A Subjectively Objective Review of Video Games Released in 2023

by Jed Pressgrove

The Best Year in Gaming History or: Eating a Filet Mignon at McDonald’s

You might have read 2023 is one of the greatest years for video games or the best year of them all. You have maybe further noticed that the cited evidence for this claim involves a striking number of sequels* and remakes** — perhaps more sequels and remakes than you have ever seen acclaimed in a single year. Here’s an incomplete list of the sequels and remakes people often mention:

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Super Mario Bros. Wonder

Resident Evil 4

Super Mario RPG Remake

Baldur’s Gate III

Metroid Prime Remastered

Dead Space

Spider-Man 2

Alan Wake II

Final Fantasy XVI

Amnesia: The Bunker

Diablo IV

Star Wars: Jedi Survivor

God of War Ragnarok

Octopath Traveler II

Street Fighter 6

The Talos Principle 2

Pikmin 4

Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon

Assassin’s Creed Mirage

Mortal Kombat 1

System Shock

One might get the excitable impression that the greatest game of this greatest of years should be something that can be considered a sequel AND a remake. The obvious stance follows: Resident Evil 4 is the 2023 Game of the Year. Besides its coveted status as a sequel and remake, this GOTY candidate is appropriate for two other reasons:

1. The original Resident Evil 4, released in 2005 on the Nintendo GameCube, was widely considered the 2005 GOTY. It’s also one of the most influential games of the 21st century (quick top 5: Resident Evil 4, Dark Souls, Minecraft, PlayerUnknown’s Battleground, and Grand Theft Auto III).

2. The remake doesn’t change “too much” about the original but tweaks things that some people complained about (e.g., Leon, the hero, can move as he aims his gun; he stood in place while aiming in the original).

UNFORTUNATELY, I cannot deem Resident Evil 4 the GOTY of 2023 because playing it is the equivalent of eating a filet mignon at McDonald’s.

Imagine the scene: You’ve been driving for hours. You’re desperately hungry, you need to piss soon, and your tank is past half empty, so you take the next exit with a gas station. You notice the station has a McDonald’s. “Gee,” you say to yourself, “it’s been a long time since I’ve eaten Micky D’s.” You go inside, expecting to order something lame but edible like a Double Stack or Chicken McNuggets. Instead, you’re shocked to find a new promotion: the Filet McNon for $8. You slap yourself in disbelief. You know it’s an absolutely awful fucking idea, but you can’t help it. You order the Filet McNon and specify medium rare. You get the steak in about seven minutes. It looks like a filet mignon, but it doesn’t smell or feel or taste like one (it’s certainly not medium rare). But because you were ravenous, you inhale the Filet McNon and tell other people, “It’s good for fast food.”

This story sums up what the gaming world has done: exalting a game that resembles Resident Evil 4 but has been divorced of its humor (the remake’s self-seriousness is embarrassing), its original thrills (the introductory village battle now seems stilted), its rough edges (how about that quick-time-event fight with Krauser?), its bells and whistles (The Mercenaries is the greatest extra mode of all time), and the personal auteurist stamp of director Shinji Mikami. The Resident Evil 4 remake is a counterfeit product that disposes of creative authorship and threatens to rewrite history with its perfunctory doppelgänger of a title. Developer Capcom stopped caring about making good games years ago; the company is on the lookout for the most convenient moneymakers, fruit that hangs just inches above ground. The familiar is considered fresh.

*It’s not unusual for a proclaimed greatest year of video games — or any normal year — to feature numerous sequels. Three popular years are 1998, 2004, and 2017, all of which had their fair share of sequels. For those curious, here is my personal top 10 for each of those years:

1998

1. Fallout 2
2. Starcraft
3. Final Fantasy Tactics
4. Radiant Silvergun
5. Metal Gear Solid
6. Resident Evil 2
7. Parasite Eve
8. Tenchu: Stealth Assassins
9. Metal Slug 2
10. Mario Party

2004

1. Metal Gear Solid III: Snake Eater
2. Cave Story
3. Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door
4. Ninja Gaiden
5. N
6. Katamari Damacy
7. Doom 3
8. X-Men Legends
9. Half-Life 2
10. Alien Hominid

2017

1. The Norwood Suite
2. Nier: Automata
3. Splasher
4. Pyre
5. West of Loathing
6. Golf Story
7. Mario+Rabbids: Kingdom Battle
8. Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia
9. Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice
10. Steamworld Dig 2

**While remakes aren’t new in gaming, the demand for them has increased considerably in the last few years. People practically beg for game remakes on social media.

For the Love of Heaven, You’re Not SquareSoft

Playing Sea of Stars is like opening an ornate can of sardines — no beautiful packaging can elevate such a dull meal. The game’s presentation suggests Chrono Trigger on steroids. The graphics and sound effects are undeniably detailed, but all the audiovisual proficiency in the world means zilch when the vision amounts to easygoing nostalgia for the 1990s. This is no Iconoclasts, whose pixel art depicted the bizarre, provocative effects of supernatural creation. Sea of Stars is pretty in that predictable video-game-industry way: It wants you to cheer on the developers for their hard work behind the scenes.

At least Sea of Stars is visually competent. For all its pride about the 16-bit era, it forgets the adult melodrama in Final Fantasy IV and VI, the spirituality in Earthbound and Illusion of Gaia, and the constant plot twists of Chrono Trigger. The story in Sea of Stars has the dramatic intensity of a paddle-ball demonstration and the psychological insight of an episode of Barney & Friends. Any narrative that allows a character as foolish as Garl to flourish can’t be taken seriously.

The combat in Sea of Stars showcases the lowest form of inspiration. SNES RPGs introduced several notable tweaks to turn-based battles — ideas like Final Fantasy VI’s character-specific mechanics and Super Mario RPG’s timed button presses have profoundly impacted the genre. In recent history, Zeboyd Games and Terry Cavanagh have made turn-based fights more urgent and calculative with entries like Cosmic Star Heroine and Dicey Dungeons. Sabotage Studio, the team behind Sea of Stars, only musters an encyclopedic approach that echoes what has come before: combos, interruptions, and so on. The developer’s one noticeable wrinkle to tradition is a resource called Live Mana, which flies out of struck enemies and can be absorbed by your party members to boost their attacks — a reward system that attempts to conceal its mindlessness with flashiness. Even more disappointing is the paltry number of techniques for each character. No amount of daydreaming about the SNES days can rescue Sea of Stars from mediocrity.

The Gaming World’s Memory Continues to be That of a Hamster

Baldur’s Gate III has impressed me far more than Baldur’s Gate II, which has always been the blandest of revered RPGs. But the praise for it has been comical and ahistorical. Phrases like “unparalleled level of freedom” and “It’s everything you’ve ever loved about any roleplaying game, with +1 to all stats” imply nobody remembers the first two Fallout games, Planescape: Torment, or The Witcher II and III, not to mention classics like Earthbound and Chrono Cross. Back in 2019, many people acted like Disco Elysium was God’s long-delayed gift to RPG fans; four years later, Baldur’s Gate III seemingly erased Disco Elysium’s existence. Going by some reviews, one might think the game invented voice-acted dialogue during cutscenes!

A Zelda/Mario/Fire Emblem Realization

After subjecting myself to the clichés, contrived surprises, and clunky innovation of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Super Mario Bros. Wonder, and Fire Emblem Engage, I think we need a superhero who kills off media franchises. Or maybe a demon who corrupts them with modernism. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Online Divorce Court. Super Mario Liposuction and Fitness Journey. Fire Emblem: Polyamorous Pickleball.

Where will these franchises go next? More importantly, why care? These games have lost their elegance and exhausted their potential. You can’t even compare them to corporate property as limited as James Bond. At least the eternal spy movie phenomenon reflects something about politics, sexuality, and culture. I encourage all souls to stop feeling obligated to pay allegiance to neverending sagas. The less time we dedicate to the old, the more chances we have to discover greatness.

My Unranked Top Games of 2023

Mr. Platformer

Starts as an ode to Pitfall. Ends as a troubling avant-garde revelation about the hollowness of completionism. Super Mario Bros. Wonder wishes it had as many compelling jumps. Terry Cavanagh is the best auteur in video games.

Boneraiser Minions

Another Vampire Survivors follower, only this time the imitator surpasses the popular landmark (and with no sleazy overlong allusions to casino games every time you open a damn treasure chest). Whereas Vampire Survivors featured a fairly predictable leveling system, Boneraiser Minions encourages mad-scientist ingenuity with its intimidating slew of crossbred demonic helpers, bizarre relics, and environmental traps and bonuses. This is what playing as the Necromancer in Diablo II should have been like. And yes, Boneraiser Minions has enough juvenile sex puns to make one wonder whether the developer is in junior high school.

Baldur’s Gate III

Baldur’s Gate III rejects its predecessor’s biggest weakness: those real-time skirmishes in which dull-looking avatars awkwardly swing their weapons at one another until someone perishes. The turn-based contests in Baldur’s Gate III marry the high-stakes drama of an XCOM firefight with the kookiness of an experimental puzzler. And while the writing can be quite goofy — I despise the Telltale-Games-esque messages about whether your party members approve of your decisions — the outlandish scenarios are charmingly depicted.

Gravity Circuit

Mega Man remade into a cathartic beat-em-up. The whole point is the style with which you pummel the nuts, bolts, and other components out of irritating robotic forces. The Capcom fanboys who complained about my damning Mega Man 11 review should expose themselves to the precarious levels and chained attacks of Gravity Circuit. The only thing that dampens the action is superfluous character dialogue.

Pseudoregalia

“Game feel” is one of those tortured gaming phrases that can haunt anyone who has a smidgen of dignity. Pseudoregalia nonetheless brought the term to mind because no 3D platformer has ever felt this precise and dynamic. I would rather play Pseudoregalia than any of the Nintendo 64 and Playstation 1 games that inspired developer rittzler.

Void Stranger

A sense of ominous nihilism hangs over this enigma. Not since Solomon’s Key have single-screen quests aroused so much curiosity about secrets that may or may not exist. Once you become accustomed to the puzzles, you find a tree that offers the option of rest. Resting literally closes the game. When you return to Void Stranger (perhaps bringing the vestiges of your own dreams into the game world), you see visions of a time when the protagonist isn’t trapped in stacked basements. But the nightmare again surfaces and the puzzles shift and any confidence you may have had about grasping the meaning of it all vaporizes. A part of me doesn’t want to peel back the layers of Void Stranger. The mysteries are enough.

Pizza Tower

This is psychologically unstable art drenched in pop smarts. What if the speed of Sonic the Hedgehog was a sign of excruciating anxiety? What if the transformations of Super Mario Bros. were feverish and awkward instead of empowering? Pizza Tower exposes the feigned emotions of big-budget games as dog treats for stressed-out populations. It acknowledges the insanity of life and gaming. I get nervous looking at it.

My Heart’s Not in Zelda or: Nobody Saves Gaming Culture

by Jed Pressgrove

And then I woke up.

– Ed Tom Bell (played by Tommy Lee Jones), in the film No Country For Old Men.

Tears of the Kingdom led me back to a feeling I had in 2017 with Breath of the Wild: an absence of heart. Not having heart is the ultimate game killer. “No más,” said pugilist Roberto Durán to the referee in 1980, ruining one of boxing’s most anticipated rematches. I understand Durán when I ponder how my time with Zelda has ended two games in a row. The phrase has nothing to do with inability — Durán had notched one win against his opponent, Sugar Ray Leonard, and wasn’t losing by much in the rematch — and everything to do with a lack of investment.

Tears of the Kingdom is not unlike many modern big-budget video games: mechanics upon mechanics, curios upon curios, waypoints upon waypoints. All the crap you pick up is not actually crap, yet nothing feels essential. Outside of a few idiosyncratic enemies and a curiously placed shrine, I don’t admire anything I have discovered.

A game like this should have exciting action. Nevermind that Tears of the Kingdom reuses many thrills from its predecessor — the monster killing is mundane and emotionally vapid compared to that of several titles indebted to the Zelda series (e.g., Shadow of the Colossus, Dark Souls, and Hyper Light Drifter). Link might have early god-like potential (most shrines are a cinch with Ultrahand and Recall), but the proposition of breaking the game is not anymore interesting than it was in Scribblenauts or Hack N’ Slash.

After a period of amusement using the new powers, a sense of pointlessness emerged as I realized I was traversing a world with a consistent stream of moderate intrigue, nipping at an ever-dangling carrot. The caves and the sky islands are merely extra content, distractions from the reused setting and the awful story. In this collection of locations, there are no high points or low points, just a bunch of mid points. Nintendo straps you to a bed and plugs 10 IVs into your veins. You’re always getting injected, always feeding, but you’re never satisfied or healed, like a junky with no god and a patient with no timetable for discharge. Almost every experience amounts to a nice plateau, so when one has a rare sensation that registers between an above-average thrill and a very good rush, one might feel wowed.

The world of Zelda is purgatory made ultra consumable.

---

In Desert Golfing, I am on hole 1401, 3653 strokes. In front of my ball is a sand shed with a sharply angled roof. Then the land flattens and stretches a little more than halfway across the screen before revealing the hole. On the other side of the hole is the steep edge of a fat hill.

I now look at hole 1402, which sits on top of the fat hill. Exasperatingly, the hole resides on the edge of a ridge. There’s no space to the left of the hole for the ball to sit, meaning the ball will roll down back toward the tee if it doesn’t land in the hole, and to the right of the hole, the ball has little room to travel before it would fall off the other side of the hill into a moderately shallow crevice. Past this crevice the ball would go off-screen, triggering a restart.

I would prefer not to deal with 1402, but it’s against the rules to see any new part of the desert before putting the ball in the hole.

This far into the game, I’m more fascinated by what the next section of land will look like than I am by how many strokes I will use on a hole. After all, I’ve hit hundreds of hole-in-ones at this point.

I’m well over a 1,000 holes in and have only seen water about 10 times. I have seen one rock. I used about 30 strokes hitting my ball into the rock, pushing it yard by yard until it fell into the hole first.

Desert Golfing isn’t open like Tears of the Kingdom, but it has a more curious and delightful exploratory philosophy. There’s an invitation to see Desert Golfing’s world, one screen at a time, this eternal sand trap, this place of triangles and other geometric shapes, this landscape of slopes, recesses, 90-degree walls, and clusterfuck canyons, this setting of meditation and self-determined pars and everlasting training, this neverending stretch of orange, this magnificent ode to random generation that resembles a natural progression of geological erosion.

I appreciate and anticipate every part of Desert Golfing’s setting. Spoiled, I take the environmental offerings of Tears of the Kingdom as a given.

---

I wish Tears of the Kingdom would overwhelm me, plunge me into doubt and hopelessness, confound me. Progress seems predestined despite the ridiculous number of variables at play. Death in Tears of the Kingdom is irrelevant. I die and return to a nearby checkpoint, perhaps with more hearts than when I crossed the same spot. Every navigational challenge is no more than a temporary annoyance. The answer to everything is immediately apparent. I always know I’m capable of advancing. So what’s the point of moving forward?

Tears of the Kingdom specializes in deliberate predictability. Like Breath of the Wild, it sees itself as a survival test. But I consider myself foolish, not resilient, for engaging with the game’s dull and awkward routines. I have come to despise every jump, every instance of climbing or gliding, every swing of a weapon, every time I have to access a power or an item from a menu. I know why people dedicate themselves to Ultrahand wizardry: Without that novelty, Tears of the Kingdom is monotonously superfluous.

I knew something was dead wrong after I joined forces with bird boy Tulin. Tulin is an amateurish gimmick. He’s positioned as an essential part of the greater mission, but his status as a CPU-controlled juvenile gives off the odor of God of War trendiness. His wind gust ability epitomizes tortured design: To activate this underwhelming technique, Tulin must be close enough to Link to summon the almighty on-screen button prompt. It actually requires two button presses for Tulin to unleash his special move. The utter inelegance of the controls and the one-note personality of the sidekick speak to Nintendo’s low creative standards, which doom what should have been an enlivening ascent into the sky.

The idiocy of this scenario — naturally, Nintendo has the gall to label Tulin and other helpers as Sages — inspired me to take a break from the main story and wander about. After hours of the isomorphic caverns, dime-a-dozen enemy encampments, uninteresting wildlife, and silly side quests, I said to myself: NO MORE!

---

To see consumerism as a kind of longing for spiritual connection in a world that has less and less space for the sacred, the mysterious, the luminous, opens up the idea of what we do in the games industry as more than straightforward game material. We touch on much deeper longings, fantasies, and desires. We sell dreams.

– narrative designer Meghna Jayanth.

Transforming into a horse that crushes monsters with its hind legs represents a more interesting fantasy than the Ultrahand prospect of constructing a flying car, mecha, or giant rotating flamethrower. I’ve used countless vehicles and contraptions in games, but I had never assumed the role of a violent stallion, a deranged mermaid, or a toxic slug until I played Nobody Saves the World.

Unlike Link, the titular protagonist of Nobody Saves the World is void of distinguished features. The eye sockets of this freak are empty. He is pallid and scrawny. He slaps his hand at opponents like a child. He is a joke, a winking reference to the modest saviors of countless fantasy games.

But he can shape-shift into other beings and wield their most lethal tactics and attacks. As in Tears of the Kingdom, your initial efforts with all the abilities involve minor growing pains. Nobody receives experience points by killing enemies in particular ways and doing other things, like opening chests. (You’re reading that right. You get rewarded for finding rewards.)

Nobody Saves the World and Tears of the Kingdom appear quite different. Their systems, structures, and capabilities don’t bear much similarity. Neither do their audiovisual styles or storytelling approaches.

Yet their ideologies match perfectly. They romanticize and fetishize the lone hero. One who saps the resources around him like a ferocious anteater, demolishes habitats as if justified by divine right, and rubs shoulders with glorious destiny. These heroes are successful in the most self-righteous, circular manner possible. Their dominance receives comprehensive, immutable backing by thematic suggestions about lowly beginnings, working one’s way up, and earning the respect of people. Contra pushes machismo. Hades worships rebellion. Zelda and Nobody present phony holiness as a sacred goal.

Beyond all my misgivings about the mechanical, kinetic, and environmental limitations of Tears of the Kingdom and Nobody Saves the World, I am most tired of their veiled and deceptive ego-building effect which leaves me hollow and aimless, notwithstanding the digital riches they can grant to me. In our slumber as gamers, kingdoms are forever customized for our fleeting happiness.

A Shrine Tale

by Jed Pressgrove

The shift from dungeons to shrines* in the The Legend of Zelda series smacks of creative convenience. Shrines give the developers freedom to throw in whatever puzzles or enemy encounters they want without overarching context. Everything in a dungeon, ideally, works together like the instrumentalists in an orchestra. However small the dungeon elements might be, they create something bigger than their sum. A dungeon needs vision. A shrine doesn’t. And so the shrines in Breath of the Wild seem less like an art and more like the scattered ideas of game design students.

Immediately following the transition from the Great Sky Island to the ballyhooed open world, Tears of the Kingdom plays into the worst disposable tendencies of the shrine paradigm. What does it say when a 2023 Zelda title — a good six years removed from its predecessor’s experimentation — dedicates an entire shrine to a contrived lesson on item throwing? It reeks of inefficiency, as you would hope the lengthy introductory tutorial would fully cover something as rudimentary as item throwing. And it doesn’t suggest adventure, neither in terms of being rewarded for wandering about, nor in terms of being stimulated by curiosity or surprise. Maybe the point is to celebrate the player’s ability to follow basic instructions. Upon completion of the task (i.e., dismantling a stupid robot standing on higher ground in the middle of a room), a voice remarks, “You have proven your mastery,” which is akin to giving someone a college degree because they can zip up their pants.

The second shrine I visited proved just as perfunctory. Its hurdles involved rehashed Ultrahand lessons from the Great Sky Island — fusing logs together for Link to walk across or climb, and crafting a raft with fans to travel on water. These mind-numbingly vapid challenges, like the item-throwing routine, say more about the smarmy design philosophy of modern-day Nintendo than they do about the setting of Tears of the Kingdom. As in Breath of the Wild, Nintendo appears frightened of letting players off the leash at the beginning. These games are as unconfident and repetitious as they are grandiose. The initial shrines in Tears of the Kingdom point to the company’s conservatism as much as the open world hearkens back to the conviction of the original Zelda on the NES.

Then something magical happened. As I scaled a mountain to draw closer to a third shrine, I found myself in the clutches of the morbidly fascinating Gloom Hands. These hands reach out of puddles that spread like a virus. It’s like a child’s nightmare, this idea of strange hands touching you, pulling you, kidnapping you to hell to do God knows what. I was able to shake loose of the hands and arrive to the Morok Shrine, but the undying threat of the hands foreshadowed an hour-plus purgatorial struggle I would have in the glorified mini dungeon.

— – <<—

Let me back up. When you leave the Great Sky Island, you have the choice of following the main quest marker. I considered this option for about five seconds and became sickened by the thought of continuing down a preset path after complying with the bureaucratic orders of the Great Sky Island. Anything to escape the game’s eye-rolling storytelling seemed sexy. This early decision to ignore the larger goal meant I would not attain the handy paraglider, which would have rendered the Morok Shrine as dull as the other shrines I had the displeasure of discovering.

Without the paraglider in Link’s possession, Morok Shrine’s platforming becomes treacherous. Particularly early on when one has not had much of a chance to gain extra heart containers to lessen the probability of deadly injury.

The subtitle of Morok Shrine is “A Bouncy Device.” It sounds innocuous and fun, but I nonetheless felt nervous after reading the words. I sensed potential destruction, however playfully constructed. The first part of the shrine made me unclench. Just a square platform rising quickly out of the floor. A higher point unreachable without upward momentum. I timed it so the platform propelled Link to the next floor mid-jog.

I saw the bouncy device. A heavy-looking spring full of pressure. It indeed bounces when Link’s weapon strikes it. Not a complicated solution. Move the contraption closer to the ledge of the upper level with Ultrahand, situate the hero on top of the spring, swing the ungodly big stick and spear combination to activate the spring, and boost Link to the next floor. Push Link forward during the jump, or you will die an embarrassing death like I did, crashing back down into the very thing that was supposed to deliver you to new heights.

My second attempt was successful, though Link sustained significant injury because I failed to dive right after I cleared the ledge in midair. On subsequent tries, I became a master of this little dive — if you didn’t know any better watching, you would think Link is instantly magnetized to the floor. (The paraglider would have made this skill irrelevant and undiscovered.)

—

The final floor almost stumped me, thrusting me into a cycle of restarts that attracted me like an irresistible merry-go-round, where my stubbornness felt like drunkenness; where my realization that the shrine, by design, required the paraglider compelled me to keep going against the grain; and where my memories of hardship in games as diverse as The Talos Principle and Ninja Gaiden floated in the background, inspiring me to prove, yet again, some silly point about my ability to overcome doubt, perplexing circumstances, and brick-wall opposition.

To the left, the final floor presents a pair of fused-together bouncy devices behind bars, which only open when a ball is placed in the middle of a recess in the floor. That ball is located to the right across a pit on a higher floor. To retrieve it, you must launch Link across the pit using another bouncy device propped up at a diagonal angle on a ramp. This stunt doesn’t demand more than simple aim. Link will not take damage, regardless of whether you dive or press no button.

Shooting the ball over the pit to the recess in the floor is easy. But the return trip for Link means almost certain death without the paraglider at this early stage. More heart containers would solve the issue, but I only had four. Being launched from the higher floor triggers fatal fall damage for this most sensitive version of the princess-saving son of a bitch.

The easiest way to shoot Link back across the pit is to utilize a ramp. You fit the bouncy device into the crevice of the ramp so that the launchpad faces your destination, stand Link on the pad, and whack the spring. Because of the ramp’s sharp upward angle, this method killed me multiple times, even with a dive.

I could have joined a Reddit discussion, asked why Nintendo would place this shrine in plain sight after the player leaves the Great Sky Island, and permanently degraded myself, even under the guise of anonymity. Instead, I opted to die multiple times while attempting different launch methods.

I reasoned that if I could launch Link with the spring on the floor with a less extreme angle, perhaps the pointy-eared rupee rubber wouldn’t perish from the impact to the lower platform, as he would not fly as high into the air. This not-so-brilliant idea presented three issues. First, the spring had to be angled so that Link would clear the conspicuously placed railing at the edge of the higher floor. Second, even if the angle allowed Link to avoid contact with the railing, he might still hit the wall below the edge of the lower floor, causing the otherwise silent protagonist to let out a pathetic, futile yell as he plummets to the abyss. Third, how would you create an angle in the first place without a ramp?

My answer to that question was as embarrassing as you might guess: drop a few shields from my inventory and fuse them together to form a pallet that could help support a lower angle for the launch. My ingenuity was never rewarded, mainly because the makeshift pallet couldn’t remain steady enough throughout the spring’s abrupt initiation.

Like many puzzles in life, the solution turned out simple, though arriving at it required me to destroy Link’s body a number of times. Just use the ramp, and dive into the lower floor as soon as you pass over the pit. When successful, you lose all but one-quarter of a heart. From there, you must make one final significant vertical jump with three stacked springs, which must be positioned close to a wall so that you can move forward a couple of feet in midair, just enough to catch the edge of the highest floor. If the stacked springs sit too close to the wall, Link’s momentum will be stalled ever so slightly, resulting in probable doom.

The torture of solving Morok Shrine in this way ranks as one of the greatest experiences in a Zelda game, in the most counterintuitive manner possible. It puts your gaming life in the most ironic of contexts. It puts hair on Link’s chest. It puts the Tears in Tears of the Kingdom.

*Yes, Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom have dungeons, but they’re secondary now, and seemingly only included out of obligation.

TO BE CONTINUED …

This is the third part of an ongoing critical series. Click here to read the second part, “The Legend of Tutorialization.“

The Legend of Tutorialization

by Jed Pressgrove

Like its predecessor, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom bars entry to Hyrule until the player completes a glorified tutorial. If a so-called open world game must include this type of contrivance, the initial trial should be brief, as in Fallout 2 or Dark Souls, for two reasons:

1. The shorter the delay to the meat of the game, the better.
2. Replaying a tutorial on subsequent playthroughs is tedious.

I criticized Breath of the Wild for the trite battles and busywork in its introductory Great Plateau area, which takes about an hour or two of your time (if not more if you want to explore—an urge that isn’t rewarded with anything particularly interesting). Seven years later, Tears of the Kingdom presents the Great Sky Island. I again question the use of “Great” as an adjective, because there’s nothing spectacular about being locked into an educational portion of a game whose design otherwise preaches freedom—especially when you must interact with a former Hylian ruler named Rauru, who has the personality of an ironing board.

Similar to the Great Plateau, the Great Sky Island has shrines where Link gains powers, though these locations must now be visited in a specific order. As Rauru nudges you to the next shrine, you run into puzzles on the island that require new skills (primarily Ultrahand). Along the way you encounter peaceful robots who relay helpful tips and malicious robots who allow you to practice the unimaginative combat system.

The script gives an explanation for this environment, but that doesn’t take away the manufactured stench of the area. Obviously the game needs to introduce mechanics, but I would prefer a concise training sequence from Rauru. The lanky fellow might show irritation as Link commits errors with the complex Ultrahand ability. Anything to decrease the extended blandness. (For all the complaints that could be directed at the more linear Zelda titles, I appreciate the sense of discovery involved with locating a special item in a dungeon and the simplicity of a quick message about the artifact’s capabilities.)

Thankfully, Link’s main powers in Tears of the Kingdom outshine what he could do in Breath of the Wild. The abilities lend a more surreal tone to the adventure. They go well beyond the activities one would envision in a dream about Link. They even correct some of the dubious qualities of Breath of the Wild. I recently visited Wikipedia because I couldn’t remember all the powers from Breath of the Wild. But these four I won’t forget.

Ultrahand

You can build complicated contraptions (just browse YouTube) with this superglue ability, but you don’t have to be perfect with it to solve certain puzzles, so Ultrahand has a comical jankiness to it that recalls Scribblenauts. While Ultrahand brings the most mechanical possibilities to Tears of the Kingdom, it’s my least favorite of the four, mainly because of the awkward controls. My main irritation: Waggling an analog stick to unglue parts is inefficient and silly. Should have been a button press. I also don’t have much of a desire to build things outside of situations where I need to. Frankly, I would have preferred Nintendo to reinvent the game’s stale combat. (It’s no surprise two of my favorite Zeldas, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link and Twilight Princess, emphasize the intricacies of swordplay.)

Fuse

The simplest of the four, but it goes a long way toward eliminating one of the limitations of Breath of the Wild: the uncreative weapon-breaking system that could pass as parody. Fuse permanently welds items together for various bonuses, including magical effects, higher attack power, and, most importantly, extra durability. If you combine the right items, certain weapons can last quite some time. That’s enough to warrant praise alone; the experimentation with different amalgams adds intrigue. Fuse makes chests more attractive. In Breath of the Wild, I started ignoring many chests because the items I discovered disintegrated so easily. In Tears of the Kingdom, I’m curious about what I might find and manipulate with Fuse. Exploring the advantages of fused materials pays off when you face monsters with unique weaknesses, creating a stronger dynamic between the hero and the random elements scattered throughout the world.

Ascend

Ascend feels like a satirical wrinkle about the tension between the desire for convenient exploration and the limits of logic. Blasting Link through a ceiling qualifies as the goofiest action in any Zelda. It’s as exciting to misuse as use: I’ve inadvertently thrusted myself into places that had nothing to do with my original intentions. After you use this skill, the game asks if you want to go through with the ascension, in case your aim was terrible or you see a massive problem waiting for you above. I find it almost impossible not to go through with the process every time. The option to back out of consequences robs the game of irony.

Recall

Although time manipulation isn’t an original concept for the Zelda series, being able to isolate a rewinding effect on an object introduces novel game-breaking possibilities. Recall is thus a double-edged sword. Undeniably fascinating to play with, but when used on items in conjunction with Ultrahand, many of Tears of the Kingdom’s shrine challenges become repetitive jokes.

– — — I … ——…

Sometimes tutorialization seems to never end in modern games. An hour or two (Zelda), a baker’s dozen (Persona 5), 20+ hours (Xenoblade Chronicles 2). Part of the issue lies in developers’ and gamers’ confusion about the value of mechanics. The more mechanics, the more depth. Even if this assumption is true (it’s not—a simple session of Texas Hold ‘Em Poker has more depth than most video games for social and psychological reasons as much as mechanical ones), we run into the predicament of games taking on too much or, as we would say in Mississippi, getting too big for their britches. Too many games are counterinstinctual, turgid, overambitious, and trendy. And games need to be accessible for financial and philosophical concerns. So tutorials overstay their welcome. The manual never died. It transformed into an obtrusive, virus-like guide within games. These eyesores, earsores, and brainsores are accepted because people feel empowered when they get to do extra things in games. Look at me I’m a builder chemist craftsman cook and photographer in an action game I finally appreciate things that I never could in real life I finally have depth

—- —- —-

I dive off the Great Sky Island. In the wilderness. Happy to leave behind the lessons. Stoked about the real game. I find a few shrines. They want me to fight single enemies and build rafts. They want me to learn things I’ve already learned.

TO BE CONTINUED …

This is the second part of an ongoing critical series. Click here to read the first part, “Why Isn’t Zelda Smarter?”