echoes of wisdom: a vocabulary of creativity

19 Oct, 2024

Some spoiler-free thoughts on Echoes of Wisdom.

I find it helpful to think of Zelda games, and other puzzle games in a similar vein, as being, at heart, games about building a vocabulary with which to interact with the game's world. You start with a fairly limited vocabulary--move, pick up objects, talk to people--and each new item you can gain gets you new verbs: a lamp might let you illuminate a dark room, or light a torch; the hookshot lets you grapple to distant objects; and so on. By and large your vocabulary is clear: that is, you know what each of your verbs can do, and on which objects they can be performed.¹ Many of the puzzles are not particularly challenging--it's hardly a galaxy brain play to see an unlit torch and try lighting it--but the puzzles that stand out involve trying to use that verb in a more complex situation--when it's clear that lighting the torch on its own is not enough, and you need to try something else. The defining characteristic of the Zelda game, then, is that your vocabulary is limited, and grows slowly; you usually don't end the game with more than ten or so verbs, and while that is enough to put together some complex puzzles, it is enough that you can be reasonably expected to know what all of your verbs do.

Echoes of Wisdom takes that formula and asks: "what if your vocabulary was massive, though?" It replaces the traditional dungeon items with echoes, which are summoned objects and monsters that function as your verbs in this game. By the time you are one or two dungeons deep the odds are pretty good you will have accumulated more verbs than in entire previous games in the series; by the end of the game you will have more than you know what to do with.² This allows for complex interactions, many of which likely were not intended by the puzzle designers; it also, by the same token, changes the way we approach puzzles. Instead of "what am I supposed to do here?" it becomes "what can I do here?" Our new vocabulary allows us to be creative.

This sort of creativity-focused puzzle design was present to a lesser extent in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, where intended puzzles were often able to be bypassed with some creative applicability of the game's rules; these led to several moments that made the player feel extremely clever for discovering them, because it was so clearly unintended. Echoes of Wisdom, in contrast, this is the rule: there are puzzles where there are so many different clever solutions that it's hard to say what precisely was intended. As an example, there was one echo that I used to solve several puzzles where I was fairly certain it was the intended solution, only to discover that several people got through the game without ever finding that particular echo.

This has an effect on the puzzle design: if you encounter a puzzle somewhere, it is very unlikely to require a specific echo unless you need to encounter that echo in order to get to that point. And if it does require a specific echo it should be possible to backtrack and pick that echo up if you missed it, or require you to have used an echo that can solve the puzzle in order to get to the room that locks its doors behind you. But there are so many echoes in the game that the player will almost certainly not be able to recall exactly where they got most of their echoes; and the path through the game is so nonlinear it will be difficult for the player to determine which echoes were placed in such a way that they were effectively guaranteed to find. This makes each puzzle feel like a blank slate. Rather than hunting for the intended solution, it is much easier to simply look at one's vast arsenal of verbs and come up with a solution that works for this particular puzzle.

Much has been made of "player freedom" as a new design direction for the Zelda series. I think this is a fundamentally misguided approach--friction is much more interesting than freedom--but there is a lot of value to be had in allowing for creativity in puzzle solutions. Not every game needs to be Echoes of Wisdom--indeed, while I loved the game I think the novelty would soon wear off--but by building a robust vocabulary, puzzles can allow for or encourage these creative solutions.

But regardless of whether these ideas from the latest handful of Zelda games are carried forward into the series' future, Echoes of Wisdom was a delight to play through. There are so many creative ways to get around the world and solve its many puzzles; the game managed to be both unexpected while still delivering on all of the strong points I have come to expect from the series. And if you enjoy thinking about these little game design things as much as I do, there is no shortage of things to think of here.

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