About a month ago, one of the most interesting games (whether it’s a blockbuster or not) of 2023 came out: Hogwarts Legacy. Like millions of others, I picked up the game and got ready to start my new life as a wizard student at the famous School of Magic. The game was received lyrically: both critics and audience turned fans and rewarded the game with high scores. We also share this opinion: feel free to read my colleague’s review. I really enjoyed Hogwarts Legacy…but I still have some mixed feelings about it. We’re now a month away, so it’s time to think.

I have to admit, Harry Potter was a huge part of my childhood: I devoured all the books and watched the movies a few times. So my inner child was really excited when I first started Hogwarts Legacy. The early hours were full of magical moments: the wizard visiting Gringotts Bank, seeing the magnificent Hogwarts castle for the first time, getting the famous sorting hat on my virtual head, and there were more that gave me goosebumps. Hogwarts Legacy immersed me in the “wizarding world” as never before, and at first it seemed to me that I had a candidate for “Game of the Year” on my hands.

But after a few dozen hours, I’ve come to terms with (what I call) “open world syndrome”. After so many Merlin Trials, Thieves’ Camps, Invisible Pages quests and countless other activities, I’m starting to get tired and the magic of those early hours is starting to wear off. The realization came that Hogwarts Legacy actually (certainly after the main story menu credits) gets quite monotonous if you want to do literally everything in the game. The full set of activities consists of 603 items (!) and it takes a lot of time to figure it all out. Agreed, you can unlock a good chunk of that simply by playing the story missions, but the vast majority of collectibles and challenges are not covered by this and have to be achieved separately.

Now I might sound very critical of a game so beloved by the public, but don’t get me wrong: I think Hogwarts Legacy is a very cute and entertaining game…but it falls into the same trap as so many other games. Open World Games: Quantity is chosen over quality. There are too many of the same activities and the world is just too big, to remain interesting enough in the long run. The biggest difference between Hogwarts Legacy and other games in the genre is that Hogwarts Legacy is wrapped in a layer of Harry Potter paint. This is probably the biggest reason why people cover the lack of diversity and innovation here with the invisible cloak of love.

This brings us to this week’s final statement: Is Hogwarts Legacy really as good as the hype has us, or is it just another open world game full of side quests and activities that eventually gets boring? And is the Harry Potter element enough to elevate this open-world game above others in the genre? Did you complete Hogwarts Legacy 100% full or did you quit somewhere along the way after shouting “REVELIO” hundreds of times? Let us know in the comments below!