Reviews – Page 14 – Diabolical Plots

GAME REVIEW: The Talos Principle

written by David Steffen

The Talos Principle is an FPS-style puzzle game with a philosophical science fictional storyline, developed by Croteam in December 2014.

The game begins as you, a new being, wake up into existence with the disembodied voice of a god-like being that known as Elohim. Elohim sets you on a series of puzzles in different segments of Elohim’s temples to prove your devotion, to earn yourself eternal life. As you go, you find messages left by previous pilgrims who have gone on the same quest before.

20160921223229_1 There are signs that this world is artificial (such as segments of wall fuzzing out, and that the messages from other pilgrims are in the form of QR codes). From time to time you find consoles that are supposed to be connected to the internet, but the net connection is down–you can still see fragments of locally stored files. You try to restore your internet access by working through the Milton Library Assistant which seems to be a little odd.

The puzzles in the game are focused on finding puzzle pieces that are locked behind barriers so that you have to make it past closed gates or hostile security elements (like mines or gatling guns).

An example of a couple of the items used in puzzle elements throughout the game that I thought were particularly interesting:

Disruptor: A tripod-based device that can be pointed at some other kind of device to disable it. This includes electronic gates, so that you can pass through, mines or guns so that you can pass by them without harm. It has its limitations, such as only being able to disrupt one device at a time, and can only actively disrupt something while the tripod is planted (so, for instance, you can’t carry a disruptor through a gate that is being held open by the disruptor, because picking up the disruptor turns it off). And you have to have a line of sight.
Connector: A tripod-based device that can transmit an energy beam from a source to an arbitrary number of receivers. These can be used to open certain kinds of gates or power other devices. And you have to have a line of sight.

As the game goes on, the main obstacle is the puzzles themselves, but a large part of the game is also the theological/philosophical side of the story. Elohim’s instructions discourage exploration, claiming he knows what’s best for you (he is your god after all, or claims to be). But does he know what’s best for you? What is going on in the outside world? When the Milton Library assistant tries to determine if you are human… are you human? Should you pass the test at all?

Visuals
Nothing particularly flashy by today’s standards. The look is relatively simple, but functional.

Audio
Quite liked the voice-acting, which mostly was two voices–the voice of Elohim speaking to you directly, and stored recordings from one of the researchers.

Challenge
It had what I would consider a reasonable level of challenge. Many of the puzzles I could solve with just a bit of experimentation. There were some major head-scratchers that took me quite a bit of time to work through, but I did solve every one without using a walkthrough, so that to me was a very satisfying level. Only a small portion of the game had a time limit, so you generally will have all the time you need to fiddle with all the elements of a puzzle to figure out how you want to approach it and to do some trial-and-error.

Story
Good story. Had a sort of golden age SF feel to it, while also having an interesting puzzle element that was sortof unrelated, and also having the conversational puzzles of dealing with the Milton Library Program.

Session Time
Mostly pretty short. The game auto-saves whenever you enter a puzzle area, solve a puzzle, or when you pass from certain areas, so you can shut the game off at any time without worrying about losing progress. The only exception is that some puzzles are complicated enough that it takes some time to set them up to be solved, and if you shut off in the midst of that you’ll lose your progress–and there’s a segment near the end of the game that you have to complete all at once, but that’s unusual.

Replayability
There’s certainly some replayability. There are collectible stars that you can find in certain puzzles if you explore beyond the strictly necessary areas. These stars can then be used to access locked areas of the game (I don’t actually know what’s in them, as I haven’t taken the time to go try to track all of them down, I tried for a bit but found it tedious since there’s no way to tell exactly where to look I spent a lot of time wandering and not accomplishing anything, which when you’ve only got small windows of playtime gets old fast.

Originality
Reasonably original. The set of items used to solve puzzles was an interesting set, especially the focusing crystals. What really made the game interesting though was as a whole, with the god-like figure of Elohim constantly pushing and prodding, and the Milton Library Assistant acting as a counterpoint to Elohim’s supposed wisdom.

Playtime
It took me about 20 hours according to Steam? I spent a disproportionate amount of time on a few puzzles, determined to solve them without help. And I spent some time looking for stars before giving up.

Overall
Enjoyable puzzle game which also has a branching conversation element in the talks with the Milton Library Assistant. Golden age SF feel to the main plot as you try to figure out what’s going on, how much you can trust various players in the system, and so on. For me it was the perfect level of challenge, enough so that it took some effort, but not so hard to be unsolvable.$40 on Steam.

GAME REVIEW: The Magic Circle

written by David Steffen

The Magic Circle is a first person puzzle/action game released by Question in July 2015.

Ishmael (Ish for short) Gilder is a celebrity in the gaming world, the designer of a wildly popular game twenty years ago, a text-based adventure. The fans have been pining for the first person fantasy sequel that Ish has been developing… for the last twenty years. Ish dithers over every little choice, never making firm decisions on anything, and so the game continues to linger in “development hell”. Not even so much as a color scheme, so the game in development is still in monochrome. He has become too emotionally attached to the game so that any actual game could never possibly live up to his expectations, and his ego has become so inflated he thinks of himself as the Starfather god figure from the fantasy world.

You are the protagonist of that game. But Ish is so indecisive, he won’t even allow the protagonist to have a weapon. So, you can’t possibly win an action fantasy game like that. Can you?

But soon you start to hear a voice that isn’t part of the game. A voice that is aware of Ish’s indecisive nature and the embarrassingly incomplete state of the game. And he knows how to help you. He knows where the cracks in the game are, to let you manipulate the environment to your advantage. You can harness energy from cracks in the program, and you can use that to generate glitches to trap enemy creatures. Once you’ve trapped a creature you can manipulate its attributes–its method of movement, its attack type, its passive attributes, its alliances. You can strip them away from one creature and attach them to another creature–make flying wolf, or a biting mushroom, or a flamethrowing rat.

20160527065246_1 The mysterious voice has a vendetta against the Sky Bastards, which is what he calls the programmers (because they manifest in the game as floating polygonal eyes with rotating wait logo for irises, and he wants to use you to get revenge against them.

The game is clearly broken in many ways and you can approach each obstacle from various approaches. You can make an army of creatures to follow you around everywhere, or you can make one creature your tank, or you can experiment with different attributes to find a different way.

As the game goes on, there are completely different kind of gameplay focuses in each one–but I don’t want to spoil the fun to work through them yourself.

Visuals
Fun graphics. Overly simple because much of the game is monochrome, (though that’s justified by story!). They did a good job making it look like a half-finished game. Besides the main fantasy quest game there is also some other segments of an unrelated game you end up, which has a fun but dated look.

Audio
Nice music, which is a nice plot element as well when it occasionally gets messed with because it’s not actually finished. The voice acting is really really good, especially Ish, who is constantly complaining about game design details, and you can find collectible dev audio notes.

Challenge
The challenge level is reasonable, and the game is flexible enough in strategy that you can adjust the difficulty by picking a different approach to the game.

Story
Fun metastory. The story of the game within the game is kindof all over the place, but of course that’s much of the entertainment. The “real world” story is consistently entertaining, and meshes with the in-game story as the real-world actions impact the game world.

Session Time
Mostly, very very short, because you can save at most any point during playtime, so it’s easy to put down. It… can be pretty slow to load, so might not be worth booting up if you know it’ll only be a few minutes of time to play. There are a couple of longer story sequences, which aren’t easy to escape out of, so if you happen to catch one of those at an inconvenient time, then it can be a little aggravating.

Playability
Easy to pick up. The only thing that took me a little bit of time to understand is that traits that you extract/give
Easy to get the controls down, challenging to master the game. The level of challenge escalates well as the game progresses.

Replayability
Definitely some potential for replayability, to get all the collectibles, to try to figure out a different approach to different obstacles.

Originality
Much originality! The FPS format is familiar, of course, but the metaformat where you’re in a game-in-development, where the slipshod state of the game is in itself an obstacle, where the point of the game is to get the game-in-the-game into some kind of releasable format, that all felt new.

Playtime
About 5 hours to finish according to Steam, on one straightforward playthrough. I didn’t take a lot of time to try to seek out every collectible, and there were some areas and abilities that I didn’t fully explore (i.e. the groupthink ability).

Overall
Fun metastory for a game, fun play, nice and flexible gameplay, great humor element as the creator continually sabotages his own creation, and a good human story too as the various real-life people act against each other. A lot of fun, well worth a playthrough. $20 on Steam.

TV REVIEW: Twin Peaks (2017 Revival)

written by David Steffen

The original Twin Peaks was a murder mystery created David Lynch and Mark Frost, which premiered in 1990, and ran for two seasons. The story began with the discovery of the corpse of the homecoming queen Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee). As the town grieves the loss of one of their own, FBI special agent Dale Cooper (Kyle McLachland) arrives to investigate the murder. Charmed by the small town atmosphere, Agent Cooper works with the sheriff Harry Truman (Michael Ontkean) to uncover clues to the mystery. What seems at first an ordinary murder (although unusual in this smaller town), uncovers more strange details and soon everything they think they know is called into question. Even though the main plot of the show was pretty dark, there were plenty of moments of levity, fun moments between characters, intentional awkward pauses. The show has a large ensemble cast who all play a major role at times, many more than would be worth bringing up in a review of this length. The show is well worth a watch, though you might want to keep in mind that it gets weirder as it goes on, to the point where some of the weirdness is just confusing rather than compelling, and if you are expecting the confusing parts to make sense later, they often don’t.

If you are thinking about watching the original series, you might want to stop here, because you can’t discuss the least part of the revival without spoiling some of the most major events from the original.

The original series, which as a whole I would describe as hopeful, especially in regards to the protagonist Dale Cooper, takes a very dark ending. Cooper visits the Black Lodge, a dark and mythical place with figures who speak strangely seeming to spend all their time in red-curtained rooms. He is warned that he might meet his doppelganger there, and if he does, he must face the doppelganger head on, or else the doppelganger will steal his body. In the moment of truth, Cooper flees, and the doppelganger does exactly that, and Cooper is trapped in the Black Lodge while the doppelganger returns to our world in Cooper’s body, and carrying the murderous spirit Bob along with him. The original show ended with Cooper’s doppelganger smashing his own head into a mirror and laughing at the reflection.

One of the first weird things that happened in the original was a strange and vivid dream Cooper has about what he will later find out is the Black Lodge. In the dream, it is 25 years in the future, and he is talking to Sarah Palmer. It’s interesting that the original show set it up that way, and that they timed the revival to air 25 years later, and so they recreate this scene as part of the new show. Cooper is still trapped in the Black Lodge, and his doppelganger has been committing terrible crimes in his body, off the grid. Cooper soon finds a way to leave the lodge, and tries to reclaim his body in our world, but he is soon sent off on a confusing and surreal journey.

The most appealing part of watching the revival is to see all the old characters, see how they’ve aged (much of the cast of the original were high schoolers, so they’re in their early 40s for the revival), see what jobs and circumstances the characters find them in. We get to see Cooper in multiple personas, it is super weird to see him as the surly grizzled doppelganger when we’re used to him being clean cut and chipper all the time.

But overall the revival is… confusing. David Lynch loves the confusing. And not confusing in a mystery novel kind of way, where it all comes together at the end, rather the opposite, it all makes less sense as the series goes on. Entire episodes occurred where I literally had no idea what happened, with long silent stretches (or worse, ear-wrenching terrible noises that were super fun especially with a kid sleeping in the next room). Cooper’s travels through the Black Lodge in particular are whole episodes of nothing but the surreal, with no clear idea where he’s going or what the rules are or anything.

Overall, I thought it was a disappointment, but it was fun to see the old characters again. I just wish it was a more coherent story to go with it.

MOVIE REVIEW: Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation

written by David Steffen

Hotel Transylvania 3 is a 2018 computer-animated children’s comedy produced by Sony. The legendary vampire Dracula (Adam Sandler) is running a successful hotel for monsters in Transylvania with his daughter Mavis (Selena Gomez) and her husband Johnny (Andy Samberg), but he is feeling lonely and depressed that he hasn’t found new love since the death of his wife, although he believes in soulmates so feels that he has already met his one true love (which he describes as “Zing”). Mavis senses his mood, but attributing it to overwork, decides to plan a family vacation, taking a monsters-only cruise. But on the cruise he gets the “Zing” when he meets the ship’s captain Ericka and with this newfound interest, he tries to woo her, not knowing that she is a descendant of Abraham Van Helsing, who had been his nemesis long before, and that she has planned this cruise as a way to trap him and his other monster-kind.

If you liked the previous two movies, you’ll probably like this one too; it’s very much cut of the same cloth, with much of the on-screen time being with the supporting cast of monsters like Murray the mummy (Keegan-Michael Key) and the werewolf couple (Steve Buscemi and Molly Shannon) and the invisible man (David Spade).

But, compared to the other two, I thought this one was a marked improvement in having a central plot that wasn’t one protagonist deceiving his daughter into staying home forever like the first movie, or obsessing over whether his human/vampire grandson is “too human”. There is an antagonist and the plot of the movie couldn’t be resolved by simply not being a giant narcissistic jerk.

MOVIE REVIEW: Hotel Transylvania 2

written by David Steffen

Hotel Transylvania 2 is a 2015 computer-animated children’s comedy produced by Sony. The Legendary vampire Dracula (Adam Sandler) runs a hotel in Transylvania with help from his daughter Mavis (Selena Gomez) and her human boyfriend Jonathan (Andy Samberg). Mavis and Jonathan get married and have a baby they name Dennis (Asher Blinkoff) who is adorable and lovable and apparently very very human to Dracula’s chagrin, because he thinks that his vampiric blood is very strong and will make any of his descendants very vampiric as well. The common knowledge is that vampire kids have to show their fangs for the first time by the time they turn five or they will never show them at all, so Dracula is determined to show Dennis the vampire life and make the fangs show.

If you liked the first movie, it’s very much more of the same, same ensemble cast in general, plus a new red-curly-haired maybe-vampire baby added to the mix.

The first movie was almost entirely based around Dracula trying to build a framework of lies to keep his daughter from being interested in the outside world. This one is very similar in premise in that it’s based around Dracula pretending he doesn’t care about Dennis being “too human” for him and trying to force him to show vampire nature in ever-escalating ways that, if he were entirely human, would be child endangerment in a major way. While the kid was cute, and it was good to see the relationship between Mavis and Jonathan stay pretty solid with a new member of the family in the mix, I found the central premise frustrating rather than funny. Dracula is SO controlling, and where Mavis doesn’t let him get away with it forthright he just sneaks around behind her back and endangers her child in private instead. And despite claiming that he is okay with Jonathan, his utter fixation on making sure the kid is a vampire shows his underlying prejudices (I’m not saying his prejudices are entirely unbased, since humans did kill his wife, but he should have learned by now that those humans were not representative of the whole human race), and pretty much the entire plot of the movie is based on those underlying prejudices, it’s hard to take that as a comedy premise.

MOVIE REVIEW: Hotel Transylvania

written by David Steffen

Hotel Transylvania is a 2012 computer-animated children’s comedy by Columbia Pictures. The legendary vampire Dracula (Adam Sandler), after the death of his wife at the hands of humans, raises his daughter Mavis (Selena Gomez) as a single parent. Frightened of violent and unpredictable humanity, he has made a life for them by founding a five-star hotel in Transylvania just for monsters, and telling Mavis constant horror stories about the human world so she won’t to go. But it’s her 118th birthday now, which means she can make her own decisions and for some reason she still wants to go out into the world. To make matters worse, a human named Jonathan (Andy Samberg) somehow finds his way to the hotel and is not scared away by the monsters, and Jonathan and Mavis hit it off.

It’s a fun idea, and since there’s been three movies to date and a cartoon TV show, clearly the kids especially like it. There are some funny bits, particular from Jonathan as he is an oddball human to have made it so far into Transylvania without being scared off. The ensemble cast (Steve Buscemi, Molly Shannon, CeeLo Green, David Spade, Fran Drescher, among others)

Adam Sandler isn’t super Adam Sandler-ish in this one, so if you tend to hate Adam Sandler movies as much as I do (some notable exceptions exist), I didn’t get that vibe about it. But the main plot of the movie is based around a fragile scaffolding of transparent lies that Dracula has been building for a century–it was pretty clear it was going to crumble at the slightest touch and then most of the basis for Dracula’s relationship with his daughter would be revealed to be completely fabricated and so the relationship between the two most important characters in the movie would be almost entirely built of lies while her father tries to intimidate and force Jonathan out of the hotel so that she can’t get to know him. Especially since Mavis is an adult even by vampire reckoning at this point, this level of interference in her life was more annoying than endearing, and I thought she was remarkably chill about her dad being revealed to have been running a long-term con on his own daughter instead of trusting her.

MOVIE REVIEW: Freaky Friday (Disney Channel, 2018)

written by David Steffen

I’d venture to guess that most people are at least familiar with the premise of Freaky Friday from one of its incarnations or another. In each of the Freaky Friday movies, a mother and a daughter underestimate the challenge of the other’s life until they magically switch bodies for a day and have to deal with the other’s challenges firsthand. The first Freaky Friday movie was released in 1976, starring Barbara Harris as the mother and Jodie Foster as the daughter. The second Freaky Friday movie was released in 2003, starring Jamie Lee Curtis as the mother and Lindsay Lohan as the daughter. A new Freaky Friday movie came out in 2018, starring Heidi Blickenstaff as the mother, and Cozi Zuehlsdorff as the daughter. The movie are linked only by the premise and the title, having no other continuity between them. Unlike the previous films, this one is a musical, and a premiere directly on the Disney Channel.

Katherine Blake (Heidi Blickenstaff) is a single mother of a 16-year old girl Ellie (Cozi Zuehlsdorff) and younger boy Fletcher (Jason Maybaum). Katherine runs a professional catering company, and is looking forward to (but also anxious about) the boost in business in her upcoming featured story about her catering her own wedding, and she just doesn’t understand why Ellie can’t clean up her room, wear nicer clothes, do her hair nicer. Ellie, conversely, just wants to be herself and thinks her mother is too uptight and domineering over everything she does. She is determined to join her friends on “the hunt” a big scavenger hunt through the city that most of the high school participates in as a huge social event, but her mother forbids it because she thinks it’s too dangerous. Before he died Ellie’s father left her a huge antique hourglass, and the two of them get in a heated argument over it, and some kind of magic occurs that makes them switch bodies on the day of the wedding (which is also the day of the hunt). They both have to keep it together and try to get through the day without ruining the other’s life, and they gain new perspective from it.

I really enjoy all of the Freaky Friday movies, the 1976 version I watched over and over as a kid, and I’ve never gotten tired of the 2003 version, and this was as much fun to watch as the others. It’s a fun premise, with a worthwhile (if heavy-handed) moral. For me, what makes them so much fun is watching the acting range of the two main actors. It’s really interesting to see how they can convey the body switch through not just wording and vocabulary, but subtle facial expressions, posture, and speech cadence, and each of the movies is a study just in that alone, to watch an actor play a character that has already been established onscreen by a different actor, and pulling it off. Both of the leads here did an excellent job of that, and it’s enjoyable to see the uptight, always-in-control mom transform into an angsty teen persona and vice versa.

I could have done without the musical component. I like musicals, but I don’t think everything has to be a musical, and I felt like it distracted from what I really wanted to see, the character moments in different bodies, and the nature of musical numbers is that they are by their nature overexaggerating the character moments. This can work in a lot of stories, but for Freaky Friday I enjoy the subtler character moments the most.

All in all, it was a fun movie, but doesn’t have the originality of the 1976 version that started the set, and the 2003 version is by far my favorite of the three–I really like Jamie Lee Curtis’s and Lindsay Lohan’s acting. But if you enjoy the previous movies as much as I do, it’s worth giving it a shot.

MOVIE REVIEW: Ant-Man and the Wasp

written by David Steffen

Ant-Man and the Wasp is a 2018 superhero movie based on the Marvel comics characters of the same names, and is a sequel to the 2015 movie Ant-Man, and also sort of a sequel to the 2016 movie Captain America: Civil War. After the events of Captain America: Civil War Scott Lang aka Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) was put on house arrest for…something he did in that movie which this movie does not exactly make clear (and I haven’t seen Civil War, so, go look it up yourself if you want to know). His daughter from his previous marriage can visit him there, so he spends most of his time making new games to play with her.

At the end of the Ant-Man movie, Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) as Ant-Man succeeded in shrinking down to the quantum realm and returning, which the inventor of the shrinking suit Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) had thought impossible. Pym had spent decades trying, because his wife Janet (Michelle Pfeiffer) had shrunk down into the quantum realm thirty years ago and he had thought her lost until Scott succeeded. For the last two years while Scott was on house arrest, Pym and his daughter Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) have been researching this further, and they have invented a quantum tunnel that will let a person go to the quantum realm and back again. The moment they open the tunnel for the first time Scott has a dream about Janet Van Dyne, and they see that as a sign that Scott has a connection with her from his trip into the quantum realm. But before they can take advantage of that connection, a phase-shifting person in a mask steals Pym’s laboratory that has been shrunken to the size of a roller suitcase and disappears. Hope dons her mother’s Wasp costume for the first time and joins Scott as Ant-Man in the fight.

This movie is, in the spirit of the first movie, a comedy as much as an action superhero movie. I loved getting to see the Wasp, I felt like Hope’s character was underutilized in Ant-Man. Paul Rudd’s comedy delivery makes much of the movie, and makes a great counterpoint to the on-screen gravity that Douglas provides. It’s a great movie for kids , generally lighthearted and fun, and even when they’re facing up against bad guys the bad guys get arrested rather than dying.

One thing that felt like an off-note to me was the after-credits scene, which was very dark in tone if not explicit enough in meaning to be really bothersome for children. Apparently it ties into another Marvel movie that I haven’t seen because it did not make much sense, and I felt like ending on that tone and without any explanation was a mistake for what was otherwise an enjoyable light movie.

MOVIE REVIEW: Ant-Man

written by David Steffen

Ant-Man is a 2015 superhero film based on the Marvel comics characters of the same name. Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) is the inventor of a suit that allows the wearer to shrink and grow. When the wearer is small, their punches land with the same force as when they’re full size, but concentrated onto the area of a pinhead. Pym worked for S.H.I.E.L.D. using the suit until 1989 when he resigned when he learned that they were trying to replicate the suit technology for military applications, and started his own company: Pym Technologies. In the present, Pym’s daughter Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) is working with Pym’s former protege Darren Cross (Corey Stoll), to force Pym out of his own company. Cross is determined to reverse-engineer Pym’s shrinking suit, and keeps on trying despite failure after failure.

Meanwhile, well-intentioned small-time thief Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) is released on parole, but has trouble finding legitimate work because of his ex-con status. Pressured by his ex-wife Maggie (Judy Greer) to find a way to pay child support, he returns to a life of crime to try to break into a safe in the house of an older man who is supposed to be on vacation. What he finds in the safe is the Ant-Man suit, planted there by Pym, and when he tries it on Pym puts him through a crash-course in its abilities (not only growing and shrinking, but being able to control ants using electrical signals). Pym recruits Scott to help him thwart Cross’s plan to perfect the suit.

Ant-Man is as much a comedy as it is an action movie, unusual in the Marvel Cinematic Universe where action is usually most of the focus with humor as a sideline. It’s friendly for kids, though a couple parts could be scary, bad guys are generally incapacitated instead of dying. Paul Rudd has a knack for dry delivery, and he is perfect for this role, bringing much of the humor to the film, and Michael Douglas and Evangeline Lilly are great in their roles as well. I watched this movie with my child and we enjoyed it a lot. I’d recommend it for all ages.

GAME REVIEW: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

written by David Steffen

I thought it was fun to discover the circumstances of the world and Link’s situation in-game with no foreknowledge, so I don’t want to talk too much about the plot so you can discover it for yourself. Unsurprisingly it does fit into the series’ long-term trend of using incarnations of the same three characters and building new stories around them.

As you can tell from even that brief introduction, this game does verge more into the science fictional than past entries in the series. Ancient Sheikah devices might be powered by magic but they are more like what we would call technology, and have a fun anachronistic design that mixes the feel of old temple relics with advanced tech.

You discover the main plot of the game as you finish the first several objectives, to save a world that’s already been devastated from a continuing threat. There are a handful of major objectives you need to do to be able to do that, which are marked on your map early on. If you wanted to just power through the game you could aim specifically for those right away, but there’s also a wide world out there for you to explore, varied landscapes from frozen tundra to burning hot volcano. Exploring will help you find equipment and other enhancements that will make it easier to survive your various challenges, by increasing your hearts, or finding better weapons, or better protective clothing that has special effects such as being fireproof for exploring volcanic regions.

One of the main frustrations I had early on was that the weapons are very impermanent. I’m used to Link finding a sword and then using it forever. But the weapons you find in this game are not very durable–odds are if you get in a fight with a few enemies you’ll probably break at least one weapon in the middle of the fight. Early on I always thought I was going to run out of weapons in the middle of a fight, but I managed to get just enough from scavenging fallen enemies to keep going.

Much of the challenge of the game happens early on between fragile weapons and extreme temperatures that Link doesn’t have the equipment to handle. One piece of goods news is that you get the ability early on to teleport to travel points that you have visited, so if you do get in trouble you can poof to somewhere safe instead of being stuck to meet your doom.

One of the major ongoing tasks with the biggest payoff is to find Sheikah shrines. Foremost because each one comes with one of these waypoints for teleporting and they are scattered all over the map. To find each one you actually have to travel on foot, but once you find them you can then teleport to that specific location at will. So you get a major payoff for each one you find, because your practical travel time to any given point on the map shrinks because every shrine is zero travel time from anywhere else you go. Finding all of the shrines is also one of the major extra things you can do–you don’t have to find more than a few to finish the game, but the game would be a lot harder and take a lot longer if you didn’t have them.

Many of the interesting sidequests involve collecting resources, herbs or stones or small animals, for the use in crafting equipment or elixirs. This encourages you to explore different regions more thoroughly where you may find these, and you can just keep an eye out for them while you’re looking for more major quest things too.

The exploration and sidequests are the best part of the game. If I had any complaints at all it would be that the main quest is kind of disappointing in comparison. I finished it and I was like “oh, that’s it?” but then I happily went back to find more sidequests.

I haven’t found everything there is in the game yet and I plan to go back and play more. I also plan to pick up the downloadable content with some extra quests and equipment.

Visuals
Lovely, especially large scale scenery shots which this game does extroardinarily well, giving a sense of huge scale even though in-game you can traverse it much faster than in real life. It’s a lot of fun to explore Hyrule on a larger scale than ever.

Audio
Great music in a series known for it.

Challenge
Highly variable depending on exactly what you’re trying to do and how quickly you want to make it through the main quest. I found the first part of the game the most challenging because I had only a few hearts to work with and subpar weapons and armor didn’t have the materials or know-how to properly make food or potions to compensate for my handicaps and was still figuring out how to survive cold temperatures and that sort of thing. The rest of the gameplay was challenging enough to be fun, but that very early part was where it was the hardest, probably because I hadn’t caught up to the learning curve yet.

Story
Plenty of story, much of it told in the form of legends about yourself. As with most/all of Zelda games it works on a repeating cycle of incarnations of Zelda and Link and Ganon facing off against each other, always interesting to see how the timeline works, particularly since Ocarina of Time branched it.

Session Time
The nicest thing about the Nintendo Switch is that all games have a short session time, because you can put the console to sleep or wake it at any point, even during cut scenes. So blissfully short because of excellent console design.

Playability
Reasonably simple controls, much of them similar to the control scheme that’s been used since Ocarina of Time, with the Z button used to focus on enemies so you can pivot around them easily. There are probably less things to keep track of because Link doesn’t have the big inventory of usable tools he unlocks as in other games, though there are plenty of functionality between various weaponry and especially in being able to climb almost anything and to paraglide. There are multiple ways to reach many goals, which makes it fun to find one that fits your playing style.

Replayability
Plenty of replayability, whether you just want to explore, or if you’re a completionist who wants to find all of the shrines. Many of them you’ll just stumble across, but to find every single one is quite a challenge (which I haven’t managed yet, I’ve still got about 15 of 120 to go). There are also some unique armor sets that you need to complete specific missions to find to get their special powers.

There is also downloadable content to expand the game with extra quests, extra items, for another $20. I have enjoyed the main game so much I am definitely going to download that at some point.

Originality
Of course it’s part of a long and beloved series of games, so in a lot of ways it’s familiar, but this does mark a very new direction for a Zelda game in the wide-open gameplay. It keeps a lot of the same feel with the different fantastical races and familiar regions, but with much more emphasis on wide open exploration. The addition of the ability to climb almost anything and to paraglide make exploring particularly fun because those open up new ways of thinking about moving around a huge map.

Playtime
I finished the main quest of the game in over 100 hours (mostly in 15 minute increments). If I had been determined to finish the main quest as fast as possible, I could certainly have done so in less time, probably half of that at most, and if someone has an idea where they’re going could probably finish it in significantly less than even that. But the biggest strength of the game is wide world exploration, so if you’re rushing to finish it I think you’ll be disappointed.

Overall
Excellent new addition to a new longstanding popular game series that has already set a high bar. This game is very familiar to fans of the series, but also very new in that it’s much more like an “Elder Scrolls, but in Hyrule” game (albeit without the complicated character leveling system etc). If you’re looking for a game that will take a lot of time to fully explore for your buck, this is a great choice. Lots of action, lots of side quests and crafting stuff, and just the fun of setting out across a completely unknown landscape to find whatever you can find.

Highly recommended, my favorite game in years. $60 for digital download from Nintendo or physical cartridge from various retailers.