The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom Preview - Genius lies in simplicity

One of the things that comes to mind when talking about design is Fumito Ueda's mantra for his titles: Design by Subtraction. It's about taking all the ideas for a project, narrowing them down to a limited number to focus on, and building the whole experience from those few. This way you build a clearer identity about the game and maximise the sensations you want to deliver. And there's a lot of this approach to building Zelda's first (and hopefully first of many) solo adventure as the protagonist. Indeed, we've already played a demo of The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of the Wisdom, from the beginning of the game to the end of the first dungeon in the story, and you can already see why this title needed the Princess as the titular character, being such a different (and at the same time, very familiar and relatable) experience to the other titles in the series.

For starters, the question is clear: How does Echoes of Wisdom set a benchmark as the next original game in the series to be released after Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom? It does so by differentiating the way it interacts with the world by the protagonists, and by taking some of the protagonists' best ideas and bringing them to its own territory. In previous Zelda games, Link faced the adventure with sword (Master) and shield in hand, while Zelda has no combat skills at all and only a mysterious wand to work with. Well, she has a wand and she has Tri. This mysterious fairy-like character acts together with his now missing allies to protect the Kingdom of Hyrule from the Void Rifts, which are very similar to the famous Nothingness found in The Neverending Story: They devour everything in their path and create empty spaces, which cannot be traversed and which trap entire regions, castles, dungeons and the poor inhabitants who used to live there.

Zelda and Tri team up to escape from Hyrule Castle (whose king and councillors have been replaced or hypnotised by an unknown evil force) and it is then that this idea of design by subtraction begins to develop. Within the first hour we are already introduced to and put into practice the two main powers that Zelda will have: Replicate and Link. To learn how to use Replicate, we approach any object that appears with a glowing halo to "scan" it and save its design (or spell, it's not clear to us yet) in our encyclopaedia. This way we can create a copy of it when we need it. In the first section, as I said, Zelda must stealthily escape from the castle, avoiding the guards, as if it were the castle gardens in Ocarina of Time. Only here we can replicate some objects that we can throw in one direction and distract the guards to sneak away unseen, or create platforms to jump on and access higher sections. We can build bridges with potted shrubs or floating beds, barriers to block vision with wooden crates, and.... Well, we've only played a tiny section of the game, but it's clear that the possibilities are as deep as your imagination offers. These replicas are not infinite, of course, and their "cost" and quantity depend on the Echoes Tri can store in its tail, represented on screen by little golden triangles. I'm sure more than a few people here are working out theories about the Triforce of Wisdom, but we don't have time for that right now, and when I have access to the full version we'll see if any of this crystallises.

Passing through the halls, we leave our home and emerge into a Hyrule in crisis, one where rifts and monsters run rampant, terrorising its inhabitants. With enemies (such as keese or moblin) it's the same: First we have to defeat them (use a replica item you can throw) to finish them off, and then we save their design (or their echo, it's not clear yet). Depending on their strength, the cost of replicating will be more or less, and managing which replicas we want to take out as allies at any given moment will save us a lot of time and effort. And although we know that our objective is at a marked point further east on the map, we find a small cave along the way where Tri takes the opportunity to introduce us to the power of Bind. Binding reminded me a bit of the use of the Magnet module in Breath of the Wild, combined with the Ultrahand from Tears of the Kingdom. Zelda hooks objects and moves them an even distance around the room - is there a huge boulder blocking your path by a cliff? Link it and throw it into the pit. There's an object clinging to the wall and you want to pull it off, link it and move to pull it back. You see the potential there is with this power, but it's nothing if I tell you that there's also a reverse bond, where it's Zelda that "sticks" to the movement of the objects. There's an impossible gap to jump over, well, maybe that elevated walkway there can float you across to the other side.

And it is on these two pillars that the experience in Echoes of Wisdom is built, at least for now. Just having appreciated the first hour and a half of the game and its first dungeon, it's clear that Hyrule has become a veritable playground of puzzles to have fun with and try out combinations with these two powers. And because you can use them at any time, you may discover ways to solve situations that even Nintendo's engineers couldn't have foreseen. It's the same genius as the other main Switch titles, only condensed into a more compact title with the same visual design as the remake of Link's Awakening (which here looks more tweaked and alive).

But maybe you're missing some of The Legend of Zelda-style action, not The Legend of Link (?). Well, there are times when neither your fiercest monsters fighting for you nor your cunning can defeat certain opponents, and this is where Swordfighter Form comes into play. At one point in the demo, after a fight that will go down in history, we obtain the Mysterious Sword, with which Zelda gains Link's skill and strength as a swordsman. But this power is very short-lived, and you have to accumulate shards of energium to charge it up. My brief experience tells me to only activate it when you really need it.

And so, with three gameplay systems that create perfect synergies with each other, Echoes of Wisdom is a sign that "there's genius in simplicity", and that Princess Zelda has a game here that looks like it can keep up with its "big brothers". If this is the "other" way forward for the series, besides big 3D open worlds, I'm more than willing to go down it.