DISPATCHES AUGUST

Like most people, every waking minute of the past week has involved playing and consuming Tears Of The Kingdom content, but while my timeline has been completely inundated with crazy contraptions and crucified Koroks, it’s Ascend that has surprised me the most out of Link’s arsenal of new powers

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Being able to create pretty much anything with Ultrahand is obviously the main draw here, but my withered, feeble brain is limited to maybe a few lopsided wheels either side of a plank of wood before it gets overwhelmed. However, being able to phase through pretty much any obstacle completely subverts my understanding of what an adventure game can be, in the best possible way.

Ascend feels like the culmination of the old traditional Zelda approach, as if the ambition of A Link To The Past’s Dark World or A Link Between Worlds’ wall-merging mechanic has finally been realised, this time without a fixed camera, in an endlessly explorable 3D world. There have been so many frustrating deaths where I have tried to glide or climb to a seemingly unscalable tower, where the instinct has been to rant to a friend or draft a spicy take on how I miss the days of Majora’s Mask – but then I remember I can just swim through it, right to the top. I’m having to retrain my brain to look at the world in a different way. Every time I successfully pull off a good Ascend it gives me that giddy feeling, like I’m cheating or breaking the game – in the same way the giant laser robots more talented people are assembling and sharing on Twitter must make them feel, but this time with just a single button press. It’s just pure magic, and I can’t see myself scaling geometry in any other video game without longing for something like this. Rob Funnell