Tears of the Kingdom refines Zelda's open-world approach - it just took me time to see it
...In winter. And Zelda in winter is a magical thing indeed. Just think of that one special dungeon from Twilight Princess where there is warmth in the kitchen and icicles on the windows and soup bubbling on the stove. This is even better now: I'm lost in the blizzard, stalking around a frozen lake, and trying to get to a snowed in town at the centre of it all.
It's a sandbox sequence, in other words, but it's got just enough direction to orient me. I eventually get to the town I'm after, swooping in through a heavy fall of snow, and I'm sent off again to a nearby mountain. The first dungeon? Not quite. The approach to the first dungeon. And I think this is the heart of why, for me, Tears of the Kingdom is giving me more of that Zelda-ish feel.
Dungeon approaches are a classic bit of Zeldas, and looking back it turns out they're often my favourite bits. Dragon Roost Island in Wind Waker. I love that. Not the dungeon itself, which I can barely remember, but the route to the dungeon, moving off the beach and up these spindly towers of rock, moving from ledge to rope swing, busting out the telescope to see what lay ahead, turning, turning, always moving upwards, exploring, but also being drawn to the point that I knew must lay ahead.
What to make of all this? The secret, for me at least, is the careful deployment of linearity inside a sandbox world. It's about a moment, in fact, where you leave the sandbox behind and are on a track. I remember moments like this from Breath of the Wild - the route to the first dungeon in that game, in fact.
I see now that I didn't play enough of Breath of the Wild to truly judge if this stuff is new for Tears of the Kingdom. Or rather, the hundred or so hours I put into that game were all spent sandboxing about, opening up the map, doing whatever I pleased. I know in the hundred hours ahead of me in Tears of the Kingdom I will do a lot of that stuff too. But here, working through the storm, something held me tightly in its grip. And it was, undoubtedly, the Legend of Zelda.
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