There’s a moment early The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, in one of the very first sanctuaries, when I felt a shiver of pure excitement run through me. I had been given a simple task: get to the other side of a deep chasm that drops you to your death using the new Ultrahand ability and an assortment of wooden planks, stone hooks and a single fixed rail. The solution was obvious enough, so I used Ultrahand’s ability to essentially superglue everything to something else and put together a square board for Link to stand on and a brick hook to attach to the rail. I then hooked my crude device to the rail and climbed aboard. Everything worked just as I expected and I was able to cross the canyon easily enough. But this simple act of seeing the problem, literally drawing up the plan and executing the solution, felt so satisfying that by the time I’d crossed the canyon, I’d burst into a smile that swallowed my face.
While there were many similarly satisfying moments after that, I would never smile like that again, and that initial excitement would slowly be replaced by a kind and familiar friendliness.
