Hands On: Zelda: Echoes Of Wisdom Brings Tantalising Creativity To The 2D Template

It’s fairly safe to say that everyone was pretty jazzed when Nintendo announced The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. We haven’t had a new top-down Zelda game since 2013’s A Link Between Worlds, assuming of course you don’t count Tri Force Heroes, and if that was your mindset, we wouldn't entirely blame you.

But the real test to see if all this non-swordy-style gameplay could actually work is actually playing it. Thankfully, Nintendo graciously invited us to do just that, so we’re the experts on the matter now. Accept no substitutes.

Our 80-minute playthrough began at the very early stages of the game, just after meeting Tri, the little wisp-cum-fairy that makes the entire gameplay possible (phew). We had to manoeuvre our way past some guards, and wouldn’t you know it, the solution involves using those Echoes they’ve been showing off in all the trailers. We say solution, but the reality is that there are several ways to go about things.

The obvious is to just build some stairs out of various objects in order to clamber over the conveniently stacked boxes like you’re trying to get thrown out of the local IKEA, but as you acquire more and more Echoes, you can get significantly more creative. Lobbing a pot will naturally create a flipping big noise to draw guards’ attention, opening a window of opportunity to slip behind them, and crates can be spawned to block their view or create an emergency hiding spot (provided they don’t see you will the wood into existence). It’s all relatively simple stuff, but effortlessly and satisfyingly implemented.

Then you might discover that you can instead jump inside a pot and hop your way to victory in a manner extremely reminiscent of the bottomless barrel from Wind Waker and (to a lesser extent) Breath of the Wild. This, for us, was the point where we started to really see what was what.

If that sounds like it’s bordering on the emergent gameplay found in the likes of Link’s more recent outings, you’d be dead right. If you didn’t like that style of gameplay for whatever reason though, don’t navigate away just yet, you impatient little clicker, because Echoes of Wisdom also contains so much DNA from classic top-down Zeldas that it actually had us slightly surprised.

Later on in our play session we entered the Still World, wherein loads of people and trees, and probably financial stability, are kept in stasis, and we wandered into a dungeon. Not a Divine Beast, not an open-ended romp around floating wet platforms in the sky - a linear dungeon just like Mama used to make.

Despite our apparent flippancy, we’re huge fans of the open-ended gameplay offered in the likes of Tears of the Kingdom; it allows for some incredibly creative and leftfield gameplay and solutions to problems, but we can’t deny that it really was refreshing to come back to the old faithful designs of the past.

That’s not to say you won’t be using fun and creative ways to get through the dungeon though, no sir! Echoes are the bread and butter of the whole experience (with one exception), and every puzzle has multiple different Echoes that can help you overcome them. We were particularly fond of the Strandtula, a spider which creates a strand of spider’s silk that reaches all the way up to the ceiling, rendering essentially every challenge that required us to reach a high platform completely straightforward.

And that’s the twist that Echoes of Wisdom has put into its structure; whereas previous top-down Zelda games all but trivialised combat if you were familiar with the basics of a sword and shield and relied on its puzzles to provide the real challenge, Echoes of Wisdom trivialises the puzzles.

If you’re vaguely competent at extrapolating from incomplete information, you’re probably expecting us to say ‘...and the combat is the real challenge.' And you’d be right. Well done, you.

Combat in Echoes of Wisdom is tough, particularly to start with. Once you get the ability to create spiky Urchins a lot of the more basic enemies become simple on their own, but even the humble Spear Moblin provided a surprising amount of brainpower for us to overcome. It just backs away quickly and constantly and throws spears at you, so Urchins aren’t as reliable as they once were. We tried spawning a load of Ropes (read: snakes) to spam it to death, but it just ended up on a slightly higher bit of ground our tiny friends couldn’t reach.

Furthermore, we came across a whole band of Moblins. Well, three, but it certainly felt like a lot more at the time. Our bright idea was to distract them with a meat Echo (standard) and spawn our own Moblin to spear them in the back. Instead, our Moblin couldn’t resist the large chunk of magically created animal flesh and joined its brethren in chowing down. Thanks a lot.

This complexity peaked once a shadowy Link appeared to stop us in our path. Considering he disappeared into a puff of smoke at the end, we’re fairly confident it wasn’t the real Link, but boy howdy did he fight like he was. Being on the receiving end of Link’s ‘combat is trivial’ skillset meant that we were faced with a threat unlike any other we’d fought before. He was constantly moving towards us, keeping his eyes fixed on our location, shield up, ready to swipe in just a few frames.

Link was honestly terrifying - we never want to be an enemy in a Zelda game if fate will allow it. We tried everything we could, but beyond a few hits in the back of the head from a Moblin spear here or there, his shield blocked everything else, and we couldn’t attack fast enough to counter once he dropped his guard to stab us.

Then it struck us. Earlier in the dungeon we’d needed to use Tri’s Bind to pull a shield off something to progress. Our dingus brains hadn’t made the connection straight away, but sure enough, Link’s guard could be disabled by ripping that beggar from his hands. That’s when he started moving about twice as quickly and became significantly more aggressive. Whoops.

We hasten to point out that this is absolutely not required to defeat him — we managed to take him down to less than half health with a series of bodge-attacks from Echoes — but this one little bit of effortlessly elegant, expert game design was unbelievably satisfying.

Defeating 'Link' also provided us with a recently announced gameplay feature, Swordfighter Form. This gives Zelda a sword (!) and your abilities essentially mirror those of Link. At first, we were a touch disappointed by this, feeling as though it was an admission that the game couldn't be carried by Echoes alone, but after a short time, we changed tune.

Swordfighter Form is (at least when we played it at 'Level 1') stupendously brief, lasting maybe 15 seconds. It's seemingly required for a few puzzles, but more than anything it served as a 'panic button' for us. If we were suddenly mobbed by an onslaught of nasties, we could rely on Swordfighter Form to quickly give us a breather, but the energy you need to recover in order to use it again was surprisingly scarce. Nicely balanced - well done, Nintendo.

We left wanting more. Wishing we could stay on and progress further than we were allowed, wishing we could take a copy home and start playing around with everything. We even wanted to replay a lot of what we’d already done because we knew there were other ways we could have done things, and because the game doesn’t really care how you solve something as long as you solve it. We’re certain our madcap ideas would have worked.