Mention the words “water in games” and nine times out of ten the conversation will immediately turn to how good the water looks in said game and whether or not it ripples and splashes well when you try to wade through it. Rarely do people talk about how smart water can be, or how it completely changes the way you move and travel through a game's landscape.
But that's precisely what the water block echo did for me in The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom this year, and I've rarely felt so overwhelmed by such a harmless, unassuming puzzle element. After all, it's just water, right? The kind of liquid that Link (and Zelda) have been able to swim in for years up to this point, and whose uses have rarely been more revealing than pushing down the odd pressure pad at various Water Temples.
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But the brilliance of Echoes of Wisdom's water block goes far beyond anything we've seen before in a Zelda game, and the best part is how immediately obvious it is when you first pick it up. You'll probably come across the water block early in your adventure when you start investigating the fissures around the two Zora territories, and you'll immediately be asked to build water tunnels in the shape of cubes to make simple bridges across the void below. . Suspended in the air, water maintains its shape fast and steady and defies all the laws of gravity, its elegant simplicity eliminating all those hours spent constructing uncomfortable bed concoctions to traverse similar sized spaces.
But then, as with almost all the echoes you've accumulated so far, you start to mess with it. In an instant you realize, with your eyes wide open, no, surely not possibility that if you create two blocks of water in the same place, they will curl towards the sky forming a tall column of liquid. For sure yes! nintendo did just give me the keys to make magic liquid steps that defy physics, and this absolutely changes all.
It's these kinds of quiet revelations that always seem most magical to me in games. The water block not only makes Zelda's movement seem more intentional in the game, but it provides purpose where previously the Crawltula spider's echoes were erratic and sometimes unpredictable. It also expands her reach into her own realm, taking her farther and higher than the trampolines, beds, and boxes that normally failed to get her where you wanted to go. It makes the world feel more alive with hitherto unseen secrets and corners to explore that are now ready to pop open and poke your nose, allowing you to inhale everything this toy-like play box has to offer and more.
The fact that it also comes in such an unusual and charming form is precisely what makes the water block feel so special, more so than the countless abilities you get in some of this year's other exploratory highlights, like Prince of Persia: The Lost. Crown, or harness the power of the seeds you plant in Ultros' strange organic spaceship. Those (the double jump, the swinging vine, the grappling hook) are much more deliberately playful in design. They're exactly what you'd expect from those kinds of games, which doesn't make them any less charming or enjoyable when you find them, but the fact that you're anticipating them from the beginning can't help but steal them away. of some of its mystery.
But Zelda's water block is just a humble water block: a single, ordinary(ish) object that can be used and combined in such creative and inventive ways that catapults it right to the top of my favorite puzzle elements, both this year and next. recent memory. It's a wonderful and very Nintendo way to recalibrate the way you see the world in front of you, and I only hope that Zelda and her Echoes have another outlet to dazzle us in the future.