I recently reviewed The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (BotW, 2017) and shared my thoughts after 10 hours with Tears of the Kingdom (TotK, 2023). After logging another 10 hours, I’m ready to revisit the topic. This time, I’ll expand on the emulation experience, share updated impressions, and explain why I don’t plan to finish the game anytime soon.

On emulation

In my previous post, I described poor framerates and graphical glitches when emulating TotK. Since then, I’ve tried several additional mods that improved performance and resolved many of the visual issues. Unfortunately, new problems emerged: frequent freezes and extreme slowdowns—especially in the Temple of Fire, where framerates dropped into single digits, making the game nearly unplayable.

Emulation will likely improve over time—especially after the Switch 2 releases and Nintendo’s attention shifts from the current console. It’s also possible that newer mods or more powerful hardware than my Steam Deck OLED could make TotK playable today. Still, as someone fairly experienced with tinkering, I can confidently say: unlike BotW, TotK is not currently a good experience on the Steam Deck OLED. The technical barriers are high enough that I can’t recommend it in this form.

Second impressions

In my first review, I described TotK as a more linear, story-driven reimagining of BotW—targeted more at new players than returning ones, due to the extensive reuse of Hyrule’s terrain. It seemed to trade BotW’s open-ended freedom and grounded design for a more guided experience.

While TotK reuses BotW’s map, I now appreciate that it reflects the passage of time. Even for someone who played BotW recently, like me, the changes help make exploration feel fresh.

The game also adds a significant amount of new content: wells, caves, sky islands, and a vast underworld. But these additions are also where TotK starts to lose me. Two of BotW’s defining strengths—freedom of movement and a grounded world—feel diminished here.

Freedom of movement

In BotW, most of the game played out on Hyrule’s open surface. Besides shrines and divine beasts, few areas were enclosed, and nearly every location was reachable without fast travel. You could just point your horse—or paraglider—and go.

TotK’s layered world (sky, surface, depths, caves) complicates that freedom. Navigation is often disorienting, and fast travel becomes a necessity rather than a convenience. The result is a less organic, more fragmented style of exploration that lacks the magic of BotW’s wide-open traversal.

Grounded world

Despite its fantasy elements, BotW felt grounded. Its terrain invited real-world instincts—climb that peak, follow that path, ride the wind.

TotK, by contrast, leans into surrealism: sky islands, glowing depths, floating structures. The world starts to feel artificial, like a dream or a puzzle box. That shift breaks immersion for me and makes it harder to engage intuitively. You’re no longer navigating a world—you’re playing a game with its own unfamiliar logic.

On device-building

I touched on TotK’s vehicle-building system in my earlier review. With more time, I still find the core idea clever. The physics engine is robust, the parts are versatile, and solving problems through creative engineering is genuinely satisfying. In some ways, this system restores the sense of freedom lost to the game’s more guided structure.

But building devices is tedious. The interface often misinterprets your intent, and fiddling with part alignment gets old fast. Yes, there’s an unlockable feature that lets you recreate previous builds—but that only highlights how long and frustrating the manual process can be.

Conclusion

Between the performance issues on my hardware and a gameplay direction that doesn’t fully resonate with me, I’m putting TotK aside for now. Maybe I’ll return in a year or two—once emulation matures and I’m in the mood for something different. For now, I think I’ll stick with BotW.