The shrines - bite-sized dungeons meant to test your knowledge of the game - that defined Breath of the Wild make a return, dotting the expanse of Hyrule in dozens of instances. You can still leap off a cliff and bust out your paraglider, an action that’s as breathtaking as ever. Of course, Tears of the Kingdom doesn’t ignore what came before. But there’s also an entire underground area pitched in darkness - and yes, illuminating your way through it is an exercise unto itself.

You start on the Great Sky Island, a mass of land floating miles above the fields and forests of Hyrule. You can send objects back in time and climb through mountains in seconds. But don’t sleep on Fuse, which lets you combine your weapons with basically anything else you see in the game (errant materials, other weapons, and even bananas, if you really wanna get creative). Link’s new Ultrahand ability arguably presents the most depth, allowing you to fabricate boats, planes, cars, mechs (yes, mechs), and more out of Hyrule’s natural resources.

In other words, there’s a lot to get a hang of. Within minutes, you’ll learn to rethink nearly all of your preconceptions about how an open-world game functions on a subatomic level. If its predecessor - 2017’s near-universally hailed Breath of the Wild - taught you to toss out the rulebook, Tears of the Kingdom teaches you to forget it existed in the first place.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is more than just a sequel.

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