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Here's an unusual admission for a reviewer to make. I haven't finished The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I've yet to uncover swathes of its vast map. Much remains for me to do and discover, and my game is still rife with rumour, mystery and surprise. This is partly because my life is no longer compatible with monstering a giant open-world game in a week, even when it's work. But it's also because of the kind of game that Breath of the Wild is.The reason I feel comfortable telling you this is that this isn't a game that any one player can just know. You can map it out, sure - spend weeks or months enumerating all its components and secrets. But the game's magic resides in its combination of sheer size with sheer openness, with apparently freewheeling yet meticulously interlocked systems, and with a scarcely credible level of detail and craft in its making. When a game world like this meets players, alchemy happens. My meandering and half-complete run, full of digressions and doubling back, feels as meaningful as the game of a completist, or of a player who skipped the main quest to take a run straight at the end boss with armour and weapons scavenged from the map's darkest corners, or a player who chose to ignore the storyline altogether in favour of unlocking the mysteries of Hyrule's most elusive Shrines, or of a player who simply headed north to see what lay there. Rarely has a game been so tempting to restart while you were still playing it.
Our hero Link awakes on a high plateau in the middle of Hyrule's rugged vastness. Sheer cliffs drop off all around, which conveniently confines us here until we've learned the ropes and earned the paraglider that will guide us safely down to the world below. But those cliffs are also there to give us an unhindered and honestly breathtaking view over the world we're about to explore, from cursed castle to hazy wetland, boiling volcano to parched desert. Amid the misty watercolour washes of this fantasy landscape, you can pick out the sharp glow and alien forms of ancient Sheikah technology: towers that fill in the map, and Shrines that house combat tests and physics puzzles. It's an incredibly promising view, and not a misleading one. Nintendo's first open world is up there with Azeroth and San Andreas as one of the greatest game worlds ever created.
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