The Adventures of Elliot borrows exhaustively from The Legend of Zelda.
Zelda finally gets her day as Hyrule’s hero in an almost-legendary adventure.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
Tunic focuses on the most unexpected elements of its forerunners in order to reward players with a rapturous sense of discovery.
The game’s aesthetic is wondrous, but you may remember Eastward most for its disrespect for the player’s time.
For better and worse, the game lacks for the trailblazing go-anywhere spirit of Breath of the Wild.
It’s an addictive, delightfully rowdy experience in spite of the creaky, decrypt gameplay and engine.
The Pathless ultimately buries anything it might have to say in a stupefying level of cliché.
Windbound is an exploration game whose sense of exploration is painfully rigid.
It’s impressive how much the simplest acts here remain so gratifying hour after hour.
From a standpoint of action, Breath of the Wild goes out of its way to step beyond every Legend of Zelda title before it.
Ironically, the game grinds to a halt whenever it indulges in callbacks to the Legend of Zelda brand.
It leaves the combat to speak for the story and trusts its murderer’s row of cool ideas to, well, murder players.
The game suggests identity and heroism arise from communal ties as much as they do from individual traits and struggle.
The initial joy that comes from mashing buttons and watching Link and his cohorts slash down mindless scores of imps, goblins, lizardmen, wizards, and dragons gives way to a steadily increasingly pile of nitpicks when repeated over several hours.
It takes note of the finger-wagging gripes unreasonably lobbed at the original and tweaks details to elevate an already fantastic journey to towering heights.
Brawsome has gone out of its way to ensure that these top-down adventures never grow too wearisome for the player, and to allow for bite-sized or full-length play sessions.
I knew the game was something special early on when I hoisted the Goddess Sword from its formerly eternal resting place and raised my Wiimote aerially to signify that I was its rightful master.
The game’s superiority to its precursor is easy to discern, at least in terms of its next-gen graphics.
Steeped in history but not bogged down by it, Ōkamiden is a grandiose adventure that also manages to remain chipper and airy.