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The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild Switch

BOTW director Hidemaro Fujibayashi suggested some players might attempt to complete the game with Link in his underwear. We didn’t expect to face a similar challenge: a remote island transforms Zelda into a survival sim, as Link is stripped of his gear, and forced to scavenge food and weapons to stay alive. It’s a delightfully fraught half-hour of living on your wits; how extraordinary that it should be tucked away where plenty of players will miss it.

The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild Switch

In case you were wondering, it holds up just fine your second time through. This Hyrule is so impossibly, unknowably vast, that only the weirdest sort of completionist will manage to see it all on a single playthrough. And even if they do, they’re unlikely to remember it. The beauty of Breath Of The Wild lies in the fact that, whichever direction you head in, it feels like an adventure all your own. It’s a feeling that more than persists into a second run.

The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild Switch

On the edge of a forest a bard sings of a certain nearby shrine, and there goes our evening. We spend most of it trying to clear out a Bokoblin camp during a persistent electrical storm; of course, all our best weapons are metal. The camp falls eventually, but an even larger threat soon stops us in our tracks. We never did find that shrine. It’s a rare game in which you can spend three hours achieving nothing, and not have it matter at all.