Discover Top Posts Tagged with #breatheofthewild

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My fandom keychain collection is live! You can find this keychain and more in my shop now.

I'm really happy to finally release these. Making keychains has been so much fun, and I'm excited to continue to make even more. ♥️

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Finished Zelda! Prints available at my #wondercon aa table f-28! #wca2018 #zelda #breatheofthewild #art

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Sharing some Breathe of the Wild love! @ECCC

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Breath of the Wild: Puzzles, Powers & Player Freedom

There are a great many things that make The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild an incredible game. Whether it’s the vast landscapes that stretch far beyond what you could possibly imagine, the mysteries of the Guardians and an age gone by, or perhaps the joys of hearing Beedle let out comical high-pitched squeels whenever you present him with a rare bug, there’s likely something for everyone to enjoy in the latest game in the series.

But while playing the game one morning, Zelda once again managed to showcase what it is that makes the game so special and just what sets it apart from the games that have come before it. Unlike the Zelda games of the past, Breath of the Wild (or BotW for complications sake) offers you puzzles that don’t require a single particular solution. While you would normally have to do something precisely or complete a number of steps in the right order to solve a puzzle in the likes of Ocarina of Time or Wind Waker, BotW throws you into a problem and instead presents you with a number of ways to get through it. Player freedom is not just limited to how you can explore this gigantic re-imagining of Hyrule; it’s extended into how you complete puzzles too. With every sense of the pun intended, it truly is a breath of fresh air for the series.

Puzzles in games have always been something of a strange concept. From gaming earliest hours, puzzles have always been an obstacle between point A and point B. Whether it’s a point n’ click adventure or a third-person shooter, puzzles have always been thrown in to vary the gameplay and to make sure that the path a player travel isn’t a boring one. Games like The Witness and Limbo, in more recent memory, have brought about change in the way we look at puzzles in games, but even masterclasses like the Portal series teach us one thing: you must do X to advance. Instead, we are now faced with doing X, Y, Z or whatever number you choose! While completing a puzzle in a manner that’s not supposed to work can happen, it’s not often supposed to.

While exploring an enemy infested marshland, I found myself at the foot of an aged shrine awaiting my completion. Without a moment of hesitation I grabbed my Sheikah slate and opened up the shrine, ready to tackle the puzzle within. What met me was something reminiscent of the old classic, Frogger.

Blocking my path to the shrine at the end of this puzzle were a number of lanes with flowing water. The first one was easy enough: as wooden boards moved from right to left in the current of the water, some simple timing allowed me to race across the board and jump up to the ledge. Easy! The first part of the puzzle was done.

But the second river was where things got interesting. Now far wider, three sets of boards would flow across the gap, and in alternating routes too. So, I faced a dilemma: do I frantically attempt to run along the boards and zig-zag between them? If I didn’t get the timing right I’d fall in the water and I didn’t overly want that. Or, maybe I could find another way to solve this? In fact, I came up with another two ways using just one of the multiple abilities you learn early in the game.

Cryonis is a power you earn from one of the first trials in the game. It allows you to form pillars of ice out of and within bodies of water. This had a number of practical uses during my adventures so far, too. I’d used the power to raise chests out of deep and/or freezing water. Furthermore, I had used this repeating pillar effect to create stepping stones across a large, bitterly cold lake. Doing so meant I could go straight over the lake instead of taking a lengthy alternate route all the way around it. As it was far too cold to swim across and survive, ice-based stepping stones were a much more welcoming solution.

So now, facing the second section of this trial, I toyed with the idea of using the aforementioned method to circumvent use of the adrift wooden boards entirely. If I had done it before, I could certainly do it again. Better yet, BotW would allow me to and actively encourages you to think outside the box to solve any problems you’re faced with. Despite this, I went with a different plan.

With the boards flowing downstream, I used a wall of ice pillars to trap the boards and stop them from moving. With the ice in place, I had formed a solid and stationary bridge straight across to the shrine on the other side of the river. This is considering that, if I wanted to, I could have raised ice pillars directly under the boards as they were moving, creating more of an air-born walkway if I wanted. Of course, this is just several uses with only one of the abilities at Link’s disposal; it’s safe to assume more solutions could be cooked up with the large number of powers and possibilities handed to us. Really, that’s the point.

Player freedom is the core of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Free from the shackles of bottlenecking and funneling, the gameplay and puzzles of the game have a completely different feel to them. Rather than feeling clever because you’ve figured out what the developers wanted you to do, players are instead rewarded with a feeling of empowerment because they have solved something themselves and in one of the many ways they can do so. While Hyrule may be shackled down by evil, Breath of the Wild is as free and open as it can possibly be. If the countless positive reviews and ratings it’s receiving are anything to go by, the series is forever better for it.