Christian Donlan with my favorite review of the brand new remake. It's an absolute treat to read.

I have a friend who first played The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time back in the day, when the game was only just released and he was home from university for Christmas. This is objectively the best of all times to play any video game: not Christmas specifically, but dropped out of the regular world and faced with a few weeks filled with nothing pressing to do whatsoever. Years later, though, my friend told me that the magic of the game didn't just come down to the playing of it, but the way that the playing of it unfolded.

Here's what he meant. He'd play all day, curtains drawn, family ignored, working through dungeons and pelting across Hyrule Field on Epona. Then in the evening he'd call his girlfriend, who was back with her own family for Christmas. She always wanted to know what he'd got up to that day. And not in East Sussex; she wanted to know what he'd got up to in Hyrule.

So as he played he took regular breaks to tell someone else about what he had encountered, and what he had discovered, and what he had yet to overcome. It is my bright delight today to be able to tell you that, around thirty years later, having just revisited the game in Nintendo's new remake, Ocarina of Time is still worth telling people about. It's still an adventure so surprising, so satisfying, so moving that I need to talk about it.