Nintendo took the same map and made it feel new again by handing you the tools to take it apart yourself.
The first time I fused a boulder to a stick and swung it into a Bokoblin camp, I laughed out loud in my living room, alone, at eleven at night. That's Tears of the Kingdom in one dumb sentence. Nintendo took the same Hyrule from Breath of the Wild, added a sky full of floating islands and a subterranean layer called the Depths, then handed you four new abilities that let you build, glue, climb through ceilings, and rewind time on individual objects.
Ultrahand ate my weekend, and I should be honest about what I produced with it. The internet was building working cars, cannons, and a functioning crossbow turret by day three. I built an ugly raft with a fan bolted to the back, to cross a lake I could have swum, and then a cart, and then a worse cart. Seventy hours in, my proudest creation is still a plank with five wheels, three of them load-bearing. The game never once made me feel bad about that, and I think that's the whole design philosophy in one interaction: it trusts you to figure out what a vehicle is, and it accepts whatever you answer.
“Nobody told me I was doing it wrong, because there wasn't a wrong way to do it.”
Fuse is the better ability, though, and I'll defend that against the flying-machine crowd. Ultrahand gets the headlines because a homemade hoverbike screenshots well, but Fuse changed how I played minute to minute. Weapons still break, and now you can staple a rock, a fan, or a monster part onto a stick and get something usable out of nearly anything in your pockets. My favorite combo all game was a boomerang fused to a Keese eyeball, which homed in on enemies from across a courtyard. Durability stopped being the thing I resented in Breath of the Wild and became a puzzle I was constantly, happily solving.
The Depths are the surprise. A pitch-black mirror of the entire overworld, lit only by the glowing seeds you throw ahead of you, and unsettling in a way this series almost never attempts. Fair warning: it's one biome repeated under the whole map, and around hour twenty of darkness I started teleporting out the moment I'd grabbed what I came for. The mood does the work the variety doesn't, right up until it can't.
The story didn't hold me. It's memory fragments scattered around the map again, and finding them out of order means your own thoroughness can spoil the plot's one big reveal, which happened to me at maybe the worst possible fragment. The four sage questlines also each end in what is functionally the same cutscene, four times, nearly word for word. I stopped caring somewhere in the second one and went back to building bad carts.
Shrines are shorter and punchier than Breath of the Wild's, and the four regional temples are proper dungeons with real identities this time. The Lightning Temple is the consensus pick for best of them, and it probably deserves it. My favorite is the Fire Temple anyway. It's a five-story minecart puzzle under Death Mountain that most players I've compared notes with found tedious, and I'd replay it tonight. Something about laying your own rails to a solution scratches the same itch the whole game is built on.
The Switch is past its prime and you feel it, mostly in the Depths, where heavy particle effects drop the framerate low enough to notice. It never cost me a fight. It cost Nintendo some of the magic trick.
I still haven't seen the credits. There's a lake in Lanayru I need to cross first, and this raft is not going to overbuild itself.