A joy to play and a master class in open world design, ‘Tears of the Kingdom’ takes the bones of ‘Breath of the Wild’ and builds it out into a grand playground of creative expression. Even moreso than ‘BotW,’ ‘TotK’ encourages you to solve a puzzle, traverse a space, or accomplish a task in a way that makes sense to you (and perhaps only you). No two players will move through this game the same way, and that is remarkable in an open world space. More remarkable still is how the map is managed. The map is not one littered with icons representing the few repeating chores you’d expect to see in other open world games. It is instead a blank slate, encouraging genuine exploration and testing your own skills of mapmaking. And the world is so densely interesting that it is nearly impossible to stay on task. No matter where you go, you’ll encounter (or spot in the distance) something you’ve never seen before. Something you need to quickly check out before you return to your task. And from there, another. And another. And it ends up a miracle that you ever see the credits roll. Roll they did for me, but my time in ‘TotK’ feels even more incomplete, more unsettled, than was ‘BotW’ when I stepped away from it. I put 105 hours into ‘TotK’ and there seems easily to be another 100+ hours of game that remains. And that will beckon to me as I try to make progress in other games. ‘TotK’ is an outstanding game that ranks right up there with the very best in the series, and therefore with the very best in all of gaming.