Tears of the Kingdom Wins IGN’s 2023 Game of the Year Award
Posted on December 16 2023 by Kristen G. Rosario
While we’re still debating whether or not Tears of the Kingdom should’ve won the top prize at this year’s Game Awards, praise for the game has been rolling in from multiple media outlets throughout this month. One particularly impressive accolade given to Tears of the Kingdom comes from IGN, as they have officially named the new Zelda title their 2023 Game of the Year. The runner-ups for this category include the remake of Resident Evil 4, Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, Alan Wake II, and Baldur’s Gate III.
According to the narration in the video above, the fight for this award continued to go back and forth between Tears of the Kingdom and Baldur’s Gate III, as IGN staff were inputting their votes.
They had the following to say about why, ultimately, the newest Zelda title took home their biggest prize:
This is the game many of us had marked on our calendars, and for good reason. We couldn’t wait to see what a sequel to one of the best games of all time could achieve. But it turns out that wasn’t the right question.
Tears of the Kingdom didn’t just deliver more of what we wanted – that would be too on the nose. Instead, the team at Nintendo put the challenge to us, asking players what could we achieve if given the right tools? Nintendo clearly watched hundreds of videos of what Breath of the Wild players were able to create — making flying machines from barrels and carts using abilities that were clearly designed for other things. Nintendo went ahead and gave us proper tools to create mechs, flying bombers, rocket ships, land rovers, kaijus… you name it. We’re still building, and will likely keep building.
In a broad sense, Tears of the Kingdom and Baldur’s Gate 3 aren’t too dissimilar. Both offer players expansive amounts of freedom, to a point where we feel like we can meaningfully impose our wills in both games. But there’s a moment very early on in Tears of the Kingdom that serves as a kind of switch in the imagination. Obtaining the Ultrahand is the key to Tears of the Kingdom’s whole philosophy. Suddenly puzzle answers aren’t just figuring out the right color-combination or finding the right switch. The solutions to all Tears of the Kingdom’s challenges lie all around Hyrule itself, in the forests and caves and sky and depths.
It’d be a disservice to say that Tears of the Kingdom is just more Breath of the Wild. If anything, it makes Breath of the Wild seem like an extravagant test run for what Tears of the Kingdom manages to achieve. When Shigeru Miyamoto created the Zelda series, he said he was inspired by the explorations he took as a young boy into the forests and caves of his hometown in Sonobe, Japan. 37 years later and this dream of exploration seems fully realized.
It’s fair to say that, while the video game industry itself took major hits in 2023, the effort put into these top-tier games shows that developers from all over have kept fighting. There’s always the chance that Tears of the Kingdom will not win the awards a Zelda fan would expect it to. However, that just means that it will be all the more satisfying whenever the game does get to take home some gold. For instance, we can appreciate the recognition given to Tears of the Kingdom as Nintendo Game of the Year at the Golden Joystick Awards and Best Action/Adventure Game at The Game Awards.
What do you think of Tears of the Kingdom winning IGN’s Game of the Year award? Do you think it’s been a dominant 2023 for Zelda? Let us know in the comments below!
Source: IGN
Kristen G. Rosario is an Editor who joined Zelda Dungeon back in September of 2015. His current goal is to become a full-time video game journalist, hoping to eventually gain a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism. While he pursues that dream, he not only takes care of his adorable dachshund Angel, but also helps run a YouTube channel with his brother. The Zelda series is a quest he hasn’t fully completed yet, but hopes to get there one day.
