I think Dark Souls is not a fluke, it shows that when executed well (which very may be hard), it is additive. It makes things feel more organic.

From article : "Maybe one cave system has a place where it connects to a dungeon, which connects also to a basement in some guy’s house in the middle of nowhere."

This just sounds better than having the black and white delineations between spaces. Yes!

> Maybe one cave system has a place where it connects to a dungeon, which connects also to a basement in some guy’s house in the middle of nowhere

To an extent, tears of the kingdom really does do this a few places, but not enough. It really is fun finding new holes into the underworld from a cave, and using the caves to get into the shed in that one village or to the tower etc

Something I've occasionally wished for is a classic-style Zelda game[1] where partway through the adventure you discover that all the dungeons are actually adjacent to each other, and you can open up passages connecting them turning it all into one big Metroidvania experience.

[1]: i.e. one with 4-8 dungeons and new navigation/combat tools in each, not a sandbox like BotW

I was surprised that ToTK was so focused on the underworld. The sky islands are much nicer.

That said, I was also surprised ToTK had the same plot as BotW. Like, Ganon takes over the castle and then they defeat him and then they go into the basement and he's just there and he takes over the castle again?

Safety can come from control over the world though. Consider Minecraft and Terraria (especially older MC), where monsters can spawn in most areas outside some minimum radius from the player. Neither is particularly "scary" because they give the player straightforward ways to control the situation. In fact, monster spawning leads to a lot of emergent gameplay in them.