The new Legend of Zelda is a toy box of delights

By Tim Martin

There’s a moment in most video games where the player bumps, with sinking heart, against the limits of what a game can do. Open a door where the designers haven’t programmed an interior, scale a mountain you're not supposed to climb, or interact with the world in a way that hasn’t been preordained, and you’ll be abruptly reminded, as your avatar runs desperately on the spot, that freedom in these virtual environments is often just an illusion. Want to explore the wrong bit of an “Assassin’s Creed” level? Divert from a mission in “Grand Theft Auto V”? Chop wood or light fires in the glacial wastes of “Skyrim”? No chance.

I’ve spent a week now exploring “Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild”, the latest instalment of a 31-year-old series and the flagship game on Nintendo’s new Switch console, and I haven’t once felt this kind of limitation. “Go anywhere, do anything” has been a common boast for years in the field of open-world games – so called because they offer wide, explorable landscapes, rather than a sequence of discrete levels – but the promise has never been kept as faithfully as it is here.