The Legend Of Zelda: Echoes Of Wisdom preview - A masterful quest

The real magic of the original 2D Zelda games were always, at least for me, the illusion of an impossibly huge world tucked away inside a tiny console.

Look at a game like The Legend Of Zelda: Link’s Awakening or Oracle Of Ages now, and you’ll see a series of small screens connected together to create something that seems truly vast. But if you grew up with these games, you’ll never forget how it felt to explore those dungeons, caverns, and mountains for the first time. How small an adventurer it made you feel.

The Legend Of Zelda: Echoes Of Wisdom bottles this feeling, then empties that bottle into an intoxicating cocktail of classic and modern Zelda that breaks all the rules with a smile and a wink. Nintendo’s beloved series has always expertly straddled the divide between the familiar and the new, but this new Switch adventure is, perhaps, the greatest example yet of this delicate balancing act.

This isn’t just a game that is to classic top-down Zelda what Breath Of The Wild was to 3D Zelda, although it certainly delivers on that description in spades with a heap of surprising new mechanics. It’s also, paradoxically, as faithful a Zelda game as we’ve seen in years; a return to the series’ roots purists have so desperately longed for since 2017.

Quite how it manages to be both of these things at once is anyone’s guess, but here’s what I can say with confidence: after 80 minutes exploring an early portion of the game, it’s clear I’ve barely scratched the surface of what promises to be an unforgettable experience.

Nintendo

Clearly, the most exciting aspect of Echoes Of Wisdom is that we’re finally getting the chance to play as Princess Zelda herself. If you’ve seen the trailers you’ll know Zelda is rescued by a mysterious swordsman known as Link, before narrowly escaping an otherworldly rift that swallows up our usual hero. It’s up to Zelda, then, to work out what’s going wrong in Hyrule and save the day.

Guiding Zelda through the world is a markedly different experience. This is far more than another Zelda game with a princess skin slapped over Link, and the way you engage with the world is completely changed as a result.

Zelda’s big trick is that she can produce echoes of various objects she finds scattered around the world. Tables, beds, pots, rocks, and even monsters. Following a brief tutorial in Hyrule castle that explains what could be an overwhelming and fiddly system with an admirable deftness, it’s pretty much over to you to explore and experiment.

Much like Breath Of The Wild or Tears Of The Kingdom, there’s very rarely one set solution to a problem. If you need to cross a large gap you can summon a handful of beds and make a bridge, or if you found the trampoline echo hidden in the game’s first village you could bounce your way across.

On more than one occasion I came across an obstacle that had me absolutely stumped, before I remembered this is a game that doesn’t play by the old rules. Try the dumbest thing you can think of, and it’ll probably work. It’s also worth noting you can’t endlessly spam echoes, with limits in place to ensure you can only spawn a certain number at a time. This is a limit that can be increased as you progress, however, and I’ve no doubt we’ll see some unhinged creations and wild solutions once the game launches next month.

The echoes themselves add an extra layer to exploration, with every cave, house, or secret area you stumble across offering the possibility of a new echo to add to your collection. For example, I went into one cave to battle a Peahat, a large flying creature with spinning razor blades. It turns out this cave and fight were entirely optional, but since beating an enemy grants you its echo to use in battle, I suddenly found myself able to call in a bloody air strike any time an enemy crossed me.

Nintendo

Let’s talk about combat, because I found it to be a little fiddly at first. Obviously Zelda doesn’t run around using a sword and shield, so she has to rely on her echoes to fight off threats. This is a dramatic change, and one that took a little longer to get used to, but the more echoes you unlock the easier it becomes to work out what summons will best counter certain enemies.

Bringing out a slow-moving Darknut to fight a Moblin that can simply batter it with ranged spears is a bad idea, for instance. But sneak up on it by distracting it with some meat first and then summoning the Darknut? Better results. You could also just summon a swarm of Keese (bats) and hope one of them breaks through the Moblin’s defences.

If I have one concern at this stage it’s that fights might become a little too easy after building up an arsenal of echoes. Certainly, I found unleashing the Peahat to be an incredibly successful tactic for almost all opponents, and since more powerful summons don’t operate on any kind of cooldown, you can literally bring them back the second they’re felled.

I haven’t played enough to suspect this is going to be a real problem, of course, and the one boss battle I faced did invite me to change things up and unleash a whole horde of different monsters to win. There’s also one other trick in combat that I think a lot of you are really going to enjoy.

Nintendo

About partway through the first dungeon you’ll unlock an item that allows you to take on the abilities of Link. You can use a sword and shield, jump extra high, and generally plough through enemies with ease. This is, naturally, a limited-time ability that requires you to gather a certain amount of energy before you can unleash it. It’s a blast to use though, and the classic Zelda theme that plays while you’re in this state is a joy.

On the subject of dungeons, it’s hard to say how close to classic Zelda Echoes Of Wisdom will be on this front, having only played one. However, I will say the first dungeon is far closer to being a traditional Zelda dungeon than anything from the recent open-world games.

There are keys to find, puzzles to solve, and even a miniboss at the halfway point, which is a feature I’ve missed dearly in my Zelda games. And while certain rooms and challenges in the dungeon have fairly open-ended solutions, others require a little bit more focused thinking and application of newly acquired skills in unexpected ways. In this regard, it’s the stuff of classic Zelda, and I can’t wait to see what later dungeons offer up once we have a larger bag of tricks. If it can strike that balance between sandbox solutions and tightly designed puzzles then we’re onto a winner.

The Legend Of Zelda: Echoes Of Wisdom is shaping up to be everything I’d hoped it would be. Brand new and warmly familiar all at once, this is a game that’s groaning under the weight of smart ideas and surprising mechanics. I’d never have guessed it, but it looks like the Nintendo Switch is leaving us with one more all-time great Zelda game after all.