However carefully open-world video games are designed, whatever delights they lay out for you like a buffet of fun-morsels, they can never account for the unpredictably dumb actions of their players. I have been invited to Nintendo’s European headquarters to spend a couple of hours with The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, probably this year’s most-anticipated video game, and so with the whole of Hyrule stretched out before me and a tantalising fort full of grimacing Bokoblin monsters to fight just down the hill, I choose to instead spend 20 minutes constructing a flame-throwing fortress on wheels.
Using storied adventurer Link’s telekinetic powers to pick stuff up and smoosh it together, I painstakingly line up wheels on wooden bars that I’m using for axels, throw together wooden boards to create a boxy chassis, and take it for a couple of troubleshooting test drives before I attach flamethrowing gargoyle heads to the front. Unfortunately, the flamethrowers unbalance it, and as I careen down the road my self-made vehicle flips over and sets itself on fire. Link falls off and I watch as my hard work turns to literal ashes, its few non-flammable components tumbling unspectacularly to the ground. It turns out you should not try to make a flame-throwing go-kart out of wood.
