It’s amazing how high a bar Nintendo has set for the expectation of innovation in the Zelda series. Recent original entries have successfully experimented with open-world survival crafting followed by an inventive construction and physics system reminiscent of Garry’s Mod. Now it’s time for the top-down, SNES-centric entries in the series to catch up and branch out, with the titular Princess Zelda here to break the mould and ignite an exciting new era in the upcoming Echoes of Wisdom.
Sporting the aesthetic (and frame drops) of 2019’s The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening remake, Echoes is otherwise wholly separate from that title and leaves its island behind for a full-fledged adventure in a new rendition of Hyrule.
This time, mysterious and menacing purple rifts are swallowing swathes of the vibrant world and transporting them into a limbo dimension. This parallel zone is called the Still World, a void of Hyrulian fragments that has been sucked into and then consumed by the scary miasma. Series’ hero Link is nowhere to be found, and my hands-on preview began with our new protagonist Zelda imprisoned. An elderly lady called Impa finds her in the dungeon. Impa hints at the coup developing and Zelda’s framing as the cause of the rifts, encouraging her to disguise herself now that she’s a wanted person. Though we see little of Impa in the preview, she proves quite the capable character while also bearing the series’ mysterious eye of sheikah upon her cape.
Have no fear, they’ll surely be chilling in the Still World
Zelda’s approach to combat is more akin to a real-time strategy puzzle as opposed to Link’s huayeaaah hacking and slashing. Zelda is armed with a Tri rod and aided by a glowing little star creature called Tri. Zelda uses the combined power of her rod and Tri to summon copies, or echoes, of objects and creatures found and overcome in this world. No matter how mundane or seemingly inconsequential the target, if it is immobile Zelda can register it for summoning at any point by tapping ZR. The only limit to the creative potential here, which is immediately way more than I could have expected, is that each summoned echo has a power cost that consumes the little triangles that trail off of Tri’s tail. This is the currency used to spawn echoes. When you cap your Tri’s power limit, newly spawned echoes will overwrite your oldest. There is the teased potential that this Tri’s energy pool will expand throughout the game, allowing the player a greater number of constructs in wacky layouts to let the player reach new areas of the world and overcome greater odds.
Zelda herself has abilities such as bind and reverse bond. Think of this as Zelda’s gravity gun, able to use her Tri rod to bind herself to an object or being from a distance. The bind allows her to break the established rules of the top-down Zelda games, levitating your obstacles or enemies out of the way or into one another. Move a boulder from your path, then fling it at a foe. The reverse bond inverts this, attaching Zelda to a point of interest and hovering in tandem with its movements. I only used this latter ability to have enemies carry me over dangerous pits and obstacles, but the potential for shenanigans proved to be limited only by my lack of creative initiative.
An early dungeon puzzle turns the game into a 2D platformer, and tasks the player with experimenting with echoes that float and sink to cross through a flooded subterranean section. Zelda can swim underwater but has to be mindful of her oxygen meter. The 2D sections remind me of Spelunky, with this shift in orientation also changing how some of the echoes behave concerning the emphasis on verticality in the 2D spaces. Here, players will be navigating cramped, convoluted, or simply dangerous spaces by using echoes that now function as ropes and spelunking apparatus in these zones.
The climbable spiderwebs will get your Spelunky brain spinning
Being able to leap into environmental and traversal puzzles knowing I wouldn’t be missing an obscure, linear solution is a breath of fresh air. The first thrill of the session involved breaking Zelda out of jail by spawning echoes of beds and tables throughout the dungeon, creating staircases and obstacles against would-be captors. Overworld traversal also emphasises puzzling out solutions with the echoes. Very quickly, the growing arsenal of echoes allows the player to build their own solutions to puzzles that don’t feel prescriptive. Because Zelda’s rod won’t stand up against a moblin’s sword, the player will also build a compendium of summonable monsters who will fight on her behalf. Echoes of Wisdom swings wildly between creative puzzle-solving and chaotic combat that left me grinning throughout.
As a little teaser of the sample of echoes I picked up in my 90 minute preview, I learned the echoes for a table, crate, pot, potted shrub, bed, big rock, smaller rock, spiky sea urchins, goo creatures, trampolines, signs, moblins, spiders, dudes with axes, firey boys, deku plants, and surprisingly much more.
What else is there to really say? The music is immediately brilliant, as if we would expect anything less. There appears to be a relative abundance of warpable waypoints, despite the world being so densely packed and ripe with secrets that you’ll want to traverse it at every turn. Oh, there’s also the tie-in release of the new Nintendo Switch Lite: Hyrule Edition which also includes a personal year subscription to Nintendo Switch Online.
We’ve barely scratched the surface of the potential, gleeful chaos of echoes in combat
There’s so much more I could talk about in Echoes of Wisdom, all of which would be ruining a smorgasbord of surprises. I’m left confident that fans of Link’s big-budget open-world adventures owe it to themselves to keep an eye on this humbler, smaller-scale rescue of yet another Hyrule in peril.
The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom releases on Nintendo Switch on September 26, 2024.
Previewed on Nintendo Switch // Preview code supplied by publisher
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