The Legend of Zelda: Breath of Wild

BREATHE IN THE ADVENTURE, AND PERHAPS GET TO THE MAIN QUEST... EVENTUALLY.

Wii U, Switch | $89.95 | www.zelda.com

NINTENDO’S FIRST OPEN-WORLD game Breath Of The Wild wants to tax the grey matter. See those mountains on the horizon? You can go to them, yes, but it is not a simple matter of setting a map marker and following a GPS route. Heading to a mountain-top shrine, you find your way blocked by a large ravine. Do you cross it using the bridge on the horizon, or paraglide across? Could a tree be chopped down and serve as a bridge? Or do you head east, where the landscape might join a mountain path straight to the summit? Whichever route you choose, chances are you’ll get dragged farther off course.

This is a game where you always have somewhere to go, and sometimes even make it there. A land this full of puzzles, secrets and innumerate distractions should feel contrived, yet it feels natural.

At some point, you’ll get around to the main quest. Calamity Ganon has been sealed away in Hyrule Castle for 100 years, but his power is growing; he’s taken control of the four Divine Beasts which are now causing merry hell in the regions they once protected. At the urging of the four tribal elders, Link must free the Beasts of their corruption, so they can then assist him in the final assault on Calamity Ganon. Each involves an errand or two, a set-piece mission to gain entry to a Beast’s innards, a smartly designed dungeon, and a boss fight. The inside of a Beast, while bigger than a shrine, is hardly the sort of complex network of puzzle rooms we’ve come to expect from the Zelda series. Yet that merely speaks to the extent to which Breath casts off the shackles of its history.

Nintendo’s Zelda design ethos has, for decades, involved a slow dripfeed of new, mission-critical items and abilities building up to a final battle dozens of hours later. Not this time. The magic of being given all the tools within the opening hour is the knowledge that the solution to any problem is already at your disposal, and that you can always change tack.

Combat can sometimes be unpredictable. You’ll be hit by things you swore you’d dodged or when the camera position interprets your intended backwards jump as a sideways one.

19 years on, Ocarina of Time is still held up as the high-water mark of one of gaming’s best-loved — and greatest — series. Now it may have to settle for second place.