I never would have expected Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom to channel my favourite obscure open-world survival game

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has just unveiled two very exciting new abilities for Link. Fuse can snap different materials together to create an infinite array of new weapons, and Ultrahand, which Link can use to create more complex combinations. In the trailer, that means things like a simple raft, but we've already seen things like a car, a hot air balloon, and a primitive helicopter in other videos.

I originally assumed that those were items we'd be able to find in the world, their primitive nature suggesting that perhaps a smart Bokoblin had cobbled them together, or perhaps some long-lost civilization. But the suggestion that we can make them ourselves, combining items at will to create whatever we like, reminded me of a very different game.

During the early lockdowns of 2020, I stumbled upon Scrap Mechanic, a vehicle-creation game in the vein of indie classic Besiege. You'd piece together your ride from scratch, adjusting for power consumption, suspension, and weight distribution, before using it to complete various challenges. When I came to Scrap Mechanic, those challenges had just been opened up into an open-world survival game, and over time we kitted out our various vehicles to gather and transport resources, each member of the fleet designed to achieve a different goal, from ferrying passengers to hauling lumber.

It was a fascinatingly iterative experience, offering a real sense of ownership over everything we achieved. Our crowning glory was an absolute tank, a genuine gas-guzzler with built-in hydraulics, storage, and even sleeping quarters that could in theory be used to overcome anything that the world of Scrap Mechanic might throw at us.

What we were shown in the new Zelda trailer was not that - series producer Eiji Aonuma's first creation was little more than three logs stapled together with an outboard motor on the back end. But Scrap Mechanic showed me that in an open world as sandboxy as Tears of the Kingdom looks, two things are an inevitability; first, you have to get started somewhere, and while your first creations might be embarrassingly cobbled together, they're a success as long as they get you somewhere; second, left to its own devices, a community will create incredible things.

We've spent years watching the Breath of the Wild community living up to that second point, and it's clear that Aonuma's creations are a little closer to my first point. But even those cursory efforts immediately reminded me of Scrap Mechanic, and even if I still have no idea what Tears of the Kingdom actually is, I'm suddenly much more excited.

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