Nintendo’s newest Switch game, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, offers a grand, gorgeous and deeply interactive adventure — one that exceeds the high quality of the system’s 2017 launch game, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

Why it matters: Surpassing Breath of the Wild means clearing a very high bar.

• Zelda, hailed for giving players unprecedented freedom to explore a vast and mysterious world, is regarded by many critics and game developers as the best video game ever made (or close to it).
• It is also one of the best-selling console games of all time, with nearly 30 million copies sold and counting.

I played the new Zelda for more than 50 hours over the past two weeks, regularly wandering from its main quest to indulge in its many alluring diversions.

• Launching on Friday, the sequel remixes and improves Breath of the Wild’s approach, dropping players into a lengthy fantasy adventure designed to encourage ingenuity.
• It's full of great puzzles and interesting characters, and offers improvements to most of Breath of the Wild's signature features. (If you liked Shrines or Koroks last time, they're even more interesting to deal with now.)

The best things about the game:

• Its new crafting powers that allow our hero, Link, to assemble makeshift contraptions — like so much virtual Lego — out of logs, planks, wheels, wings and more. I initially worried it'd be too awkward to grasp, but a lengthy opening section serves as a surprisingly thrilling and empowering builder tutorial.
• The return trip to the same virtual Hyrule from Breath of the Wild, now several years later. Most game developers, Zelda team or otherwise, set sequels in new places. But for Tears of the Kingdom players who went through its predecessor, there's much to be gained by discovering how the places and people from Breath of the Wild have changed.
• The new Ascend ability that lets Link magically swim through ceilings to the floor or land above. It had a Tetris effect on me and got me wistfully looking at ceilings in my own house and wondering, "What if?" It also feels like a throwback to pre-Breath of the Wild Zelda, when Link regularly gained upgrades that let him move through a space in weird but wonderful ways.
• Many, many surprises best left unspoiled, including how big this game world actually is.

Go deeper: Review: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom surpasses its predecessor

Nintendo may have a hot game looming, but its Switch console is significantly slowing down.

• The company said this week it expects to sell 15 million new Switches in the 12 months ending March 31 2024, down from 18 million last year and 23 million the previous year.

Be smart: The Switch will be seven years old next March, a year older than when Nintendo replaced its last breakout system, the Wii, with a follow-up machine, the Wii U.

• But it has yet to indicate when a Switch successor is coming.

👩🏻‍⚖️ Settlement payments to more than 1,500 current and former workers at Riot Games over gender discrimination claims range from $5,000 to $156,056, according to a new court filing.

😲 Pokémon development studio Game Freak is continuing to make games outside of that hit franchise, with the next one, codenamed Project Bloom, coming from Take Two Interactive’s Private Division label.

☹️ Ubisoft has laid off 60 customer service workers due to “organizational changes,” according to a company statement provided to IGN. The French gaming giant rarely cuts its workforce.

📈 Capcom says it sold nearly 42 million video games last year, up from 33 million the year before. The totals include nearly 4 million copies of its Resident Evil 4 remake in its first week of release.

👨‍💻 Roblox has 66 million daily users, up 22% from a year ago, the company says, though it continues to post losses.

⚽︎ Electronic Arts reported big earnings for three months of 2023, including $1.9 billion in net bookings (player spending on games), with strong performances by FIFA and Apex Legends.

🎮 Activision says that more than 26% of its workforce are women or nonbinary, a slight increase from a year ago. A similar percentage was reported for leadership roles, a 4-point increase from a year ago, according to company data.

🍿 The Tribeca Festival in New York City this June will feature several upcoming video games, including Chants of Sennaar and Goodbye Volcano High, along with a screening of a documentary about game designer Hideo Kojima, who will be in attendance for a live Q&A.

🤔 Eurogamer, a leading online games publication that jettisoned a 10-point review scoring system several years ago in favor of a four-tiered recommendation system, has resumed scoring games. This time, they’ll use a five-star rating scale.

• “We rarely used Avoid, because it always felt a bit mean,” Eurogamer's editor-in-chief, Tom Phillips, said of the badge system.

Friday, May 12

• The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (Switch) is released.
• A new public beta for Diablo IV (PC, PlayStation, Xbox) begins, running through Sunday.

Saturday-Sunday, May 13-14

• Don’t forget Mother’s Day on Sunday!

Monday, May 15

• A quiet Monday.

Tuesday, May 16

• Humanity (PC, PlayStation; available in VR and non-VR) is released.
• Ubisoft reports quarterly earnings.

Wednesday, May 17

• Take Two Interactive reports quarterly earnings.

Thursday, May 18

• Firmament (PC, Mac; available in VR and non-VR) and Veiled Experts (PC) are released.

Friday, May 19

• Lego 2K Drive (PC and console) is released.

Warning: Tears of the Kingdom is disturbingly realistic.

• Its in-game newspaper is understaffed.
• To borrow a joke from my Twitter followers, maybe print is just dead in Hyrule, and everyone's reading the news on Link's in-game digital tablet.