The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
Scored 10/10. Breath of the Wild's Hyrule, tripled: sky above, depths below, and a toolbox that turns players into engineers.
A perfect score needs a game with no honest argument against it. Tears of the Kingdom is that game. Nintendo took the most celebrated open world ever made and stacked two more worlds on it: sky islands above Hyrule, and the Depths, a dark mirror continent underneath it.
ULTRAHAND CHANGES WHAT A GAME CAN ASK
Build a bridge. Build a plane. Build a ridiculous war machine that falls apart gloriously and still gets you there. Fuse, Ascend, Recall, Ultrahand: four powers that turn every shrine, every enemy camp, every cliff into a question with a hundred right answers, most of them yours.
WHY 10
Breath of the Wild scored 9.8 on this page for inventing the freedom. Tears of the Kingdom takes the deduction back: it keeps the freedom and removes the splinter. 10/10, the second perfect score on this bench, and the argument is the game itself.
THE INDUSTRY NUMBER
Two scoreboards live on this page and they never mix. The score at the top is Moe's, argued above and signed. The industry's number, the collective critic aggregate, sits here for reference: Metacritic 96. Same game, two verdicts. Read both, then play it yourself.
