Everything Games & More

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is here, but Cardy, Matt, and Emma haven’t had a chance to play it yet so you’ll have to wait until next week to hear all about it. In the meantime, the opportunity is taken to design our own (weird) dream Zeldas made up of bits and bobs from other games. Before that, get on board for some quick Honkai: Star Rail thoughts.

Has a game ever gotten better after you’ve finished its main story? Give us your co-op game suggestions and drop us an email: ign_ukfeedback@ign.com.

As a sequel to Breath of the Wild, Tears of the kingdom of course has numerous connections to its predecessor from the world the game takes place in to its characters to its story. But it also has an extremely tangible connection: it reads your Breath of the Wild save data, and uses that data in Tears of the Kingdom for a feature that we’re all surprisingly emotional about.

WARNING: Spoilers for what this feature does begin below the video. Read at your own risk!

Like Breath of the Wild, Tears of the Kingdom includes horses that you can seek out, tame, and ride around the fields of Hyrule. In fact, we have an in-depth guide to horsing around in our Wikis section.

The Legend of Zelda timeline is fairly disconnected between games, meaning you don’t necessarily have to play the previous entry in the series to enjoy the latest. That doesn’t necessarily apply to Tears of the Kingdom, however, because the developers always planned on making it a Breath of the Wild sequel.

So if you haven’t already played Breath of the Wild and are wanting to dive right into what our Tears of the Kingdom review called a “A remarkable sequel that somehow raises the bar”, you may want to slow your roll.

With the whole world dissolving into an apocalyptic, primordial abyss, your band of misfits sets out into a nightmarish land to save everything by destroying corrupted pieces of reality beneath an ancient mountain. They’ll probably fail, taken down by ambush, infighting, bad luck – but maybe, just maybe, fortune favors them and they destroy some unspeakable horror… and then gear up for the next run. That’s the routine in Darkest Dungeon 2, where I was never sure if I’d journey from desperate despair to delicious delight, or from frolicking fun to futile frustration, every time I booted it up.

If you posted gameplay or fanart – or really, anything at all – about The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild over the past six years, congrats: you may have had a small hand in influencing its sequel.

In a long interview published by Nintendo, producer Eiji Aonuma, director Hidemaro Fujibayashi, and designer Satoru Takizawa talked about how the reaction to the previous game guided their approach to Tears of the Kingdom, and how it encouraged them to give players even more freedom.

When asked if they ever watch fan gameplay videos, Aonuma answered, “there was some talk about them among the development team.

Jack Black has created yet another catchy song – and this time, it’s a love letter to video games.

Following up on his song “Peaches” for The Super Mario Bros. Movie, his band Tenacious D released “Video Games” with an accompanying music video that sports more game references than you can count on two hands. You can watch the full video here.

It opens up with an animated version of Jack Black singing about how he doesn’t play video games (we all know that’s not true) with bandmate Kyle Gass playing guitar. As the video goes on, Black begins to name a bunch of video games he’s played… while Gass gets killed by various video game creatures and characters.