3 reviews liked by oepn


I tried to make my second run through Dark Souls a contrast with my first. I always go for dextrous katana builds in my first run through these games, so coming back I wanted to do a strength-oriented build instead with heavy armor and heavier weaponry. I knew the game by this point, so I allowed myself to skip bosses and areas I wasn't interested in refighting (so long, Lost Izalith; another time, Kalameet).

But the most impactful change was streaming my run to friends over Discord, including particularly my friend @zandravandra. Zandra knows this game back to front, and she gave me some context on it that really opened my eyes to what's special about this Souls. The way the game hides its meta progression asks the player not just to engage with the game on its own terms, but to understand it so thoroughly that they're able to use the grammar of the game to subvert the destinies that seem at first unavoidable. To save Solaire, you must not only follow his route, but understand how to subvert it. To find the secret ending, you must see the ways the game prevents you from moving forward, then probe the holes in those defenses.

This demonstrates a tremendous amount of faith in the player's willingness to engage with the game over and over in order to truly divine its secrets. The willingness to allow each player to experience a different subset of the game clearly still persists in the later games (Elden Ring in particular is a master class in this), but even there as long as you touch everything once you'll see all there is to see. Dark Souls takes one bold step further by making so much at the heart of the game's text so readily missable, thereby demanding that players not only engage thoroughly but thoughtfully as well.

Even if you wanted to do that today, I'm not sure it would matter. We live in an age of endless wikis and discords which instantaneously disseminate information to players. That's not necessarily a bad thing—to catalog a thing so painstakingly is another way to love it—but it does mean that vanishingly few players will play a game five times through without ever looking up its secrets on the internet. But still, Dark Souls remains, a brilliant monument to that moment when it was possible to make a game just like this.

What a brilliant mess this game is. Breath of the Wild, when it came out, felt like a flawless jewel. You could complain (and I did!) about how weapon durability disincentivized engaging with the combat, or bemoan the relative weakness of the dungeons, but those were all gripes around the edges of the monumental fact that they had near-perfectly delivered on the promise that open world games had been making for decades. It was reacting to the larger world of video games in a way Nintendo largely refused to do, and at the same time it was like nothing we'd seen before.

Tears of the Kingdom is very much like something we've seen before. The core conceit is identical to its predecessor despite the different array of magical abilities, and even the plot is largely unchanged: Zelda is gone, again. The great evil is back, again. Climb the towers, find the shrines, do the dungeons, save the princess.

But to see this as just more Breath of the Wild is also to miss the point. The first game was constrained by its immaculate crystalline structure. It had to be the open-world game. Tears of the Kingdom could never be that because that's already been done, and it uses the extra freedom of the younger sibling to get weird with it.

In a lot of ways, this weirdness isn't for the best. The control scheme is onerous to say the least, particularly when engaging with the construction mechanics. The combat scaling is way off, with enemies either taking ten hits from a top-tier weapon or dying immediately. Once you get a feel for the patterns in the depths, they're largely empty and repetitive.

But damn if it isn't also interesting. The truth I keep coming back to is this: although I think Breath of the Wild is a "better" game in some abstract design sense, I lost interest after about 100 hours. Meanwhile, I've spent twice that playing Tears of the Kingdom and I'd be happy to continue if only there weren't more games to get around to.

This game takes huge swings, and while not all of them hit the ones that do are incredible. You only have to glance online to see the videos of mechs and drones players have built. The depths feel genuinely terrifying. Fusion is fully brilliant, simultaneously solving durability and making room for countless moments of discovery. There are genuinely good boss fights for maybe the first time in any Zelda game.

And I could rhapsodize endlessly about the way the world interconnects with itself. To my mind, the only real justification for the concept of "open world" is the idea that your actions as a player have non-local effects on the world you exist in. Breath of the Wild gestured at this, but Tears of the Kingdom fully embraces it. Conversations continue across the map from one another as NPCs wander from place to place. Refugees you meet in one region return home to another as you rebuild their houses. The world feels alive in a way that games seldom attempt and almost never achieve, and I love it for that.

i can play as ninja wearing an among us backpack and kamehameha a team of darth vader, master chief, batman and el chapulin, killing them all instantly and then take a selfie before getting rapid sniped by a team of ricks and mortys
can you honestly tell me this game doesn't rock