You are locked inside a universe intent on showing you every intricate facet of its work. Now you are 'leveling up.' In the process of developing a 'skill tree.' You are en route to accepting your 'mission' at the 'mission marker.' You are accumulating 'experience points.' Now you are 'crafting.' Building gear and weapons.

I can't even look at this screenshot without wanting to start the game all over again.Ĭompared with Breath of the Wild, other video games feel like islands loosely connected by discrete systems that rarely mesh. It is, almost certainly, one of the best video games ever made. An intricate space designed, not to be catalogued or conquered, but explored and savored, complete with a cohesive set of intertwining game concepts that could be tinkered with but, unlike others, was somehow resistant to the breaks in logic that subvert regular video game experiences.

It was the most obvious thing you can imagine: an open-world game that focused almost exclusively on its open world. Breath of the Wild unraveled decades of open-world bullshit and began afresh like none of it existed. A place where these transitions feel seamless.īreath of the Wild was a game that felt traditional, but in the ways it wasn't it felt revolutionary. A world where you're accidentally riding a reluctant bear into a spontaneous wildfire one minute, then scrambling solo toward gorgeous vistas the next.

Where open worlds aren't celebrated for their size and instead focus on in-the-moment experiences that spiral into spontaneous, weird emergent stories that are yours and yours alone.Ī universe where exploration is a means to its own end, where meaningful encounters occur effortlessly, where there is a story around every corner.Ī timeline where systems interplay in ways that encourage chaos. Where RPGs aren't dependent on mission markers and laundry list fetch quests. Breath of the Wild feels like it arrived fully formed from another dimension.Ī dimension where video games evolved differently on an alternate timeline.

Games like zelda breath of the wild