We spent 90 minutes with The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, which captures the creative essence of Tears of the Kingdom in a totally new way.
This story is part of our Summer Gaming Marathon series. The only constant in the Legend of Zelda series is change. From its perspective to its art style, Nintendo takes some surprising risks when it comes to one of its most valuable franchises. That often pays off. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, for instance, was a bold open-world reinvention of the classic adventure formula that put an emphasis on flexible gameplay and emergent moments born from creative thinking.
It’s a simple system. If an object has sparkles around it, Zelda can stand next to it and hit a button to copy it. That echo is then permanently added to her inventory and she can summon it out of thin air any time after that through a Tears of the Kingdom-like horizontal pop-up menu. The catch is that each echo has a summon cost, represented as yellow ticks. In my demo, I only had three ticks of summon power to work with at a time .
By the end of the demo, I’m solving puzzles and beating bosses in ways that go against the most obvious solutions. It’s the same small thrill I get whenever I complete a shrine in Tears of the Kingdom in some inventive way. Where Echoes of Wisdom feels more approachable is that it doesn’t require players to engineer machines to achieve that. Summoning is a quick process that makes trial and error easy. Echoes aren’t resources that go away either, so there’s no punishment for experimentation.
Classic Zelda design What’s especially exciting about Echoes of Wisdom is that it’s a bit of a return to form, even with its entirely new puzzle system. It’s a top-down adventure in the style of developer Grezzo’s Link’s Awakening remake . There’s an overworld grid to explore, heart pieces to find, and traditional dungeons to complete. It’s been over a decade since the last original Zelda game in this style and the formula hasn’t missed a step.
For one, there are clever boss designs that play more like action puzzles. In the dungeon’s end fight, I have to take down a Talus by weakening a core that moves around its body. There’s an obvious way to deal with that, but I discover a few alternate ways to tackle the challenge just by summoning creatures and seeing what happens. What can an aerial Keese do that a grounded Darknut can’t? That’s where fights get interesting.
Grezzo Nintendo Nintendo Switch Summer Gaming Marathon Summer Gaming Marathon 2024 The Legend Of Zelda: Echoes Of Wisdom
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