There have been a few rigid puzzles so far. I used a fan to shoot wind into something and the game said “no not that wind.”
One shrine has a mechanism you can turn 180 degrees by hitting a nearby switch and it’s pretty obvious that you need to use it as a base to build a baseball bat, but you can’t attach anything to the mechanism itself with Ultra Hand goop. Instead you have to insert another object using Ultra Hand and then glue something else to that.
Also, they like forcing you to make longer levers for some reason. Like boy I could flip the heck out of this light switch if there was a whole pencil taped to it.
I’ve found more shrines than I have completed them due to my squirelly nature of just surveying and trying to get all the map data before I commit to any hefty story or questlines. Of the ones I have completed, the puzzles shrines I’ve come across have felt almost to easy but not sure if that’s just the nature of having GMod tools, sensory memory of BotW or their just hiding more devious stuff on the outer edges. I remember having to do a lot of Where’s Waldo’ing in BotW shrines even in the early parts.
Speaking of: I switched to Splatoon after a couple hours of 30fps Zelda today. Helicoptering around the Salmon Run map felt like a rollercoaster in comparison.
today was spent journeying into the desert in search of the feminine bicep. the trip through gerudo canyon by fan boat down the (now flooded) canyon floor while the sun lit the walls up in bright orange was absolutely captivating. the slow journey by foot through the desert was broken up by trips into caves and riding the occasional updraft out of the sandstorm so i could get my bearings and re-orient in the brief moment my compass worked again. in one cave system i came across the wreckage of a hot air balloon and was able to float myself high enough to cover a good bit of distance to kara kara bazaar where i could resupply and purchase the Secret Gerudo Technology of beating the heat with a cute updo
i made it to gerudo town and got into the rhythms of plot stuff but wow i missed spending all afternoon just moving around in this world
going in i was afraid a “reused” overworld would put a damper on what i found most fun in the first one – the exploration – but all the caves and nooks and crannies really fill out the world, and the overworld has changed in some significant ways.
i also thought the sky islands would be annoying to get to and traverse, but that hasn’t really been the case, and the underworld has been really fascinating. i like the light system, i like that it’s sort of a drain on resources so sometimes you have to surface to stock up again. there’s some really tricky terrain down there, and that combined with not being able to see well results in some really interesting traversal. there’s some really cool stuff down there and it’s fucking massive.
even the shrine puzzles are improved. sure, some of them are still trivial or tutorial-y but some are kind of obtuse and require pretty creative solutions. the powers are a lot more flexible than botw and it means not every solution is painfully obvious.
Yesterday I got to a shrine where you have to assemble blocks to match another set, which turns out was super easy. I completely missed this and created an elaborate solution involving building stairs and throwing them up in the air, only to use rewind so I could jump off the top over a barrier. It wasn’t until the second puzzle in the shrine wouldn’t let me do that that I actually figured out what I was supposed to do, ha.
i feel like with BotW they shied away from traditional dungeons because
a) the whole idea was trying to shift from “setpiece puzzle” to “emergent puzzle”
b) given the scope of link’s powers and the non-linear progression of the game, it is difficult to create a challenging “dungeon”
and ToTK is like, yeah we’re just going to go apeshit and design dungeons that still work, even with link’s even more robust powers in this game. very confident design in this game
You can also just lift the wing up and out over the edge then bring it back down to you. That’ll let you hop on and use rewind to position it precisely.
I found that while searching for a clip I wanted to share of a Korok getting blasted horizontally by rockets. The point I wanted to make is this: all the fancy tech we’re developing for abusing Koroks is well and good, but there’s something pure and simple about just gently rolling them down a hill.
So far, my brain won’t let me enjoy the puzzle solving in the overworld, I think because putting together the same janky devices in shrines is more videogamey and forgiving. You don’t lose resources and it’s easy to retry. Outdoors, I can fashion something that gets me halfway to a tower, but then I’m stuck thinking “oh if go back and start a little higher, this might work” instead of “OK I’m closer now, I should come up with something else.”
Yeah I almost envy people who skipped BoTW at this point.
There’s a few things it maybe did better just by virtue of being simpler: clearer world goal, better tutorial, it was easier to climb a tower and spot landmarks, some things that were free now require resources, etc. They’ve overcomplicated some stuff in order to make all of their systems and collections more useful (instead of just trimming down), but I don’t know that any of that would bother me if I hadn’t played the first one.
The main thing that annoys me in this ocean of design they’ve made is that the only really good weapons are fusions. This is such that your entire inventory quickly fills up with fusions ironically because it wants you to use fuse more (something that is precluded by having an entire inventory full of already fused items). They’re also very mean in making the fused component vanish if you unfuse which isn’t true of ultrahand shit! I guess I won’t farm rare gems from wizzrobe sticks then!
i would suggest to just play this one! there is a Lot of game, and if you go thru BotW first you will very likely need a significant break before playing ToTK, these games are enormous
Probably worth pointing out that there are growing tips and tricks threads all over the Internet in the usual places, like Reddit. I don’t want to dive into those yet because I’m still laughing at my bad ideas and I like the schoolyard exchange of info here, but I did CTRL+F for “map” in a couple just to get clarity on what some indicators mean.
A couple useful ones: the checkmark on caves means you found the magic frog loot and apparently there’s still an indicator that tells you that you haven’t completed a shrine. I didn’t notice it so I assume it’s different.
Also, allegedly, shrine locations in the overworld correlate to the lightroot locations in the depths, which is cool and maybe something I’d have preferred to figure out on my own.
