How to check how long you’ve played Tears of the Kingdom

Jul 17, 2023

By Jay Peters, a news editor who writes about technology, video games, and virtual worlds. He’s submitted several accepted emoji proposals to the Unicode Consortium.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has officially been out for 10 days, which means that it’s now possible to see how many hours you’ve spent torturing Koroks exploring the vast lands of Hyrule by checking your account profile on your Switch. Strangely, you’ll only be able to see this number on your Switch 10 days after you started playing a game — it’s a weird limitation that’s been in place for the Switch since it launched.

Here’s how to check your profile on your Switch to see how many hours you’ve played the game. (This will let you see how long you’ve played other games, too.)

You can see a more detailed activity log if you’ve registered your Switch to the Nintendo Switch Parental Controls app. Unfortunately, it seems that the app only captures playtime from after you register your Switch, so if you haven’t already set that up, the playtime listed on the app won’t be as accurate as what you can get from your Switch. I just registered my Switch to the app while writing this article, and even though my Switch says I’ve played 40 hours of Tears of the Kingdom, only 15 minutes of playtime appears in my “Time Played” log in the parental controls app: five minutes of Tears of the Kingdom and 10 minutes of “other,” which includes time on the home menu.

Let me know in the comments how much Tears of the Kingdom you’ve played so far. I’m curious! The game is really good.

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