3D Dot Game Heroes

The sense of living within the empty spaces of Link's life is palpable. Even in the first few hours you'll pass beckoning mouths of caves, stumpy brown signposts, wriggling clumps of grass and squat little bushes as you plod around. Being hit by an enemy will knock you diagonally back in a way that feels exactly right, and even the brisk clatter as you extend your shield to block them seems to have rung out from your own memory. Swinging a sword is as basic, and as brilliant, as it is in Zelda, even if you can upgrade things a bit over time and enjoy a flashy over-sized effect. There are tweaks, then, but they're tiny and mostly aesthetic.

Again: it's lots of fun, but if you're in the wrong kind of mood this will probably be disquieting. Everywhere you look the game is willing to show you things someone else dreamt up: dungeons with those distinct rows of pillars turning rooms into mini-mazes, castles with the familiar runways of carpet spread over stone floors.

People present you with gifts, which you hold aloft with a half-familiar heroic trill, and almost every enemy, every location, every individual sound cue has a clear precedent. The metagame quickly becomes spot the reference and - if you're playing with spectators of a certain age - pinning it down correctly before anyone else does is a pretty good kind of social multiplayer for the terminally boring (I loved it).

How far does the onslaught of the familiar go? Further than you might expect. The first section of the game has a kind of tutorial, albeit a knowing one, threaded into it, and it's telling how entirely unnecessary it is. Your childhood was the tutorial for this game: you may be exploring a brand new kingdom, but the bulk of the early adventure at least is pure finger memory.

It sounds joyless if you put it like that, perhaps, but there's a simple if slightly unearned magic to be found in a return to these recognisable spaces, jazzed up somewhat by that effortless transition into three dimensions.

Everything's colourful and cute, enemies explode in tangible blasts of little cubes, and there's a real sense of genuine physicality to the world, brought on by depth-of-field blurring and some pleasantly jerky animation that calls to mind stop-motion techniques.

And you can thank progress for the fact that you can play through the adventure, should you wish to, as a pixellated Michael Jackson, or Barack Obama, or even Peter Molyneux if you think you can capture that enigmatic smile, via a frankly brilliant character editor that also allows you to construct very simple animations.