Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (TotK) may not technically be the greatest game ever made—how would you even measure that, between this and Tetris? But it’s already becoming a cultural phenomenon.

The new Zelda (for Switch) came out last Friday, and many of us haven’t been able to put it down since. The latest in a long line of Zelda games, it’s a direct sequel to 2017’s Breath of the Wild, sharing the same map, control scheme, and overall graphical style. Breath of the Wild was already hailed as (another of) Nintendo’s masterpieces, and yet the consensus is that Tears of the Kingdom improves on the original in almost every way.

"I personally think that even at this early stage it's by far the best Legend Of Zelda game. But is it the best game ever made? I honestly can't say," Mark Cruz, owner of the retro gaming YouTube channel The Retro Mark Cruz, told Lifewire via email.

I grew up playing video games that you loaded from a tape into a computer, and I always dreamed of a game where you could roam the world and interact with almost anything. In Zelda, you can do just that. You could essentially make up your own game within a game, build a house, keep a horse, and go out every day to find dinner. But that's getting too far ahead of yourself.