Nobody Saves the World scratches a Zelda itch I never knew I had

polygon.com:

I’ve never played a Zelda game for the combat. Even The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, a game whose countless overlapping physics systems encourage creative violence, remains in my memory for the puzzle-solving and pure joy of discovery. But Nobody Saves the World, the recent release from Drinkbox Studios, shows me what a combat-centric Zelda game might look like. And I’m enthralled.

Nobody Saves the World — which is available on Xbox Game Pass right now — puts you in the shoes of a shapeshifter named Nobody as they travel from dungeon to dungeon across a sprawling map, all the while unlocking new corporeal forms with which to defeat hordes of bad guys. You can be a rat; you can be a mermaid; you can be a bodybuilder, a stage magician, or a slug. You can eventually combine their abilities, playing chemist as you grant the ranger’s poison effects to the horse’s “gallop” attack. As Owen Good wrote in his review, it’s a concise, coherent, steady dopamine drip of a gameplay loop.

It may seem odd to compare a bizarre action-RPG to the comparatively restrained Zelda series, but structurally speaking, the two are extremely similar: The hero traverses a large overworld, meeting an array of disillusioned characters with their own discrete side quests. Nobody’s map itself strongly mimics those in several top-down Zelda games, most notably that of A Link to the Past, with a castle in the center and various surrounding biomes. Crucially, the protagonist also delves into minor and major dungeons, the latter of which contain story-critical collectibles.

It’s what you do within those dungeons that sets the games apart. Whereas Zelda’s temples rely on environmental puzzle-solving, Nobody’s interiorsplace their emphasis on crunchy,