[GAME] The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom (2024)
Echoes of Wisdom is kind of a monkey's paw situation for me. On the one hand, it's a return to classic Zelda dungeon design - locked doors and keys, clever item usage, subtle teaching of the game's mechanics to the player - everything I loved about this franchise before Breath of the Wild has returned. On the other hand, the combat and open-ended design of the puzzles sometimes feels extremely janky, and everything outside the dungeons themselves ranges from ok to downright boring.
I will say that the puzzles themselves were, for the most part, a delight. The echoes you receive as part of the game's story are interesting puzzle pieces that synergise well together, and there were parts of the game were I felt like I was "breaking" the puzzles due to my own cleverness, when in fact it was the design that presented such opportunities for me.
The combat, sadly, was not as good and in my opinion worse than the already pretty vanilla Zelda combat. Because you are effectively a summoner, most encounters boil down to summoning some enemies to fight for you and waiting until they finish off the enemy - you don't feel like you have any agency in what's going on.
Exploration in the overworld feels pointless - most of the things that you find in various chests are smoothie ingredients and random rupee denominations, and neither of these rewards feel like they contribute to you becoming more powerful. The meta systems could have done with a bit more work to incentivise the player to explore beyond the intrinsic satisfaction in solving puzzles.
The art style, on the other hand, is lovely - everything character feels like a chibi figurine, and there are some really nice renditions of classic Zelda characters. It's a shame that there are serious performance issues, with some pretty significant framerate drops.
Overall, I like the experimental approach to classic Zelda design, but Grezzo have quite a bit of work to do to get this thing up to par with other 2D games in the franchise - the framework that's there is quite good, so hopefully we will get a direct sequel sometimes soon.