Garry’s Mod was a weird experiment. It took all of Valve’s library and smushed them together into one big sandbox, giving you a doohicky glue gun that can pick stuff up with a laser. If you really want to, you can make a car out of a bathtub, or a boat out of corpses. It’s absurd, but for some reason, it works. Yet, no game has ever tried anything similar until, weirdly enough, Tears of the Kingdom.
We finally got a ten-minute gameplay clip where producer Eiji Aonuma sat down to show off all the new mechanics. One of which is ‘Ultrahand’, an ability that lets you pick stuff up with a laser and stick it to other things. It’s just Garry’s Mod’s physgun with a new name, only in a story-driven triple-A game with actual objectives and goals. Making a boat in Garry’s Mod out of a random assortment of Half-Life props is pretty fun, but it’s ultimately useless, and eventually, it gets boring. I can only make so many giant Mad Max-style trucks until I tap out and play the actual Mad Max game.
Here, Ultrahand has value. Let’s say there’s a lake I can’t swim across because Link has the stamina of an asthmatic ten year old with hay fever on sports day (AKA me a couple of years ago). In (Struggling to) Breath(e) of the Wild, I’d probably say ‘f*** that’ and go climb a volcano where I’ll slowly burn to death as I fend off the heatwave with apples. Again, that was me a couple of years ago. But in Tears of the Kingdom, I can pick up a few logs, stick ‘em together, and smoothly sail across that lake. It’s not some gimmicky crafting menu or predetermined schematic, so I can make the boat however I want. I’m half tempted to build a replica Titanic for this tiny lake, or at least try. The fact I can outside of a sandbox like Garry’s Mod is wild, but I’m so excited to get stuck in.
The whole appeal of Garry’s Mod is that you can do whatever you want, something BOTW echoes in its design philosophy. We’ve seen people construct catapults, shoot their horses across the map, fly without the glider, and fling giant boulders into enemies at the speed of an F1 car. It was revolutionary for the open-world genre because it was so freeing, to the point where players are still finding unique ways to reach areas and fight enemies half a decade later. Stick a physgun into the mix and there are endless possibilities on top of already endless possibilities.
We’ve seen very little of what can be done so far—two boats, a helicopter, and a car. No doubt fans are dreaming bigger, especially those with a tendency to push BOTW to its limits. I’m not very good at BOTW as is, let alone when toying with the mechanics in those kinds of ways, so I doubt I’ll make anything absurd with TOTK’s new toolset, but it’s something that can be as creative as it is meaningful.
Garry’s Mod’s physgun can be used to construct elaborate machines in combination with other in-game tools, whether it’s fully functioning motorbikes made out of flimsy boxes or a working Mario map with headcrabs in place of Goombas. It flies over my head completely. What I love is building scrap bases, pretending it’s one of the rebel outposts in Half-Life 2. I decorate the interiors with all kinds of props, maybe designing a firing range where the targets are old Combine scanners, while the outside looks like shipping containers strung together, surrounded by a barbed-wire fence defended by repurposed turrets. In Tears of the Kingdom, I might build a houseboat to store all my ill-gotten goods, or maybe I’ll have a crack at a floating mansion.
I’ve long wanted that freedom to be able to pick things up that I find scattered around me to turn them into something new, using the world itself as a toolbox to express my creativity. The physgun was perfect for it, and I’m more surprised it’s taken this long for another game to ‘riff on it, even unintentionally. I never expected Zelda to be the spiritual successor to Garry’s Mod I’ve long waited for. When TOTK is finally in my hands, I won’t bother trying to save Hyrule like some green-hatted schmuck with an ocarina, I’ll be gathering up all of its logs to make a castle of my own.