Breath of the Wild: Excitement and Frustration

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017) introduces some excellent interacting systems in open-world gameplay but abandons them in the narrated part of the adventure. Gameplay revolves around solving a multitude of bespoke puzzles, some really well embedded into the open world and some less so. The sense of exploration and discovery is strongly present.

I'll dive into a handful of moments that defined the game for me, in both positive and negative. I'll try to make the text tactically a bit vague to keep the spoiler element to a minimum. Still, if you want to experience Breath of the Wild completely by yourself, it's perhaps best not to read further until you do.

In 2017, I heard from multiple people that I should try out Breath of the Wild on the new Nintendo Switch. For months I was sceptical and hesitated. Finally in December 2017 I gave in and got myself a Nintendo Switch with the new Zelda, Breath of the Wild.

I had already seen a couple of thorough reviews of the game on YouTube. I also knew that the game got near perfect ratings (Metascore 97/100). It's been praised as something like the best open-world game, or simply one of the best games ever made. Such praise always gets me on the defence. However, after hearing a bit what the game is about, I got curious enough to lower my defences and try it out. I had heard that Breath of the Wild does open-world so literally that you can go kill the boss directly without bothering with quests, levelling up or anything. I had also heard that you can just go explore and get lost finding new interesting places. It sounded promising enough.

What's going on here?

When all you hear is praise, you can be sure there's something people are omitting. Therefore, I was happy to find also some criticism. Someone said that the weapon mechanics in Breath of the Wild isn't very rewarding because most weapons break quickly and it gets irritating. Others criticised that there's not very many enemy types in the whole game world. I also heard that the enemies levelled up with the player character, something that was deemed a great flaw in earlier games like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Finally, some people complained that in the starter area of Breath of the Wild there are noticeable drops in the frame rate.

Given all this, I was sure that I would enjoy the game but I also expected many of the mechanics to be very familiar from open-world games that I've played before. I expected my enthusiasm to peak in the first few hours when everything was still fresh. I thought that eventually I'd learn the strict limits of various gameplay mechanics and their lack of interaction with each other in anything but tightly scripted ways. After such a discovery the gameplay would then be reduced to just "nice." I was sure the game would keep my interest long enough for me to complete the story (in a more involved way than just by killing the boss right at the start). With these expectations, I set to play the game and make my own mind about it.

Exploration without Lunar Rover

Many games struggle with directing the player in the game world to points of interest. The most common solution is to provide the player with a compass or a map where your current destination is clearly marked. This trivialises travelling and makes the physical game world mostly meaningless in terms of gameplay because you only need to look at your map or compass and not your surroundings in order to get where you need to go. A rarer approach is to give the player textual directions to decipher. The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is one example. The problem with Morrowind's approach is that translating written text into physical navigation commands is a mentally involving task. It might take a lot of time and effort and in the worst case get the player stuck. To help navigation based on textual instructions, a game could offer the player additional help on request. For example, the player could return to the NPC that gave the instructions, explain how far he got, and the NPC would explain how to continue from there. I haven't seen any game attempt to do this. It's no wonder. To pull it off properly you'd need a whole bunch of artificial intelligence and natural language processing.

Breath of the Wild introduces a clever trick to make physical navigation of Hyrule, the game world, interesting while keeping it fluid. The hero, Link, is carrying a device called the Sheikah Slate which is essentially a tablet computer. It comes with a sensor that bleeps when Link is walking towards a nearby point of interest, commonly an unexplored shrine. The clever part is that the sensor will only give you an approximate bearing of a shrine but no explicit marker on the map. You know which direction to go but you often won't see the goal directly. Terrain may be too difficult to navigate directly in that one direction, so you're left with partial mental information about the world map. I find it clever because it involves the player, posing to him a little challenge of finding this unseen place.

Encouraged by the blue bleeping Sheikah Sensor, I ventured into this freezing cavern.

Breath of the Wild deals really well with the common big challenge that I like to call Lunar Rover. In a nutshell it's the problem that while a majority of the play time in a freely explorable game world is spent on travelling, the mechanics of travelling is absolutely trivial. I like how Maddox put it in his video "I hate walking in video games." What makes travelling so much more interesting in Breath of the Wild is that many areas are steeply inclined, forcing Link to use his climbing skill. Climbing depletes Link's limited supply of stamina and forces the player to look for a route that is possible to traverse without running out of stamina. Especially early on in the game, the player's limited amount of stamina rules many areas inaccessible. Unless, of course, you manage to find a concealed resting ledge somewhere on the mountainside.

Link also makes use of a portable glider. He's able to glide through the air. Travel through the air is superior to travelling on foot for many reasons. For one, you get a mostly unobstructed overview of the terrain and points of interest in a way that's not possible from the ground. Secondly, you can avoid combat because most enemies and their attacks are tied to the ground level. Finally, there are no obstacles in the air, so you're able to travel far fast without getting slowed down or outright blocked by steep cliffs or wide canyons. I think these benefits could easily break the joy of travelling in Breath of the Wild if it wasn't for the stamina meter to limit your use of the glider. Just like when climbing, gliding depletes Link's stamina steadily. When you run out, you fall down. This limitation elevates gliding from an overpowered mode of travel into an intelligent tool that requires estimation and planning from the player. In a nutshell, gliding is a trade of altitude and stamina for forward travel. Climbing on the other hand trades stamina for altitude and overcoming obstacles.

That shrine in the horizon will have to wait until I find a woolen hat.

Another brain-teasing factor in travelling is temperature. On mountain peaks it's cold, and cold inflicts considerable damage over time. It's easy to protect Link against cold with food or warm things but protection is always temporary, which again pushes the player to be mindful about travelling rather than keep rolling on mindlessly. I really love how temperature never blocks your way completely. It merely sets a severe but flexible limit on how far you can reach without taking countermeasures. If you're in a hurry or desperate, you can push into a cold area, hoping that you'll get through before you run out of health and food. A careful player can alternatively back out of the cold area, prepare properly, and try again.

Link will soon be fried to a crisp by a guardian. But that unidentified item is tempting!

Yet another example of how Breath of the Wild makes the most out of traversal in the game world is the occasional stationary guardians. They are armed with a devastating laser beam that targets Link with high accuracy and has a considerable range. When running cross-country, looting machine parts from defunct guardians, you may suddenly realize that a targeting beam is locked onto you. You then have a mere few seconds to find cover or be blasted away. This will make you scan the surroundings frantically, trying to find anything to block the line of sight between Link and the guardian. Sometimes it's easy, sometimes more difficult. There may be a partially collapsed stone wall, or a narrow tree, or just low mounds to hide behind. This mechanic of line of sight reminds me of World of Tanks and how it's important to use the terrain and obstacles as a way to hide and as extra armour against incoming fire. These are great mechanics to tie the terrain and obstacles into meaningful parts of the gameplay.

Armed with only a wooden oar, I needed to be very careful on Eventide Island.

I greatly enjoyed one particular optional piece of content in Breath of the Wild, namely Eventide Island. It's a small, secluded island in a far corner of the game world. When you arrive on the island, you enter a challenge; all your weapons, armour, food, and other items are taken away, and you're supposed to find three orbs on the island and place them on designated pedestals. When I found the island—quite late in the game—my immediate reaction was great joy. The island is like a miniature version of Breath of the Wild embedded in itself. Its greatness lay in  not being able to resort to my accumulated arsenal of monster-erasing equipment. This concept turned a nearly trivial running errand into an exciting mini-adventure. I'd say that this kind of "item reset" is what makes the so-called roguelike and roguelite games so appealing. It gives you once again the chance to start from a clean slate and ramp up your power. You can again experience the excitement of overcoming small obstacles with little equipment, and to be able to build up your inventory of problem-solving options for the next, bigger challenge.

My journey to Vah Ruta was exciting because everything was new, also the rolling boulders.

Come to think of it, I felt a similar enjoyable feeling of survival challenge when I embarked on the quest to reach my first divine beast, Vah Ruta. It was with the aquatic Zora people. I had to trek a long distance through unknown perils upstream along a riverbank in a mountainous area. I was very alert for dangers. I faced new enemies, I was low on health, found new crafting items, and made slow but steady progress. My enjoyment was only marred by the nagging feeling that maybe I'm way over my head with the trek. I had no indicator of how far I had to travel and how difficult the journey would become. It would have sucked big time to go halfway and find out that it was just too time consuming to try to progress further with my low-level hero. I might have turned back if it wasn't for the feeling that I could take a breather after every enemy encounter and evaluate if I was still able to proceed. There was always the option of walking back and replenishing my health, but that would have cost me precious real-life time. Luckily everything went well in the end. Probably that feeling of uncertainty added to the excitement of the quest. In contrast, my trek to the last of the divine beasts, the volcanic Vah Rudania, felt mostly trivial. Perhaps the reason was that I was too well equipped and very familiar with the game's systems. I knew exactly what kind of a risk I was taking and how to survive, so it was not much more than just a casual running errand.

Open world

"Open world" games have been all the rage for years now. The meaning of the term has stabilized somewhere around having a large "outdoors" world with various kinds of "points of interest" sprinkled evenly all around. For example in Horizon Zero Dawn, some of the kinds of points of interest are bandit camps that you can clear, Banuk figures that you can collect by climbing mountains, corrupted zones where you can kill more difficult beasts, vantage points where you climb to uncover some background story, and so on. I wrote two years ago how it felt in the end like a safe playground that reduced to a list of checkboxes.

Interesting terrain shapes on the map drew my attention naturally, without need for explicit markers.

Breath of the Wild has its own selection of types of points of interest. On paper it's not much different from the other open world games. But the execution is excellent. This time they don't really feel like "points of interest" but more like "areas of interest," or just a "mass of interesting details" spread around the world. When you look at the world map zoomed out, it's at first as dull as that of other open world games; just a large mass of traversable land. But when you start to look at the details and zoom in on the map, you'll discover unusual things that catch your interest. Each successive level of map zoom reveals more curious shapes: a lake that looks like a skull, a peninsula in the form of a spiral, a large forest surrounded by a moat, or a mountain with a large lake in the middle. You're sure to find something of interest if you explore these areas. At the same time, it's not at all obvious what it exactly is that you're going to find. I love it how the details in the map and the landscape draw my interest naturally, without need of a quest log or map markers that would reveal too much in advance and spoil the fun of exploration. This is the best open world experience I've had so far!

It's also impressive how the different interesting things merge in the open world. Whereas in Horizon Zero Dawn, bandit camps and corrupted zones contained only that one activity, in Breath of the Wild the metaphoric divisive lines are blurred out. It's merely so that there are interesting things around, and I can interact with them naturally, through the game's own systems. I don't feel like I explicitly start solving a shrine discovery puzzle or clearing a Bokoblin camp. They are things that I might notice while wandering around, and I might interact with those things or I might not. Even when I'm traversing one of the many environment mazes, I might be able to climb the walls and "break the puzzle." The game doesn't limit me to doing only that one activity but lets me interact with the world using all its mechanics. It gives me an incredible feeling of freedom to experience the game without having to open just one cumbersome pre-planned experience container at a time.

I can either walk the hedge maze or "break it" by gliding over. Truly an open world!

Closed world

Sadly, not all of the content in Breath of the Wild exists in the open world. There are sections of the game where the brilliant interaction of the game's many systems is abandoned by design. Shrines are a prime example of this design, as they are plentiful.

Shrines are secluded areas of gameplay that mostly consist of one or a series of environmental puzzles. The player uses his logical skills and Link's special powers to solve the puzzle and help him reach the exit of the shrine. Completing shrines is essentially the only way to level up Link. Also, some of the (optional) quests require the player to complete a number of shrines. It's the jarring marriage of the surrounding open-world game and these puzzles that I don't think works in Breath of the Wild. Nintendo could have released the shrine puzzles independently as a fine puzzle game of their own.

Solving a secluded environmental puzzle; fire from a broken lantern burns through wooden platform, dropping the treasure chest on the floor.

After visiting but a few of the over one hundred shrines it became clear that each of them is nothing but a deliberately crafted puzzle that waits to be solved. Shrines are void of any moment of distraction or surprise. There's almost no chance to make surprising discoveries in a shrine. Completing a shrine doesn't feel like part of an adventure but a task to complete. Shrines are their own little bubbles that don't interact with the outside game world and its complexities.

In the open world the player has a wide palette of tools to use to reach his goals. Even more importantly, the player may alter his goal as a way to overcome an obstacle. For example, if I'm not able to fight my way through a bokoblin camp, maybe I'll climb on a hill and glide over it. In puzzles the tool palette is forcefully limited. In a shrine that is named to be a challenge in electricity, you're supposed to move objects to fill electric circuits that then let you progress towards the end of the shrine. The setup is clearly restricted so that there are only a couple of objects that you can manipulate. The puzzle is about figuring out which skill you use where. You have less wiggle room.

One of the goofier but fun shrine puzzles; tilt your Switch controller to swing a large mallet at a metal sphere to get it into the hole on the left. Essentially mini golf.

Like the open world, also shrines let the player figure out solutions outside the box. Let me give an example of what I experienced. In a shrine about electricity I spent 10 minutes trying to figure out how to get electricity on two plates that would then start a conveyor belt that would push a big block into a pit to act as a bridge for me. 10 minutes is a long time and I was getting really frustrated for not being able to come up with a solution using electricity, so I tried out something else. I froze the big block and hit it a few times. This is a trick the game teaches you elsewhere. It lets you build up kinetic energy in the block, and once it unfreezes it flies off like a rocket. To my surprise the trick worked in the electricity shrine. In theory this kind of a discovery of an alternate solution can seem fun and surprising. But the reality was that I solved the electricity puzzle by skipping all its electric parts. My genuine feeling wasn't that my solution was ingenious but that I completely avoided the point of the puzzle. I felt disappointed in the game for allowing such a lowbrow solution. The puzzle was solved but I still didn't know what the intended solution was.

A convoluted puzzle in Vah Ruta that artificially limits Link's puzzle-solving toolset.

Solitary puzzles become even worse experiences when they artificially limit the gameplay mechanics, that is, rob you of some of the ways you have learned to manipulate the game world. One such location is Vah Ruta, the elephantine divine beast. (Side note: divine beasts are solitary puzzles like shrines, just larger and with multiple phases.) I'm not going to explain the whole Vah Ruta puzzle but only my two sources of frustration. First, when I needed to reach higher ground, I wasn't able to climb walls. Somehow they just resisted all climbing attempts. Second, I had to move a large metal ball around but, without any explanation, Link's magnetism skill couldn't be used. These two restrictions felt unfounded. They undermined the freedom of an open world much in the same way as some boss fights in Horizon Zero Dawn dictated without reason that certain kind of attacks just have no effect. I'm sure the game designers placed these restrictions in order to disallow trivial solutions that would bypass essential parts of the games. Despite the understandable intentions, the result is not a high quality game experience for the player.

A well-embedded environmental puzzle; a huge snowball rolls downhill and crashes into a gate.

There are a few shrines whose puzzles are about finding your way to the shrine. The insides of those reward shrines consist only of a straight path to the reward. Such puzzles I enjoyed in general much more than the ones that were enclosed inside shrines. Here's one example: In some snowy mountains there was a large closed gate. My Sheikah Sensor told me that there's a shrine on the other side. But how to get through? I noticed that leading up from the door was a groove going steep uphill. On top of the hill I found a pile of what looked like snowballs. Filled with curiosity, I tried throwing one snowball downhill. It worked! The ball gathered more snow on its way down and eventually slammed against the gate, breaking it open. It was a great delight to make this discovery.

Admittedly, this open world snow-bowling puzzle was very much like the other similar puzzles that exist inside shrines. I know it because of how the groove and snowballs were located, waiting to be discovered by the player. That kind of small snowballs don't exist anywhere else in the game. Also, nowhere else in the game do snowballs grow in size when rolling downhill. Finally, breaking down locked gates with heavy impact is not something you can do to any other gate in the game. Regardless, I genuinely appreciated how the puzzle was embedded in the open world. Its disguise as "just some terrain formations and inconspicuous wilderness items on the ground" allowed me to still keep experiencing the game world around me. The snow-bowling puzzle felt like it was part of the world. Unlike the explicitly presented attention-demanding in-shrine puzzles, this puzzle surprised me with its existence and didn't ask me to commit into solving it.

Physics

Already in the first few minutes of gameplay I got a positive impression of the in-game physics. Being able to climb a tree (or just about anything) seemed useful and intriguing immediately. An early tree had two apples hanging up on a branch just above Link's reach. Climbing up the tree to get them gave me the feeling that climbing can be used creatively. Like it's a game mechanic that can be used in combination with other mechanics. It was a very promising start.

Apples are always ripe for picking in the most imaginative ways. Blow up the tree if you like!

Mind you, the level I'm comparing to isn't much. My current favourite example of the limited nature of contemporary game physics is from Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (2016). Much like Breath of the Wild, it has physics-based puzzles that sometimes involve stacking boxes and climbing on them. My experience in Mankind Divided is that if you stack three boxes of anything but the most bulky kind, then the stack is going to wiggle and topple over in unnatural ways.

That's what I've come to accept as the standard level of 3D rigid body physics in games in general. As a programmer, I understand that numerical physics that can be simulated on the average desktop CPU tends to be lacking in stability. And it's sad, because apparently that's close to the level where game physics was already two decades ago when Trespasser was released, a game that originally tried to rely on simulated 3D physics in its puzzles and world simulation, much ahead of its time, but that unfortunately fell flat in that and many other aspects. (Here's some physics-based gameplay in Trespasser. Also check out AVGN's Trespasser review if you're so inclined.) But now, finally, we have Breath of the Wild with stable and reliable 3D physics as an integral gameplay system.

Reliable game physics at work; multiple rigid bodies in a stable stack.

So, the physics simulation in Breath of the Wild works very well. In an early shrine I had to stack boxes in order to climb them to the exit. I stacked three boxes and a slate flat on top of them, and the pile kept slightly wobbling about perpetually. As I built the stack a couple of more times the wobbling didn't happen again. Even with the rare wobbling, this is a dramatic improvement upon my experience in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.

There's something very nice in how game-world objects interact physically and how well-rounded the interaction is. Physics is a very programmer- game mechanic. I'm accustomed to seeing it in games in a raw, engineer-like form where the interaction has quirks (read: bugs). Those quirks have their explanations that an engineer will understand and appreciate but that don't have a meaningful explanation in the context of the game world. Such quirks include limited numerical precision, or the need to keep the simulation computationally light enough to sustain real-time updates. These quirks will manifest in unnatural behaviour such as unstable stacks, objects clipping into each other, or heavy objects moving as if they were very light and had very little momentum. An example of the latter: I recall how in Skyrim I shot a humanoid into the head with an arrow, not only killing it but sending its lifeless ragdoll body flying in an arc, tens of meters away and down a mountain. The small physical momentum of the arrow was absolutely not comparable to the huge impact it had on the body. The physics of Breath of the Wild hides its engineering side well and consequently manages to dress physics simulation as a believable part of the game world. The common manifestations of the computational quirks are missing. What is left for the player to observe is a credible and consistently well-behaving physics simulation.

Representative graphics over details

I've read praise about the graphics and music in Breath of the Wild. It surprises me a bit. I see beauty in the game's graphics but at the same time it lacks detail. The graphics are quite cartoony, and you can rightfully say that it's a valid artistic style. When you look closely at things, there's not much detail anywhere. It's understandable, given the modest hardware specs on the Nintendo Switch. However, Breath of the Wild shows its visual artistic power on a higher level. There is a wide variety of colors, shapes, and terrain. I feel that such a wide "higher level palette" adds a lot to the feeling of exploration in the game. Based on the time of day, your location, and other factors, the game's visuals may engulf you in a completely new atmosphere. If we consider Bloodborne for comparison, another game where exploration is a major part of the gameplay, it doesn't vary much from its dark and dreary visual style at any point. In Breath of the Wild, finding a new kind of visually-based feeling in a deep cavern or in a peaceful meadow feels like completing a quest, again totally without the game explicitly stating that it's something you could do. Truly an open world adventure.

There is a large variety of moods that the graphics convey.

There's another point that I like about the lack of graphical small-scale detail. To me it means that just about everything that is visible in the world is also meaningful in terms of gameplay. In contrast, most AAA games are incongruous in their level of detail in graphics and in gameplay functionality. You might for example see lots of detail in grass and trees, but at the same time none of that has any significance in gameplay. You can't interact with such static props. They are only for the looks.

I like how boldly Breath of the Wild matches its graphics with gameplay mechanics. Instead of static props you have meaningful interactable objects. If you see a tuft of grass on a meadow, it can catch fire, potentially harming you or a nearby bogoblin. If there's a tree somewhere, you can cut it down and pick up a bunch of firewood and any fruits that the tree bore. Any rock of reasonable size you can lift, and sometimes there's even a little gameplay surprise waiting for you such as some rupees (i.e. money) or a crab that you can catch for cooking later.

Let's make a comparison with The Witcher 3. Geralt, the hero of The Witcher, has some magical abilities one of which is a limited control over fire. It manifests in non-combat gameplay as the ability to extinguish and light any candle, torch or fireplace that you find. This gameplay feature helps invigorate the game's static props. However, it's little more than a gimmick and doesn't work as well as similar interactions in Breath of the Wild. The fires that Geralt can start will never interact with anything else. The player quickly learns that Geralt's fiery light toggle lives completely in a vacuum, separated from all the other gameplay mechanics.

Trees aren't static props; the hinox has just felled a regular tree and grabbed its trunk as a weapon.

I believe that the appeal of graphics in Breath of the Wild is in the feeling it creates in the player. Since the graphics lack much of the kind of detail that doesn't actually represent any gameplay systems, it is only natural that the player will learn to expect that any kind of detail in the graphics is potentially a sign of some gameplay mechanic. That will create the feeling of a living world that is full of possibilities and things to discover. It's a world that invites you to explore and experiment, not by providing button prompts and map markers but simply by presenting things in almost the simplest way possible. What you see is what you can interact with.

Conflicting styles

One notable aspect in the mood that Breath of the Wild sets is what seems to me as a patronising attitude. When I'm solving a puzzle that's part of one of the game's main quests (Vah Ruta), I'm given supportive messages from a female spirit in a fragile and gentle voice. After pressing one button inside the divine beast which is essentially one big 3D puzzle, I'm told that the spirit believes in my success and that there's still four more buttons to press. The same kind of encouraging message is delivered to me after each button. The vigour of how the game is following my progress is almost suffocating. Could I please just have my adventure without the patronising commentary?

I wasn't thinking of giving up. Would Miss Spirit please mind her own business?

In strong contrast to the irritating cheers at Vah Ruta, there were times when I ended up in situations where I got killed in an instant by a vastly overpowered enemy that had a stronger weapon than me, had more hit points than me, and moved faster than me. In these moments the game said nothing to support me. That's when I knew I was definitely not expected to be able to kill that particular enemy. This duality of easy and patronising passages on the one hand, and difficult and solitary experiences on the other hand distanced me from the feeling of embarking on an adventure where I could explore. These experiences in both extreme directions are characteristics of scripted adventure, not that of a living world where I discover the story.

That lynel in the distance is about to give me a proper whupping.

When the game is not patronising, it can be playful. Extremely playful. The land of Hyrule is in ruin and monsters threaten simple people. Yet, there's downright comical characters all around. For example, one person is practising cooking in a solitary place, attempting to make food out of inedible things like ore.

Another notable example are the Koroks, small forest people who have laid out probably over a hundred little puzzles all over the land. They are cheerful folk whose mere existence evokes carefree happiness. I find a big contradiction here. Koroks inhabit even the boss castle that otherwise reeks of evil and danger. Koroks always greet you with the same blissful cheer every time. My interpretation is that Breath of the Wild had to maintain the full family accessibility that is so close to the core of Nintendo while also taking the Zelda series a big leap towards (and perhaps past) serious open world adventures like Skyrim or Horizon Zero Dawn.

A happy and carefree Korok hidden in the final castle, among lots of evil corruption.

In my previous analysis of The Surge I commended the game for including NPCs in the game world that brightened up the otherwise bleak and oppressive mood of the game with their friendliness and small humane problems that you could help them solve. (And, by the way, The Surge 2 does it even better.) Comparing the two, I have to say that the NPCs in The Surge were a believable part of the game world. They were a welcome change to their surroundings but they didn't stand out of place. Koroks in Breath of the Wild, on the other hand, appear to be completely clueless about what's going on around them. Talking to them is like suddenly jumping to another universe.

Moments of frustration

This closeup felt unnecessary.

Breath of the Wild has a jarring way of presenting things. Throughout the game, trivialities are emphasised by expressing them with lots of time and space. It feels condescending, as if the game didn't trust the player's abilities to make sense of the open game world and notice things on his own. One example of this is when I entered one of the first bokoblin camps that I found and killed all the monsters. The gameplay paused, the camera zoomed right on top of a small lookout tower and highlighted an obvious treasure chest for a few seconds. To really underline that the chest was practically waiting for me to loot it, the eyes of the skull face on the chest lit up. This short but accentuated cinematic event was thoroughly underlining the fact that I'd cleared the camp and that the chest was my reward that was now unlocked. I was left wishing for a more subtle message, if any. I interpret the underlined messaging as Nintendo's way to be inclusive to players who may not be familiar with the tropes of physical-systems-focused 3D adventures. I appreciate the effort but it'd be nice if it didn't impose that style on players who would appreciate to explore the game with less conspicuous guide rails.

Another source of frustration was how vague Breath of the Wild could be with its instructions of gameplay mechanics. The game allows Link to surf downhill on a shield. As such it sounds like a fun activity and a way to speed up travel. Sadly, I never learned to shield surf. The game tried to teach me to shield surf by saying "Just hold out your shield, and then hop onto it in mid-jump." I expected that meant pressing Jump and then pressing Shield in mid-air. It did nothing. I tried to press every conceivable combination of jumping and shielding on the controller, and I never got to shield surf. It was very, very infuriating. Now, nearly two years after I completed the game, I went online to see how to actually shield surf. It wasn't too complicated, I just never understood to also press A on the controller. Shield surfing in itself is a fun activity. I just couldn't get into it because the game only hinted at how to do it. The explicit explanation of how to activate shield surfing was added to the games Ability Controls menu only after I had succeeded in doing that action once. That is, if I hadn't looked it up online, I'd have never experienced this gameplay mechanics.

What she means is "while holding ZL, press X and then A."

Again, when fighting Fireblight Ganon on the reptilian divine beast Vah Rudania, I was befuddled. It was due to a simple puzzle that I couldn't figure out quickly. When Fireblight was in his fireball phase, I had a hard time figuring out what kind of attack to use to inflict any damage on him. So, after running around dodging fireballs for a good few minutes, the game finally spelled it out to me in the voice of the assisting spirit: "Maybe he'd like a bomb snack." Duh, of course! So I threw a bomb at the beast and that solved the battle. The solution was obvious after I was told about it. What I see as bad in this puzzle-like element of the fight is that solving the simple puzzle wouldn't likely have felt like a big accomplishment, but failing to solve it by myself felt like a big failure.

I was stuck in this fight, and these insultingly obvious statements didn't help me.

Deflated challenge

There was one section of the game in particular that I was hoping to be a good challenge. One of the divine beasts, Vah Rudania, is in an area that is burning hot. It's not enough for Link to max up his heat resistance for example by eating certain cooked meals. I found this out when I wandered into the area for the first time. At that point it felt like a real challenge to get to the beast. I didn't know how could I do it. I looked forward to trying to figure this out, and maybe try to explore the outskirts of the hot area carefully and proceed step by step. But before I'd do that, there were other places to explore, so I left the hot area, being excited about the challenge that was waiting for me.

It's raining meteors.

Later on, I found myself in possession of a potion whose description said that it provided fire resistance. It even said explicitly that this is what you need to proceed to the hot area of Vah Rudania. That was a helpful note, but I was baffled to see it. This particular problem of figuring out that the fire resistance potion provided me access to the hot area was solved for me by spelling the answer out clearly. I didn't expect to see that in a game that's built out of little puzzles.

Because I only had one fire resistance potion and was afraid that it wouldn't last long enough for me to explore the hot area, I set out to find the ingredients for making more of them. Wandering around for some hours, climbing new towers and solving new shrines, I couldn't find the ingredients. Mind you, I did know what I was looking for but it didn't help me direct my efforts. To add insult to the injury, much later in the game I discovered that I could have upgraded my basic equipment in a way that made it considerably easier to find the ingredients. I just didn't know about the possibility and ended up pushing forward in the game without the benefit that seemed to have been designed to be obtained by players quite early in the game, if only you knew that it existed.

Finally I decided to just go for it and see what I could do with one fire resistance potion. I ran to the edge of the hot area and drank the potion. The game gave me about 5 minutes of real time to wander around. I decided to try to run as far as I could. And lo, I managed to reach the central town of the hot area in about 3 minutes. To my disappointment there wasn't much anything to hinder my progress through the area except the extreme temperature. A couple of enemies appeared but I just ran past them. Most of the way there was a direct road that I could follow. At one point some fiery boulders rained on me but even that was minor damage and didn't prevent me from running past. At the town I sought out the armour shop because I was sure they'd sell pieces of armour that provided immunity against the environmental hazard. And that they did. I quite didn't have enough money to buy the whole set, but that was quickly resolved by selling a dozen of my meals that I didn't have much use for anyway.

I visited Hateno Ancient Tech Lab (by accident) for basic upgrades only after practically completing the game.

So the challenge was overcome. I was left somewhat disappointed because the obstacle that I'd been looking forward to cracking open piece by piece was in the end just a matter of drinking one potion I happened to have. I'm not even sure how I got it. My experience could have been much better if the game had provided me with multiple subgoals that I could have pursued and stay aware of my progress. Also, the threat of the burning hot environment could have been used to a bigger effect by not giving me permanent resistance to it in a single purchase of fire-resistant armour.

Conclusion

All in all, Breath of the Wild was a wonderful experience with a number of minor nuisances. Writing this article took me about two years because I had so much to say about the game and it was a lot of work to condense it from an ample ramble into a more meaningful collection of topics. I had trouble choosing which way to approach the thoughts I had about the game because it manages to tie everything together so well. And that's what I feel is the key to Breath of the Wild's excellent level of quality. There's a whole lot of skillfully handcrafted content and just about all of it is connected together through gameplay. Even though it's tempting for me to dwell in the minor details that annoyed me, I feel that they are not the defining factor of the game. The open world is. Truly!

-Ville