In his review of Atomic Heart, our Rob Zak mentions how gratifying it is when a game invites you to experiment with its toys, and it’s as if Nintendo is closely listening. The Fuse ability featured in the latest Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom showcase seems to embody a similar level of limitless fun and freedom, transforming the familiar Breath of the Wild landscape into a veritable toybox for players to rummage through as they please.
With this Fuse ability, you can combine various elements found in the environment or even from your pouch, such as rocks or mushrooms, to enhance durability or grant special effects to your weapons and items. Your trusty arrows, for example, can also become homing missiles when outfitted with the right monster part, and the big reveal is how Fuse also allows you to fashion your own customized vehicles and other contraptions from scratch (like the ones seen in the previous trailer) to reach new locations in both the land and the sky.
It’s a joy to witness Nintendo’s ingenious approach to getting past player restrictions like durability and traversal. Instead of discarding these systems, it looks set to masterfully employ them as a springboard into even more inventive player options. Abilities will no longer be confined to certain items or pre-designed shrine puzzles, with the whole world now being reimagined entirely as a puzzle we can solve as we see fit, using everything around us as its pieces; items, monster parts, weapons, or literally any pebbles on the road.
To take down monsters, you’ll need to devise specific contraptions to counter their new forms, such as using a bomb catapult against a giant Bokoblin. The fact that monsters can also wield fused weapons not only serves to eliminate the repetitiveness of previous monster designs, but also acts as creative breadcrumbs for us, the players, to follow in their footsteps and craft similar armaments.
The Fuse ability should easily allow you to bend the rules and decide the flow of the game all by yourself. Boss encounters will depend on how much you prepare beforehand, and how much creativity you put into the gadgets you’re able to conceive (maybe a wind-emitting shield to ward off fire attacks, or a poisoned javelin with a far-reaching tip), but the point is that, more than ever, the flow of fights will be dictated by whatever crazy concoctions you come up with through fusing.
I’m sure we’ll see multiple versions of boss fights and playthroughs, and each player’s journey will be uniquely their own. It might be appropriate at this point to call Tears of the Kingdom an unrestrained Horizon Zero Dawn, or even an Immersive Sim, as it leans more and more into boundless systems-y experimentation.
Tears of the Kingdom is the first Zelda game to give us the tools to make those dreams come true with unparalleled scope and depth, creating the biggest toy box ever seen in a Zelda title, or maybe even a Nintendo game.
