbled upon Zora’s domain in BotW, it was magical. When I paraglided my way there in TotK, it was expected. When I found my first dragon, or maze, or the blood moon rose for the first time in BotW, it was special. When I found these same things in TotK I was bitterly disappointed that they reused them.

The story makes this all even more disappointing. Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Link and Zelda have a fatal encounter with Ganon/dorf and some amount of time passes, Link, far into the future, travels around Hyrule enlisting the help of four champions/sages, a Rito, Gerudo, Zora and Goron, he finds the master sword, which Zelda had prepared in advance for him, and collects memories of the past which inform him of what happened. Finally, he travels into the interior/depths of Hyrule castle to confront Ganon/dorf, who turns into a beast and is ultimately defeated by Zelda and Link together in a mechanically dull cinematic final boss. Beneath the Zonai stuff, it's the exact same story, set in the same world.

It’s a good game, how could it not be? but during the marketing cycle, I was hoping it would be to BotW what Majora’s Mask was to Ocarina. Something that, despite using the same assets, offered a different experience and used its direct sequel status as an opportunity to tell a radically different story to the typical Zelda fare. This isn't a Majora's Mask, it’s a Twilight Princess, something with a superficially edgy veneer that ultimately struggles to find an identity distinct from the game it models itself on, something that feels "asked for", despite its parts that definitely weren't. I think I’m self-aware enough to realise that pontificating about the reception of a game is a waste of time, but given the glowing feedback this has received, I think we’re likely going to see the next Zelda game also retread the same ground, here’s hoping that once the new formula becomes stagnant again, we can see another Breath of the Wild, not in its flawed superficial mechanics, but in essence.