The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom

Let's do it this way.

Here's a nice indie game for you. Graphics are fabulous and are its high point. Luckily, they could make use a rendering engine from a previous big-budget remake at the studio, though it seems in this instance that they didn't test it well enough and it really strains the hardware it was made for, the Switch 1. Players are reporting lots of stuttering.

The story, well, nothing original here. A princess discovers she has magical powers to save the world. You're given a companion, which is constantly on screen but doesn't do much except provide some dialog. The world is of adequate size, and again was lifted entirely from previous games in a well-known franchise, so not much creativity here: you've seen these areas and creatures and met these characters before. The story's pacing is a bit awkward in that there is an "ending" of sorts right in the middle. It feels like you're almost there, but—tricked you—there's another half of the game ahead.

The main issue is that, like many indie games, there are lots of elements that could have used more work and polish, as well as several poorly applied, if not fatal, design decisions.

The structure is main-quest-side-quest. Side quests are an opportunity to change the pace of the story and to allow for delightful gameplay alternatives, but as with so many indies the opportunity is missed. Too many quests feel like either busywork or a forced excuse to venture into a gameplay area. And there's one big problem with them: they are missable. In fact, many side quest prompts appear only after certain story milestones are reached. This means that you have to constantly scour the whole map, revisiting places, in order to make sure you get them all. The devs are essentially forcing players to search for the gameplay, and that's a meta-gameplay loop that is boring and feels unnecessary. Why not enable all prompts from the start? There's virtually no in-game logic to this, too.

The core gameplay is also not very original, but it is mostly fun. You can generate objects and creatures after you encounter them once, which you then use to solve puzzles. Some puzzles are environmental, some are tactical (combat), and there are boss fights, which are sometimes puzzles, too. Unfortunately, the quality and difficulty of the puzzles is all over the place. Many are trivial, some are very good, and some are unnecessarily difficult.

The problem is that the difficulty is not so much about thinking them through, but in wrestling with the controls. See, the world is essentially a 3D grid of blocks, but the devs thought it best to use analog sticks for movement, reserving the d-pad for other functions. Creating objects requires pixel-perfect direction, a task that analog sticks are notoriously bad at. You will aim carefully ... and then have the object appear in the wrong place.

This is merely annoying when trying to solve puzzles at your own time, but the game has many timed challenges, ostensibly optional but still frequently encountered. This is where the awful controls go from merely annoying to extremely frustrating. Like, rage-inducing frustrating.

Generally speaking, timed challenges are widely disliked and are a terrible way to add length and difficulty to a game. I would even say that they should never appear in adventure games. There was one challenge that took me 20 tries because the stupid princess kept aiming at the wrong stupid direction, and every mistake guaranteed failure. Restarting the challenge required unskippable dialog (and paying in-game money). There was a lot of loud cussing in my gaming den.

The item-picking UI is also frustrating, and bafflingly so, because it is a foreseeable disaster, moreover one that should have been diagnosed during playtesting. It works well enough in the beginning of the game, but as you start to accumulate dozens of creatable items it can take a loooooong time to scroll through them. There are a few sorting options, but they are only marginally helpful. Towards the end game it feels like you're spending more time scrolling through items than playing the game.

Alright then, a flawed indie adventure game that nonetheless has its charms. We've seen many like this: the Oceanhorn series, Ogu and the Secret Forest, Tchia, the list goes on. But the punchline is ... this is an official Zelda game! From Nintendo! I bet you didn't see that coming.

I'm not personally invested in the quality and continuity of the Zelda franchise. There are some great games in the series, but the world itself is, for me, just a recognizable backdrop for adventure games of varying quality. I would honestly prefer it if each of these games had its own original world (as in the Final Fantasy franchise), but I guess the marketing geniuses at Nintendo know best. I am grateful for the reboot started with Breath of the Wild, as it provides exciting newness and a sense of discovery. Not so with Echoes of Wisdom.

There you have it. I did have fun with it, but I think its control issues and other flaws might prove too frustrating for many, especially the more casual gamers who would be drawn to it.