You wake up in an unfamiliar world. A strange tablet appears before you, explaining that you’ve been asleep for a thousand years. You question it. “Sorry, I meant 100 years.” it beeps back at you. Strange. You shake your head and leave the cave you woke up in.
Once you get the hang of the controls – easier said than done when the tutorial tells you that pressing B makes your character jump, despite it clearly being assigned to X – you begin to explore this world, running down hills and through small copses of woodland.
The trees overlap slightly, their branches clipping through each other. There must be deep magic in this place, you realise. The feeling of unease perseveres as you meet an old man cooking apples – at least, you think they’re apples – over a fire.
“Well met, stranger!” he says.
You ask who he is.
“I’ve generated your reply, in a mysterious, conversational tone,” he replies. “I’m just an old fool who has lived here – alone – for quite some time now.”
There’s something uncanny about the figure, and it’s not just his manner of speech. When you look closer, you notice that hisseven mangled fingers are one with the stick he holds, a grotesque combination of flesh and wood. Is this a part of the game’s horror? Is it your job, as the Hero of HAIrule, to save him from this affliction?
He tells you that it helps tocook your apples with glueto make them deliciously sticky – all in a perfectly mysterious, conversational tone, of course. You remember his comment from before. Something’s not right about this man, and it’s not just his malformed digits.
Eventually, you stumble on a church.Something about it seems oddly familiar. Is that Notre Dame’s famous West Facade? Inside, there are flowers reminiscent of the Midgar slums.
You shake the feeling off. All churches look a bit similar, right? It’s just a coincidence, your mind conflating unrelated steeples and–no, you’ve definitely seen that stained glass window before. You spend a minute Googling stained glass windows to no avail. But the uncertainty persists.You’ve definitely seen this before.
Hours later, you’ve escaped the confines of the Great Plateau and are exploring the wider world of HAIrule. It’s beautiful, in its own way, but you’re able to’t help notice oddities with every step you take. Are those mountains overlapping? Is that grass texture repeated over and over ad nauseam?
An NPC tells you there are three Rs in the word Goron, for some reason. You wonder how many are in the word moron. You were only trying to help him rebuild his village, and ended up in excessive debt to an anthropomorphic raccoon for some reason. Everything is disparate, nothing makes sense. An ally who joined you to wrest control of a mechanical elephantstarted talking about white genocide in South Africafor some reason. Does South Africa even exist in this universe? Well, if elephants do, you suppose…
The mechanics, too, don’t feel wholly original. Surely the large language model that programmed this game couldn’t have intended to include the Dark Souls “You Died” text? Are you even allowed to use the Nemesis System, legally speaking? And no flesh-and-blood developer would have implemented weapon degradation.
You haven’t even touched the narrative yet. Zelda is in HAIrule Castle, you understand that much. But you thought you understood the existing timeline, and none of this makes any sense whatsoever. Youdon’t remember any Hero of Justicewho brought the world to order. Maybe you need to replay the old games, refresh your memory. An AI couldn’t be wrong, not if it usesas much energy in a day as the Empire State Building uses in 18 months. All that power has to be for something, right?
Epic CEOTim Sweeney promised the future of gaming. He promised that we wouldn’t have to pay more than ten developers for their time, their expertise, their wonderfully intentional game design, any more. Did that affect prices? You look at your $80 receipt for Breath of the AI-ld andsay a prayer to St. Pitchford. This is real gaming. Just a board of executives, a handful of focus group surveys, and an LLM to piece the rest together. What more could a gamer ask for?
