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My birthday gift from Klik’s mother was The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. I had pre-ordered it, and she reimbursed me for it. It came out on May 12th, a week after my birthday. As it happened, Klik was away on a trip with her mother when the game came out. The trailers had me very excited to play, so I had made the necessary preparations! I had cooked in advance for Friday, Saturday and Sunday, so I had meals in the fridge that I could just shove into the microwave.

Friday the game arrived, and after work I started in on it. I didn’t continue too late.

But Saturday, I started around 9 AM. I broke half an hour for lunch, and around 6 PM I thought: “Oh, better get something to eat…” so I broke another half an hour for dinner. But after that, it was straight back into the game! Late that evening, Klik called, and she started with: “Oh, it’s late, are you already in bed?” just as I was about to enter another shrine…

Since then, the obsession has faded a bit, but I’m still playing it a lot. And Klik, who is even a bigger Zelda fan than I am, has started as well. Our play styles are very different, so we get to see a different side of the game through that.

Of course, the biggest innovation of the game is that you can build your own constructs and use them in the game. They play an especially large role in the shrines, but you can also use them “in the field”. That is a lot of fun, but I find myself using it not that often. If I have to go somewhere, I prefer to just walk or climb, the “good old-fashioned way”, because it lets me experience the game world in a much more direct way. I get to see all the little nooks and crannies, get to pick up cooking ingredients along the way and in general just take it slow. I do enjoy seeing the weird constructs in game clips on YouTube, but I do not really feel the need to try and build something as grandiose.

I also dislike the Depths, which is essentially the whole map in one big underground cavern. It is dark (until you activate that area’s ‘lightroot’) and the enemies do ‘gloom damage’ from which you can’t recover by just eating, so it’s extra challenging. When I started out there, I got the same feeling as I got from Dark Soul’s Tomb of the Giants, which is not a good thing — when I got to that area in Dark Souls, I just bounced off the game and never finished it. Luckily, in Tears of the Kingdom, there are items you can use to shed some light on your path, and they’re quite easy to find, so it’s not that big of a problem once you’re prepared. (Yes, I know there are light-giving items in Dark Souls too, but those are not the same as Brightbloom seeds: you’re still mostly bumbling around in the dark.)

Just like its predecessor, Breath of the Wild, this will take us a few hundred hours to fully appreciate. And maybe multiple playthroughs as well.

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.