On the way to one of the hidden locks that disable the vent in the center of the Temple of the Winds, there is a treasure chest in a sealed room. A room surrounded by walls contains only chests. Between you and the chest is a gate with a square hole in the middle. That hole is the only way to get in and out of the room, but you can’t reach it by climbing or jumping through the gate. The chest is too far away to just grab it with the Ultra Hand and pull it out of the hole. Without other tools, there is no way to reach the chest. The whole puzzle is just finding a way through a hole that’s just a few feet away.
I came up with what I think is a very elegant solution. To enter this room, you need to break through a wall of icicles, so backtrack a bit and collect the icicles and put them back in the chest. Using the Ultra Hand, I lined up three icicles to create a raft-like platform, which I leaned against the edge of the hole to create a ramp. I climbed the ramp, crouched through the hole, and grabbed the treasure. Icicles were the only usable objects in that area of the temple, so I played Zelda knowing full well that this wasn’t necessarily the only solution, but even though the developers intended me to use I felt like
I saw a friend playing this section. Like me, they first tried to climb the gate and jump over the hole. When that didn’t work, I expected them to go find the icicles. Instead, they took a Zonai Wing from their inventory, leaned it against the gate to create a ramp, and entered the room. They had to build another Zonai Wing ramp to escape, but it worked. The method is different, but the solution is the same. I was even more convinced that this was the way to get breasts.
today i saw Twitter clip that broke my brain. I saw someone pick up an icicle with an ultra hand, thread it through a hole, attach it to a chest, and pull the whole thing out of the hole. I got the chest without entering the room or using the ramp. The person who posted the clip asked if that was the intended solution, and the thread was filled with people telling me that yes, that was the correct way to get the treasure. “So did I. I think this is the intended solution!”, “I had to because it’s the only legitimate solution I can really come up with in that area”, “This is 100% the intention I cried when I figured it out.”
Deeper in the thread, several people share “wrong” solutions. One person started outside and used a paraglider to slide all the way into the room and thread a needle through the hole. Another says they use weapons to make ramps. Another posted a video of their own solution of melting icicles to create tiny legs, attaching them to a zonai sled to create a high platform, then climbing onto it and crawling across it. These are all more complex and less commonly used solutions than the OP’s icicle fishing strategy, so they are all considered imprecise solutions.
Over the last week, I’ve seen hundreds of puzzle solutions posted on social media, and almost all of them contain statements to the effect of, “This can’t be the right solution, can it?” . I’m interested in how people react to his TOTK puzzles and determine that some solutions are correct or intended, but others are not. increase. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of game design philosophies that everyone continues to do, including myself.
A lifetime of video game experience doesn’t prepare me to negotiate the design of Tears of the Kingdom. Other video games, including previous Zeldas, have a single solution to the puzzle. Pressing the hidden switch opens the gate, and turning the crank raises a pedestal from the floor that you can climb onto to reach the hole. Solutions may involve solving puzzles, but most require carefully scanning the environment for things you can interact with. There may be other ways to enter the room, but only one is correct.
Clearly, Tears of the Kingdom is built differently. As soon as you start playing, you will be given an endless variety of puzzle solutions. The developer’s intention was to give players the freedom to tap into their creativity and use whatever means they could think of to find a solution. The person who drilled the hole in the fence may have just tested whether both the link and the chest could pass through the opening. That’s really all you need to do to make sure the puzzle is solvable. Every obstacle in the game essentially has a thousand ways to get around it, so it doesn’t make sense to waste time creating an “intended” solution.
Looking at the hole in the gate, I realized that we’ve all learned to see the game as a collection of locks and keys. A key could be a button you push to open a locked door. Alternatively, the bullet could be the key and the Nazi head. Alternatively, it could be a gate with an icicle key and a hole in the middle. Tears of the Kingdom is such a deep evolution of game design that I don’t even know what to think about it. The only intended solution is the one you decide to use, and I think that idea is going to forever change the way games are made and played.