Hands-on with Tears of the Kingdom’s Zelda-meets-Minecraft construction set

For decades, solving puzzles and figuring out how to advance in Zelda games followed a well-established pattern. You'd hunt around a dungeon for a key item, use that item to get around some obstacle and/or beat a new boss, then explore the overworld until you found an area that was newly accessible with your shiny new item.

It's been over six years since Breath of the Wild turned that basic design on its head. Traversal abilities like climbing and floating made it much easier to carve your own path through the game's wide open world, to the point where players can technically run to the final boss after completing the tutorial area. The game's early introduction of Link's magical new abilities has also led players to craft some incredibly inventive and unintended solutions to the game's shrine puzzles and combat challenges.

After spending an hour or so playing a near-final build of Tears of the Kingdom, it seems clear that the newest Zelda sequel is determined to go even further in letting players craft their own creative solutions to the game's challenges. In doing so, though, the game seems to have gotten even further from the basic Zelda gameplay loop that served the series so well for so long.