Watch On
Beneath my television sits a small, underpowered rectangle. It’s called the ‘Nintendo Switch’ and I purchased it—in its advanced, glowing OLED form—to play Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. That is its sole purpose—filling that single hole in my PC’s gaming library (yes, yes, I know you can black-magic your way to Zelda on PC, but consider that I am very lazy and stupid).
Except maybe that hole isn’t there anymore. Maybe we’ve finally got Breath of the Wild on PC—truly on PC—with the advent of Tire Boy. It’s a game where you roam windswept, verdant plains, make prominent use of a glider, and help the world’s strange denizens with their travails and woes. Plus, you are a boy that is also a tire. That’s also a factor.
Revealed at Day of the Devs, Tire Boy looks very much like Link got into a horrible accident at an autobody shop. You play a boy who is, for about ⅔ of himself, simply a boy. He has all the normal boy accoutrements: arms, legs, a t-shirt. And then where his head should be, his neck instead resolves into a great tractor tire, looping out of his esophagus and connecting between his feet, just above ground level, in a neat 360.
Which is the stuff of nightmares, of course, but I have to admit the whole thing looks quite charming, especially when you hear its very amiable devs chat about it excitedly. “Tire Boy is fast and nimble,” declares the studio, which seems unlikely to me. If I were a boy that was also a tire, I think I’d be taking some serious hits to my dexterity, and yet there he is, doing battle with giant toad-monsters and rolling gaily across the countryside like it’s actually regular humans that are badly designed ones.
It’s aggressively Breath of the Wild-flavoured, which I mean only as a compliment, but looks infused with enough imaginative weirdness to make it definitively its own thing.
Your main quest is all about repairing a huge radio transmitter to get in touch with lost travellers, for instance. Plus, on top of being a boy that is a tire, Tire Boy spent his childhood being raised by a large owl named Nestwijk, and it sounds like figuring out why your head is a tire—what happened to your family of presumably also tire-headed kin—will be a lynchpin of the game’s story. At one point Tire Boy picks up an acoustic guitar while roaming the open world. I’m not going anywhere with that observation, I just wanted to make you aware of it.
I’m into it, even if my Switch is now more obsolete than ever, and I will be linking up (get it? Like the Zelda guy) with Tire Boy as soon as he arrives at an undefined point in the future.
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