several months ago now on an episode of game studies study buddies--i do not recall which one, because of the elapsed span of time, which in and of itself feels significant--i made some comments about how i was playing Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and had some thoughts on its whole deal i wanted to write up. some folks seemed interested and i was like "oh don't worry it'll happen, i just need to finish the game!"
several days ago, i booted up my switch to check out the mario rpg remake, and was surprised to see the Tears of the Kingdom icon in my little gallery, because i have not played the game since early july and quite honestly forgot it exists.
"oh, you were gonna write about that," i said to myself, "because it felt so very odd. maybe you should finish it up and get your thoughts collected and--"
i didn't finish the game. i didn't even dive back in. i realized i had no interest in the game, at all. i realized the months had whittled away whatever desire i had to see the thing through to its end, to see how the game's final gestures aligned with or complicated the thoughts i'd had while completing the first two dungeons and tooling around hyrule building trucks for koroks.
and maybe that was the point, the result, the output. maybe me bouncing off the game is the trajectory to trace from the thoughts i was having.
so here we go:
🔔 This really sharply nails down a lot of what we found so... low-grade frustrating about Tears of the Kingdom. Not enough to truly dislike it, because it didn't produce even a strong enough emotion for that, but rather, to find dispiriting about it, to watch as our once white-hot passion for the series evaporated in the face of an endless procession of lifeless 'challenges' whose solutions are so open-ended as to be devoid of character.
I'm sure a lot of people got a lot out of the 'play YOUR way' pitch and had a great deal of fun building snazzy machines, but... once the novelty wore off for us, the total lack of character in the puzzles presented to us left us feeling as though completion would've been more like a participation trophy. It only made the supposed return to more 'traditional' Zelda-style dungeons feel more like an empty afterthought when we found them even less involving or exciting than Breath of the Wild's elaborate karakuri puzzlebox Divine Beast dungeons.
I think this is one of the fundamental failure modes of the 'play like a designer' trend, which is it becomes a justifiable reason to design less, to care less about whether or not a game has any particular memorable moments in its own right, rather than merely a sandbox for the player to bring their own experiences into. And it's a tricky nail to hit, at that, because no sandbox system, no toolbox of mechanics, can TRULY account for everything a player might do. You can 'design your own experience,' but the nature of 'design' as a verb is still proscribed. It makes me feel less involved, not more, if I have to strain against the limitations of that system to find a way to express the experience I DID want.
I think much of this is an assumption that players want to be in communication with an audience(and specifically, a social media audience), rather than in communication with the people who actually made the game. I am firmly in the latter camp. I get an effusive thrill out of figuring out not 'how to get past the puzzle,' but rather, 'how did the designers want me to get past this puzzle,' for that flickering hint of understanding I can have with people half a world away, for the deciphering of intent and logic, for its nature as a puzzle, a thing that conceals whose purpose is to reveal.
Or I suppose I could glue together a helicopter and fly over it and never bother. And then do roughly the same thing for every other puzzle. It's for somebody, assuredly. Just not us.
