The Legend of Zelda—the original one—has a reputation for being hard and cryptic. What nobody tells you is that the manual and fold-out map give you enough information to figure most things out. Later games made the series about solving environmental puzzles and fitting key items into locks. Here, progress is made by navigating an open world and making inferences from vague directions and environmental cues. That might seem uninteresting or outdated, but Tunic proves that this structure still stands; the manual can even be in an alien language. Combat is some of the best on the N.E.S.; the importance of wall-cover and the brutality of some dungeon rooms might be unmatched in the series. Breath of the Wild is faithful in its abandonment of items and its pursuit of a discoverable world, but maybe it falls short fleshing out the underground. 7