I was over 20 hours into Hogwarts Legacy before it revealed that, on top of being an expansive RPG with skill trees, wizard combat, crafting, environmental puzzles and loads of sidequests, it’s also a quaint home-decorating game with a splash of zoo management. This is a much larger game than I think anyone was anticipating and as I’ve completed the main quest and dozens of sidequests over 50 hours, I’m still surprised by how good each individual element is.
It suffers from a meandering start and distracting technical issues, but once I was set free to explore the entirety of Hogwarts and miles of countryside surrounding it, I enjoyed Hogwarts Legacy in the same ways I did The Witcher 3 or Red Dead Redemption 2: moseying across a convincingly rendered world at my own pace, letting myself disappear into a character I’m invested in.
Like those open-world classics I just mentioned, Hogwarts Legacy is a game you’ve probably played before, but also a rarity: a big-budget RPG attempting to bottle up all of the prestige, splendour and expectations of a massive media property into a seamless sandbox. For the most part, it nails it. This is Harry Potter’s Arkham Asylum moment – a game telling its own story in an established world, unshackled by the restrictive deadlines and creative boundaries of a movie tie-in, created by a studio that was itself once relegated to obligatory marketing products like Toy Story 3: The Video Game.
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